Your best work is your expression of yourself.
You have to be optimistic. I still have doubts and conflicts, but the bottom line is, I believe in the future.
There are a great many things about architecture that are hidden from the untrained eye.
Time is just a blur for me. I don’t know what – I don’t even know where I am sometimes.
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.
You’ve got to bumble forward into the unknown.
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.
The message I hope to have sent is just the example of being yourself. I tell this to my students: It’s not about copying me or my logic systems. It’s about allowing yourself to be yourself.
The message I hope to have sent is just the example of being yourself.
Man, there’s another freedom out there, and it comes from somewhere else, and that somewhere else is the place I’m interested in.
The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, that we all have something to put in the pie to make it better, and that the collaborative interaction works.
One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
I like the idea of collaboration – it pushes you. It’s a richer experience...
An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art – or at least people call it that.
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.
You have to build up a credibility before the support comes to you.
Each project, I suffer like I’m starting over again in life. There’s a lot of healthy insecurity that fuels this stuff.
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.
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.
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.