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
I don't know why people hire architects and then tell them what to do.
Interpretation
This quote highlights the irony of clients dictating terms to architects whom they hire for their expertise.
Frank Gehry's quote addresses the strange phenomenon where clients, despite hiring architects for their creativity and expertise, impose their own ideas and constraints on the design process. This can undermine the architect's vision and diminish the potential for innovative and original designs, emphasizing the importance of trust and collaboration in the client-architect relationship.
In practice
In an architecture presentation discussing the need for client trust.
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.
I'm a bad customer for my own buildings! If I'm choosing an apartment, I choose one about five or six stories high so that I can see the people, the trees, and the world on the street. Beyond that, I lose contact with the ground!
We try to make buildings last long and be resilient but also be not so idiosyncratic that they can't change.
Architects mostly work for privileged people, people who have money and power. Power and money are invisible, so people hire us to visualize their power and money by making monumental architecture. I love to make monuments, too, but I thought perhaps we can use our experience and knowledge more for the general public, even for those who have lost their houses in natural disasters.
Modernist buildings exclude dialogue, and the void that they create around themselves is not a public space but a desertification
All buildings, large or small, public or private, have a public face, a facade; they therefore, without exception, have a positive or negative effect on the quality of the public realm, enriching or impoverishing it in a lasting and radical manner. The architecture of the city and public space is a matter of common concern to the same degree as laws and language—they are the foundation of civility and civilisation.
It is insufficient for architecture today to directly implement an existing building typology; it instead requires architects to carefully examine the whole area with new interventions and programmatic typologies
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