Personal Effort

For me and for the people that work for me, in a way what we do is less about the final product and more about achieving the final product, because that’s what we spend all of our time doing. So aside from the fact that we all consider ourselves lucky that we are in a position to work with great clients and great consultants, what matters to us most is the process of doing all of it. Not that many people understand what that’s all about because they never get the chance to see that side of it. Probably the biggest mistake is to make assumptions—in this case to assume that we never think about function or budget, that we just sit around crumpling paper and we let the computer do the rest, that we are just concerned with creating spectacles to get ourselves on magazine covers.

I consider it a personal effort. I don’t think about it in megalomaniac terms of taking over the world. I think maybe what’s been successful about it is that I have been able to keep on a sort of personal course. I have had little forays into somebody else’s thing, but I pull back and have been consciously pushing this personal signature, or whatever you want to call it. I don’t know what its impact is going to be; It has been so personally satisfying, that that has been plenty for me.

by Frank Gehry