Quote

There's a drive in us to express ourselves in some way or form. We pick up whatever material is available. It's primitive. Kids see sand on the beach, build something and show their parents: Look what I did, Mama. It's necessary to us.

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
Drive
Looks
Parents
Express
Something
Parent
Picks
Way
Whatever
Available
Mama
Show
Material
Primitive
Shows
Sand
Kids
Materials
Beach
Form
Build
Pick
Look
Necessary

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Take what comes your way. Do the best with it. Be responsible as you can and something good will happen.
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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 don't know how to overcome this perception that I'm extravagant.
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I found myself starting architecture with a deep social, Jewish, liberal conscience, and the belief that architecture is for the people. It was a do-gooder base I was born and raised that way. I was for blacks, whites, Italians, Poles, whatever.
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The idealism [in architecture] is in the formal arrangement, the relationship to the city, the use of materials that are available to me. That's where I say our powers are limited.
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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.
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Anybody I talk to agrees that maybe 2 percent of the building environment since the war, we could call architecture.
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The whole can be greater than the sum of it's parts, that we all have something to put in the pie to make it better, and that the collaborative interaction works.
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It should begin much earlier with arts education in the American school system, which is sadly deficient.
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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 work from the inside out.
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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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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.
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One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
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We live and work in boxes. People don't even notice that. Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable. People say, This is the world the way it is, and don't bother me.
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Time is just a blur for me. I don't know what - I don't even know where I am sometimes.
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Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.
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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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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.
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Most of what's around us is banal. We live with it. We accept it as inevitable.
Frank Gehry