Architecture Is Surely An Art

I used to be symmetrical freak and a grid freak.

I used to follow grids,

And then I started to think,

And I realized that those were chains,

That Frank Lloyd Wright was chained to the 30-60 grid,

And there was no freedom in it for him,

And that grids are an obsession,

A crutch.

You do not need that if you can create spaces and forms and shapes.

That is what artists do, and they do not have grids and crutches,

They do it.

I was interested in what the artists were doing,

How they were working with materials and craft,

And consequently learnt a lot from them.

I wanted to deal with the craft,

I wanted to deal with the people who were making the buildings,

I wanted to engaged them

—which is not the way we are trained as architects.

I wanted to break down those barriers

—which will take two more lifetimes.

by Frank Gehry