Frank Gehry Quotes

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

You have to build up a credibility before the support comes to you.

The back of Saint Peter's is one of the finest pieces of architecture I've ever seen.

When I was a kid, my father didn't really have much hope for me. He thought I was a dreamer; he didn't think I would amount to anything. My mother also.

There are people who design buildings that are not technically and financially good, and there are those who do. Two categories - simple.

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.

Cardboard is another material that's ubiquitous and everybody hates, yet when I made furniture with it everybody loved it.

Your work may be great and not make its way into the big picture... like Van Gogh... so who's to say what's good and bad?

I think my best skill as an architect is the achievement of hand-to-eye coordination. I am able to transfer a sketch into a model into the building.

A new idea is obsolete in seconds, right? I just said it and now it's obsolete.

It's a metaphor for what we're being told: "Just stay in the box, kid, don't muddy the water." Parents say it to their kids. Teachers say it. Schools do. And so people become immune to the sameness.

On certain projects, on big public projects, people definitely are interested in making them greener, but on smaller projects with tight budgets it can be harder.

I'm going to design the container and interior spaces. You bring your own stuff to it and make it your own.

I don't know how to overcome this perception that I'm extravagant.

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

I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.

Art is about people. I think the discussion about whether architecture is art or not is lamebrain.

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.

We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that.

There is an order to our environment, a broader order.

I work from the inside out.

Generally people are more impressed with the services and the comfort issues than the design.

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 can't ignore history; you can't escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form.

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.

I'm inspired by a lot of stuff. I always was interested in sculpture and painting and music and literature and all those things. There's no one thing.

For me, every day is a new thing.

I used to sketch - that's the way I thought out loud. Then they made a book of my sketches, and I got self-conscious, so now I don't do it much.

I'm of two minds about doing any interviews these days. It seems a lot of the world is out to play gotcha with me. I guess they always go after people these days. It's sport.

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.

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

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.

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 don't want to do architecture that's dry and dull.

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

I would like to make a building as intellectually driven as it is sculptural and as positive as it would be acceptable to hope.

The architect Borromini's Quattro Fontane, a little church in Rome, is one of the most beautiful rooms in history.

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.

Everybody's an artist. Unfortunately we don't treat them as such.

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.

In Tokyo, London or Los Angeles people go into McDonald's and the restaurants are identical and people are comfortable. It's unthreatening.

It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it.

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.

There are places that are so designed they're unlivable.

In the art world Robert Rauschenberg had been combining common materials that people thought was art and beautiful, and it was. If he could do that, I could emulate him.

Ideas exist in the marketplace; they are thrown out for everyone to use.

I'm preprogrammed emotionally and intellectually not to go down blind alleys. I don't waste the time. I automatically edit out whatever's impractical.