Frank Gehry Quotes

Everyone has a desire, if not a need, to use their individual signatures. Whenever people meet to talk about a project, even stuffy old businessmen, they say they want to create something new.

I have always thought that L.A. is a motor city that developed linear downtowns.

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.

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.

With computers we can work everything out from the beginning.

People are searching for something they don't have in their lives. There's an unfulfilled need.

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

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

I am just relating to the world we live in. I see some order in it, even though it looks like mush.

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

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

If you're serious about being an architect, you've got to learn how to take responsibility.

Computers allow architects to remain parental instead of being marginalized by the contractors and managers.

The safety requirements, which are necessary, spread everything out and push people farther and farther away from the stage and from each other.

I don't micromanage the interiors. People ask me to and I say no. I don't want to control everything.

We deny our nature to build and create and then wonder why there is so much alienation and dissatisfaction.

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

Generally in our world, whether in architecture or almost anywhere else, we devalue the artist, and schools at whatever level shut people down.

Ultimately you can't repress individuality, even though you can try.

I never said I was opposed to the LEED program or to green building - I'm not.

I don't make things with my hands, although I studied woodworking and made furniture.

I can't just decide myself what's being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them.

My buildings are all on budget.

My father probably - he had flashes of creativity - he used to do store windows for fruit stores that he worked in and stuff.

In an ideal world, pressure should come from below and from the top.

Anybody I talk to agrees that maybe 2 percent of the building environment since the war, we could call architecture.

Democracy is a problem and we don't want to get rid of it.

Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.

Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It's about making the world a better place, and it works over the generations because people go on vacation and they look for it.

Architecture is a service business. An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.

It's not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone.

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.

There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up.