Time is just a blur for me. I don't know what - I don't even know where I am sometimes.
Artists dismiss me as an architect, so I'm not in their box, and architects dismiss me as an artist, so I'm not in their box.
If I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it. When I can predict or plan it, I don't do it.
When you agree to collaborate, you agree to jump off a cliff holding hands with everyone, hoping the resourcefulness of each will insure that you all land on your feet.
Man, there's another freedom out there, and it comes from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is the place I'm interested in.
That's where you have to look for your inspiration. Don't separate the rest of your life - who you are, what you love - from your work.
We're physiologically wired differently.
You have freedom, so you have to make choices - and at the point when I make a choice, the building starts to look like a Frank Gehry building. It's a signature.
When I start my class I ask the students to write their signatures on pieces of paper and put them on a table. I have them look at them, and I point out, "They're all different, aren't they? That's you, that's you, that's you, that's you."
The message I hope to have sent is just the example of being yourself.
Childhood play is nothing more than an expression of our individuality and preparation for human interaction. Everybody’s an artist. Unfortunately we don’t treat them as such.
What I have learned about museum buildings is that buildings have to have iconic presentations. The position of the art museum vis-a-vis other civic buildings needs to be hierarchal in the community. It has to be equal to the library and the courthouse.
Childhood play is nothing more than an expression of our individuality and preparation for human interaction.
The message I hope to have sent is just the example of being yourself. I tell this to my students: It's not about copying me or my logic systems. It's about allowing yourself to be yourself.
Art is about people. I think the discussion about whether architecture is art or not is lamebrain.
When people condemn me for designing iconic buildings in cities and not having an idea what a city is, they haven't done their homework. I started in urban design and city planning. It's just that when I got out of school there wasn't much of a market for that. There still isn't.
You have to build up a credibility before the support comes to you.
I promised a lot of people I'd slow down when I turned 80.
That's why you go into architecture - at least I did - to do things for people. I think most of us are idealists. You start out that way, anyway.
Most of our cities built since the war are bland. They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that.
There is an order to our environment, a broader order.
I'm a do-gooder liberal.
It's not elitist to acknowledge that everyone has a unique signature and everyone is different.
Green issues have been used as a marketing tool. Sometimes these green claims are completely meaningless.
Some people may say my curved panels look like sails. Well, I am a sailor, so I guess I probably do use that metaphor in my work - though not consciously.
