Top 25 Frank Gehry Quotes

Words matter. These are the best Frank Gehry Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.

There are people who design buildings that are not tech

There are people who design buildings that are not technically and financially good, and there are those who do. Two categories – simple.
Frank Gehry
And I realized, when I’d come in to the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I’d just landed from Mars. But I couldn’t do anything else. That was my response to the people and the time.
Frank Gehry
I promised a lot of people I’d slow down when I turned 80.
Frank Gehry
There is stuff I would have liked to have done. But there are no sour grapes.
Frank Gehry
Democracy, obviously, is something we don’t want to give up, but it does create chaos. It means the guy next door can do what he wants, and it creates a collision of thinking. In cities, that means people build whatever they want.
Frank Gehry
I make a model of the site. There are some obvious things: where the entrance should be, where the cars have to go in. You start to get the scale of it. You understand the client’s needs, and what the client is hoping for and yearning for.
Frank Gehry
There is a backlash against me and everyone who has done buildings that have movement and feeling.
Frank Gehry
My only extravagance in life is my sailboat. I’m bonkers about that, but other than that, I don’t spend money on myself.
Frank Gehry
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.
Frank Gehry
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.
Frank Gehry
I was in Peru and visited a building near Lima built by the Incas. It was low in height, with no windows at all, but all the way in the back there was air movement. And I couldn’t figure out how they’d done it; it was incredible.
Frank Gehry
I can’t just decide myself what’s being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them.
Frank Gehry
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.
Frank Gehry
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.
Frank Gehry
Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.
Frank Gehry
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.
Frank Gehry
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.
Frank Gehry
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.
Frank Gehry
Green issues have been used as a marketing tool. Sometimes these green claims are completely meaningless.
Frank Gehry
I don’t know how to overcome this perception that I’m extravagant.
Frank Gehry
You’ve got to bumble forward into the unknown.
Frank Gehry
I think my attitudes about the past are very traditional. 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.
Frank Gehry
The game is if the orchestra can hear each other, they play better. If they play better and there’s a tangible feeling between the orchestra and the audience, if they feel each other, the audience responds and the orchestra feels it.
Frank Gehry
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.
Frank Gehry
I would like to make a building as intellectually driven as it is sculptural and as positive as it would be acceptable to hope.
Frank Gehry