Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" There is stuff I would have liked to have done. But there are no sour grapes. "

Related Quotes:

" Each project, I suffer like I'm starting over again in life. There's a lot of healthy insecurity that fuels this stuff. "

" When I went to Harvard and studied planning, I found I didn't have the skills or the strength to become the kind of public person who could go out and lobby government agencies. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it. When I can predict or plan it, I don't do it. "

" 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. "

" I would like to make a building as intellectually driven as it is sculptural and as positive as it would be acceptable to hope. "

" 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. "

" I don't know how to overcome this perception that I'm extravagant. "

" One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini. "

" I work from the inside out. "

" My buildings are all on budget. "

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

" 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. "

" The best advice I've received is to be yourself. The best artists do that. "

" I promised a lot of people I'd slow down when I turned 80. "

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

" Bilbao opened in 1997. It was only ten years later that I was asked to do another museum. A lot of other people got work because of Bilbao. "

" There is a backlash against me and everyone who has done buildings that have movement and feeling. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Chicago's one of the rare places where architecture is more visible. "

" On certain projects, on big public projects, people definitely are interested in making them greener, but on smaller projects with tight budgets it can be harder. "

" I refuse to work unless I get paid, so I don't get a lot of work sometimes. "

" 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. "

" I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings. "

" 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. "

" 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. "