Frank Gehry Quotes - Page 6

Well, I've always just - I've never really gone out looking for work. I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head.

If the room is friendly to a relationship between lecturer and audience, you feel everything - the tension, the appreciation. I think the audience feels it too.

Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. "The client made me do this." "The city made me do this." "Oh, the budget." I don't believe that anymore.

Chicago's one of the rare places where architecture is more visible.

There is a backlash against me and everyone who has done buildings that have movement and feeling.

My father always told me that I was going to be a failure - I think he was more talking about himself, but I didn't know it at the time.

Erich Mendelsohn's drawings are expressive and beautiful. If he'd had the computers we have now, everything I've done he would have done before me. I would have had to figure out something else.

In the Renaissance there wasn't a distinction. Bernini was an artist and he made architecture, and Michelangelo also did some great architecture.

You see a lot of so-called architecture that part of the ego trip overpowers the functionality and the budget and all that stuff.

The fact is I'm an opportunist. I'll take materials around me, materials on my table, and work with them as I'm searching for an idea that works.

Bilbao opened in 1997. It was only ten years later that I was asked to do another museum. A lot of other people got work because of Bilbao.

When you were a kid, if you went to the Montreal Forum or a hockey game at Maple Leaf Gardens, which I did, there was a great feeling. The new stadiums don't have it. Why don't they have it? Building codes.

You never build the perfect building. Only Allah is perfect. Life is such. You make decisions on conclusions, then some guy invents something else and the world changes. That's comforting. There's no one way to use museums, no one way to do art. That also means there is no one way to build museums.

Many people put a green button on their collar and feel good, just like a lot of people put an American flag on their lapels and feel patriotic. It's not enough.I'm not dismissing it.

With computers we can work everything out from the beginning.

Picasso could use everyone's paintings and transform them into his own. He was using ideas from all of his contemporaries.

People live and work in uninspiring environments, but look inside those rooms. Look at the painted walls and the decorations. People rebel even in the most controlled office environment in which they're not allowed to do anything. You see the little bulletin board in front of a person's desk with their photos, clippings, cartoons and whatever else.

The thing is, I hate the celebrity architect thing. I just do my work.

China is building cities for a 20 to 40 percent increase in population. India is quickly growing. The carbon footprints of that and other development around the world are overwhelming.

If the general public demanded better, they'd get better, because the market­place responds to the public's needs and desires.

People say, "This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me." Then when somebody does something different, real architecture, the push-back is amazing. People resist it. At first it's new and scary.

Some cultures tried to stop people from expressing themselves. In Mao's China, for example, the Communists tried to stop individual expression. For them the payoff was a society of equality. The problem of course is that it didn't work.

Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable.

I hate the word starchitect. Stuff like that comes from mean-spirited, untalented journalists. It's demeaning.

It should begin much earlier with arts education in the American school system, which is sadly deficient.