Clients: A Real Intense Relationship

I am probable more contentious with a client than most.

I find myself questioning their programs, questioning their intentions...

I get into a real intense relationship,

Which finally ends up synergistically giving more positive results, i think,

Because the client has spent more time thinking about the program and what they want

—they get more involved.

What I am telling them is,

“I am bringing you into my process.

Watch it, get involved, understand that I am not stopping here.”

by Frank Gehry

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

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

The Moment of Truth

My artists friends were working with very inexpensive materials

—broken wood and paper—

And they were making beauty.

These were not superficial details,

They were direct

—it raised the question of what was beautiful.

I chose to use the craft available

And to work with the craftsmen

And make a virtue out of their limitations...

I explored the processes of raw construction materials

To try giving feeling and spirit a form.

In trying to find the essence of my own expression,

I fantasized the artist standing before the white canvas deciding what was the first move.

I called it the moment of truth.

The moment of truth, the composition of elements, the selection of forms, scale, materials, color, finally, all the same issues facing the painter and the sculptor.

by Frank Gehry

We Start with Shapes, Sculptural Forms

The models are a way of studying. It is the way of working I feel most comfortable with. That is how I design.

I ask someone in my staff to start for me, they will bring it in, and then I will fold something here, cut something there. They will work on it some more and bring it in again. The model lets me have a dialogue with my staff.

And I make a value out of solving all those problems, dealing with the context and the client and finding my moment of truth after I understand the problem.

If you look at our process, the firm’s process, you see models that show the pragmatic solution to the building without architecture. Then you see the study models that go through, leading to the final scheme. We start with shapes, sculptural forms. Then we work into the technical stuff.

We agonize about every little part of it,

And I stare for hours

And then I move something just a little bit,

And I stare some more,

And then slowly it starts to take shape.

by Frank Gehry

Individual Expression

It really began with my mother taking me to see galleries

And to listen to music when I was a child.

She tried to exposed me to those kinds of things.

That was very personal,

And I think very important to me.

I still go very often.

I always go to concerts and listen to music, classical music.

I am not a scholar, but I am a fan.

I need that kind of inspiration.

I have continued to study art history on my own, wherever I go.

There certainly was not much theory.

We did not study theory.

I myself came at it from the arts,

And I was always interested in painting and sculpture.

I was different from the other architects in that way,

Although I did not realize it when I was a student.

I only realized that I was different later on my career.

by Frank Gehry

Fish

You know, I got very angry when other architects started making buildings that look like greek temples.

I thought it was a denial of the present.

It is a rotten thing to do to our children.

It is as if we are telling them there is nothing to do but look back.

It is like there is no reason to be optimistic about the future.

So I got angry.

That is really when I started drawing fish,

Because the fish has been around for thousands and thousands of years.

It is a natural creature, very fluid.

It is a continuous form,

And it survives.

And it is not contrived.

To tell you the truth,

I did not intend for it to become a central from when it first occurred to me.

It was an instinctive thing.

by Frank Gehry

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