There Are No Real Rules

I am a slow architect;

I take a long time to create,

So the thought that my building ideas are just tossed in the air and land is the furthest thing from the truth.

For me it is a free association,

But it grows out of a sense of responsibility,

Sense of values—human values.

The importance of relating to the community, and all of those things...

And the client’s budget, their pocketbook, the client’s wishes.

But even within that there is a range of creativity possible,

And I think it behooves us to explore that envelope and push at it.

It comes out of intuition,

Or a learned intuition, I guess.

You study a long time ‘til you can do it.

But it is from looking around you,

It is from understanding what is happening in the culture,

What is happening in the world.

It is a really big picture.

Because there are no real rules.

I think that the architecture comes out of a lot of exploration.

When you’re young and you’re starting out,

You need to build things and try things.

You need to learn to build.

And it is hard...

A lot of people don’t bother to learn that.

They go right into theorizing their design before knowing how to build.

Building is its own discipline.

The building industry has its own mechanisms,

And you have to learn it in order to manipulate it

Because you are making a three-dimensional object.

The chain link for me was about denial.

There was so much chain link being absorbed by the culture,

And there was so much denial about it.

I could not believe it.

That is the populism in my work,

As opposed to the art.

What is wrong with chain link?

I hate it, too,

But can we make it beautiful?

I said, “Maybe, if you make it beautiful—if you are going to use it in huge quantities—you can make it beautiful.”

Whatever I did the first go-around could not be quantified,

Could not be talked about.

I could not say, “This is what I was trying to do, and this is what I did.”

I started out to do something,

And then I followed the end of my nose.

You were never sure what was intentional and what was not.

It looked in-process.

You were not sure whether I meant if or not,

There was something magical about the house.

And I knew that the thing a lot of people hated or laughed at was the magic.

by Frank Gehry