Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. "The client made me do this." "The city made me do this." "Oh, the budget." I don't believe that anymore.
Frank GehryRead
Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.
Interpretation
Architecture reflects the era and location it is in, while also aspiring to achieve a sense of timelessness.
Frank Gehry's quote emphasizes the dual responsibility of architecture to both represent the contemporary context of its creation and to transcend that context by embodying qualities that make it enduring and universal. It suggests that great architectural works should resonate with the present but also possess a lasting appeal that allows them to remain relevant across generations.
In practice
This quote can be shared during an architectural conference to inspire professionals.
Look, architecture has a lot of places to hide behind, a lot of excuses. "The client made me do this." "The city made me do this." "Oh, the budget." I don't believe that anymore.
Your best work is your expression of yourself.
My only extravagance in life is my sailboat. I'm bonkers about that, but other than that, I don't spend money on myself.
For me, every day is a new thing. I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did. And I get the sweats. I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going. If I knew where I was going I wouldn't do it.
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.
An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.
Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things.
A strange thing has happened - while all the other arts were born naked, this, the youngest, has been born fully-clothed. It can say everything before it has anything to say. It is as if the savage tribe, instead of finding two bars of iron to play with, had found scattering the seashore fiddles, flutes, saxophones, trumpets, grand pianos by Erhard and Bechstein, and had begun with incredible energy, but without knowing a note of music, to hammer and thump upon them all at the same time.
My heart beats more for a raw, average vulgar art, which doesn't live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life.
When a critic sets himself up as an arbiter of morality, a judge of the matter and not the manner of a work, he is no longer a critic; he is a censor.
Drawing is a means of obtaining and communicating knowledge
The Whole Business of Man is The Arts, & All Things Common.
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