Frank Gehry Quotes
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If I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it. When I can predict or plan it, I don't do it.
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Each project, I suffer like I'm starting over again in life. There's a lot of healthy insecurity that fuels this stuff.
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My buildings are all on budget.
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For me, every day is a new thing. I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did. And I get the sweats. I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going. If I knew where I was going I wouldn't do it.
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I promised a lot of people I'd slow down when I turned 80.
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I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.
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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.
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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.
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I don't know how to overcome this perception that I'm extravagant.
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I refuse to work unless I get paid, so I don't get a lot of work sometimes.
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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.
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My only extravagance in life is my sailboat. I'm bonkers about that, but other than that, I don't spend money on myself.
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Liquid architecture. It's like jazz - you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think it's a way of - for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city, and what might happen in the city.
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There are people who design buildings that are not technically and financially good, and there are those who do. Two categories - simple.
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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.
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My father was an urchin that lived in Hell's Kitchen. He was part of a family of nine. I mean, there were times that were better and worse, but mostly, by the time we got to L.A., they'd lost whatever they had. And it was a sad time. And both he and I became truck drivers for different companies.
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You have freedom, so you have to make choices - and at the point when I make a choice, the building starts to look like a Frank Gehry building. It's a signature.
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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.
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A lot of people don't get it, but I design from the inside out so that the finished product looks inevitable somehow. I think it's important to create spaces that people like to be in, that are humanistic.
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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.
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I am obsessed with architecture. It is true, I am restless, trying to find myself as an architect, and how best to contribute in this world filled with contradiction, disparity, and inequality, even passion and opportunity.
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I do think democracy has produced chaos, especially visual. A lot of people don't like it and yearn for nineteenth-century images, forgetting that the politics of those images were different than the democracy we love.
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I have always thought that L.A. is a motor city that developed linear downtowns.
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I'm a leftie, and I've always believed in doing things on a modest scale.