Quote

The present is filled with flotsam and irony and chaos and disorder in all arenas, political and sociological. I think we have to work in the present even if it's awkward, even if it's not necessarily good, even if we don't understand it ourselves. You only find out 10, maybe 20 years later what was going on.

Frank Gehry

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Frank Gehry
Age: 95
Born: 1929
Born: February 28
Architect
Designer
Furniture Designer
Sculptor
City of Toronto
Frank Owen Gehry
Frank O. Gehry
Ephraim Owen Goldberg
Frank Goldberg
Frank Owen Goldberg
Thinking
Political
Irony
Find
Chaos
Even
Necessarily
Flotsam
Going
Later
Arenas
Work
Filled
Sociological
Years
Present
Arena
Good
Maybe
Awkward
Think
Understand
Disorder

More quotes by Frank Gehry

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I don't micromanage the interiors. People ask me to and I say no. I don't want to control everything.
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If you're serious about being an architect, you've got to learn how to take responsibility. It's not fluff. You have to do every detail on every bloody piece of the building. You have to know how the engineering works. You have to know how the fittings go together. You have to master the mechanical, electrical, acoustical - everything.
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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.
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With computers we can work everything out from the beginning.
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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.
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The culture of France is unique because it's a culture that has a high priority on the arts, more than any other place in the world in our time since Greece. So as a practicing artist, if you will, this is home ground. They love us, so music, literature, art continues to be the center.
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I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do.
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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.
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An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.
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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.
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A well-designed home has to be very comfortable. I can't stand the aesthetes, the minimal thing. I can't live that way. My home has to be filled with stuff - mostly paintings, sculpture, my fish lamps, cardboard furniture, lots of books.
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I have always thought that L.A. is a motor city that developed linear downtowns.
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Here we are surrounded by material that's being manufactured in unimaginable quantities worldwide and is used everywhere. I don't like it, no one likes it, and yet it's pervasive. We don't even see it.
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Your best work is your expression of yourself.
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One of my unsung heroes is Erich Mendelsohn. I met him when I was a student and he was a cranky old man and very unpleasant. But if you go to his Einstein Tower in Potsdam, Germany you see an enormous intellect at work with a language that was personal and new. It has a sense of urban design and of theater and procession I hadn't seen before.
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Art is about people. I think the discussion about whether architecture is art or not is lamebrain.
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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?
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You have to be optimistic. I still have doubts and conflicts, but the bottom line is, I believe in the future.
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We should celebrate variety rather than conformity and allow people to express themselves. That we don't is more of our denial.
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I can't just decide myself what's being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them.
Frank Gehry