Gehry Quotes

Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass - anything and everything - the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that's how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone's ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don't understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such.

Talent is liquified trouble.

To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone’s ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality.

I crumpled up a piece of paper and threw it in the garbage. Then I quickly snatched it out, because hell, I’d just tossed out a Frank Gehry knockoff. What you call trash, I call architecture.

If I wanted to be a painter, I might think about trying to be like Van Gogh, or if I was an actor, act like Laurence Olivier. If I was an architect, there’s Frank Gehry. But you can’t just copy somebody. If you like someone’s work, the important thing is to be exposed to everything that person has been exposed to.

I’ve always believed that if you know what you’re going to do, you won’t do it. Your creativity starts with your curiosity.

Museum architectural search committees have invariably included the Kimbell in their international scouting tours of exemplary art galleries (a practice pioneered by Velma Kimbell, the founder’s widow, in 1964). Those groups no doubt respond to the Kimbell with suitable reverence, but given the buildings they later commissioned, many post-Bilbao museum patrons obviously wanted something quite different. The disparity between Kahn’s museums and recent examples of that genre parallels the discrepancy he saw between postwar Modernism and ancient Classicism: “Our stuff looks tinny compared to it.” At a time when commercial values are systematically corrupting the museum - one of civilized society’s most elevating experiences - the example of Kahn, among the most courageous and successful architectural reformers of all time, seems more relevant and cautionary than ever.

The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that’s how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone’s ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don’t understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such.

Making art is an act of love and making love to the world.

Where visual artists are concerned, the Baroque sculptor and architect Bernini and the painter and sculptor Picasso were clearly adept at both experiential and instrumental attending, says Tellegen, as is the modern architect Frank Gehry. Choosing a literary example, he says that F. Scott Fitzgerald once admitted to "wrapping one of his romantic flings in cellophane" for later artistic use and notes that "this kind of heartless but honest professionalism is not uncommon among creative people.

From: Bernadette Fox To: Manjula Kapoor Oh! Could you make dinner reservations for us on Thanksgiving? You can call up the Washington Athletic Club and get us something for 7 PM for three. You are able to place calls, aren’t you? Of course, what am I thinking? That’s all you people do now. I recognize it’s slightly odd to ask you to call from India to make a reservation for a place I can see out my window, but here’s the thing: there’s always this one guy who answers the phone, “Washington Athletic Club, how may I direct your call?” And he always says it in this friendly, flat… Canadian way. One of the main reasons I don’t like leaving the house is because I might find myself face-to-face with a Canadian. Seattle is crawling with them. You probably think, U.S./Canada, they’re interchangeable because they’re both filled with English-speaking, morbidly obese white people. Well, Manjula, you couldn’t be more mistaken. Americans are pushy, obnoxious, neurotic, crass—anything and everything—the full catastrophe as our friend Zorba might say. Canadians are none of that. The way you might fear a cow sitting down in the middle of the street during rush hour, that’s how I fear Canadians. To Canadians, everyone is equal. Joni Mitchell is interchangeable with a secretary at open-mic night. Frank Gehry is no greater than a hack pumping out McMansions on AutoCAD. John Candy is no funnier than Uncle Lou when he gets a couple of beers in him. No wonder the only Canadians anyone’s ever heard of are the ones who have gotten the hell out. Anyone with talent who stayed would be flattened under an avalanche of equality. The thing Canadians don’t understand is that some people are extraordinary and should be treated as such. Yes, I’m done. If the WAC can’t take us, which may be the case, because Thanksgiving is only two days away, you can find someplace else on the magical Internet. * I was wondering how we ended up at Daniel’s Broiler for Thanksgiving dinner. That morning, I slept late and came downstairs in my pajamas. I knew it was going to rain because on my way to the kitchen I passed a patchwork of plastic bags and towels. It was a system Mom had invented for when the house leaks.

Sometimes we ate raw onions like apples, too, I wanted to tell her. Sometimes, the tin foil held shredded chicken petrified in aspic. A fish head to suck on! I was filled with shame and hateful glee: everything I was feeling turned out at the person next to me. I was the one with an uncut cow's tongue uncoiling in the refrigerator of his undergraduate quad, my roommates' Gatorades and half-finished pad Thai keeping a nervous distance. I sliced it thinly, and down it went with horseradish and cold vodka like the worry of a long day sloughing off, those little dots of fat between the cold meet like garlic roasted to paste. I am the one who fried liver. Who brought his own lunch in an old Tupperware to his cubicle in the Conde Nast Building; who accidentally warmed it too long, and now the scent of buckwheat, stewed chicken, and carrots hung like radiation over the floor, few of those inhabitants brought lunch from home, fewer of whom were careless enough to heat it for too long if they did, and none of whom brought a scent bomb in the first place. Fifteen floors below, the storks who staffed the fashion magazines grazed on greens in the Frank Gehry cafeteria. I was the one who ate mashed potatoes and frankfurters for breakfast. Who ate a sandwich for breakfast. Strange? But Americans ate cereal for dinner. Americans ate cereal, period, that oddment. They had a whole thing called 'breakfast for dinner.' And the only reason they were right and I was wrong was that it was their country. The problem with my desire to pass for native was that everything in the tinfoil was so f*****g good. When the world thinks of Soviet food, it thinks of all the wrong things. Though it was due to incompetence rather than ideology, we were local, seasonal, and organic long before Chez Panisse opened its doors. You just had to have it in a home instead of a restaurant, like British cooking after the war, as Orwell wrote. For me, the food also had cooked into it the memory of my grandmother's famine; my grandfather's black-marketeering to get us the 'deficit' goods that, in his view, we deserved no less than the political VIPs; all the family arguments that paused while we filled our mouths and our eyes rolled back in our heads. Food was so valuable that it was a kind of currency - and it was how you showed loved. If, as a person on the cusp of thirty, I wished to find sanity, I had to figure out how to temper this hunger without losing hold of what it fed, how to retain a connection to my past without being consumed by its poison.

The fact is that a wide array of projects—events, products, books, home renovations, you name it—can be simulated, tested, and iterated even by amateurs at home. Lack of technology isn’t the real barrier to adopting this approach; the barrier is thinking of planning as a static, abstract, bureaucratic exercise. Once you make the conceptual shift to planning as an active, iterative process of trying, learning, and trying again, all sorts of ways to “play” with ideas, as Gehry and Pixar do, will suggest themselves.

What Gehry means by questioning isn’t doubting or criticizing, much less attacking or tearing down. He means asking questions with an open-minded desire to learn. It is, in a word, exploration. “You’re being curious,” he says. That’s the opposite of the natural inclination to think that What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI), the fallacy we saw in the previous chapter. In contrast, Gehry assumes that there must be more to learn. By making that assumption, he avoids the trap of the fallacy.

The officials told Gehry that they wanted a building that could do for Bilbao and the Basque Country what the Sydney Opera House had done for Sydney and Australia: put them on the map and bring back growth.

In project planning, a standard tool is a flowchart that lays out, from left to right, what needs to be done and when, with the project concluding when the goal is achieved in the final box on the right. That simple concept is also valuable in the initial planning stages because it can help us visualize a project not as an end in itself but as a means to an end: The goal is the box on the right. That’s where project planning must begin by asking Frank Gehry’s question and thoughtfully exploring what should go in that box. Once that is settled, you can shift to considering what should go into the boxes on the left—the means that will best get you to your goal. I call this “thinking from right to left.

At the beginning of a project, we need to disrupt the psychology-driven dash to a premature conclusion by disentangling means and ends and thinking carefully about what exactly we want to accomplish. Frank Gehry’s question, “Why are you doing this project?,” does that.

I have this anti-commercialism about me -- I work with clients and get involved with their commercial needs, but it plays against my grain when it comes to my own situation. I'm not into style; I'm against style.

People are terrible at getting things right the first time. But we’re great at tinkering. Wise planners make the most of this basic insight into human nature. They try, learn, and do it again. They plan like Pixar and Frank Gehry do.

You’re being curious,” he says. That’s the opposite of the natural inclination to think that What You See Is All There Is (WYSIATI), the fallacy we saw in the previous chapter. In contrast, Gehry assumes that there must be more to learn. By making that assumption, he avoids the trap of the fallacy.

It has haunted me,” he explained to a TV interviewer. “People who’ve seen The Simpsons believe it.”[17] Frank Gehry is indeed a genius, but everything else about that image of how he works is wrong. In fact, it’s the opposite of the truth.

Given the fear or indecision we often confront when attempting to unleash our creativity, the practice of rigorously smallifying problems is liberating. At the same time, while some externally imposed constraints can be onerous, many can be enormously helpful starting points. This is the great irony about constraints. And if we can delineate the job before us into discrete problems to solve, as General McMaster, agile developers, and Gehry do by taking a proactive approach to problem finding, we are more likely to discover unique possibilities.

Over the past decade, its Dialogues Between Neuroscience and Society series has featured such luminaries as the Dalai Lama, actress Glenn Close, dancer Mark Morris, and economist Robert Shiller. At the 2006 meeting in Atlanta, Frank Gehry was invited to discuss the relationship between architecture and neuroscience. After the talk, an audience member (actually it was me) asked him, “Mr. Gehry, how do you create?” His answer was both intuitive and funny: “There is a gear [in my brain] that turns and lights a light bulb and turns a something and energizes this hand, and it picks up a pen and intuitively gets a piece of white paper and starts jiggling and wriggling and makes a sketch. And the sketch somehow relates to all the stuff I took in.”4 Gehry’s answer is a perfect metaphoric formulation of the evolving neuronal assembly trajectory concept, the idea that the activity of a group of neurons is somehow ignited in the brain, which passes its content to another ensemble (from “gear to light bulb”), and the second ensemble to a third, and so forth until a muscular action or thought is produced. Creating ideas is that simple. To support cognitive operations effectively, the brain should self-generate large quantities of cell assembly sequences.

was as if hyperintelligent counterparts of Frank Gehry, Alex Calder, Dr. Seuss, and Martha Graham had gotten together, dropped a load of acid, and hit the drafting boards.

The Villa Savoye set out the tenets of modernism , while Fallingwater showed that there could be another , more organic path for contemporary architecture . The Farnsworth Residence took the house to the logical , transparent limits of modernism , whereas Niemeyer's House at Canoas confirmed Wright's engagement with nature while taking the idea to a more sensual level . Gehry led the way for contemporary architecture to strike out into the realm of art , while Koolhaas embodied the late 20th - century angst by putting a void at the center of a house . Each of these significant examples plays a justifiable part in the evolution of modern architecture .

Little Bets, and it was written by a former venture capitalist named Peter Sims.2 When Sims studied a variety of successful innovators, from Steve Jobs to Chris Rock to Frank Gehry, as well as innovative companies, such as Amazon and Pixar, he found a strategy common to all. “Rather than believing they have to start with a big idea or plan out a whole project in advance,” he writes, “they make a methodical series of little bets about what might be a good direction, learning critical information from lots of little failures and from small but significant wins

The CAD image was drawn by an electron beam onto a green phosphorus coating on the inside of the glass TV tube. The

Frank Gehry’s office began to recognize the benefits of CAD/CAM and reciprocated in a technology transfer back to architecture, fusing computers with engineering, fabrication, art and architecture.

The data to fabricate the pipes came directly from the CATIA 3D model.

working with Permasteelisa was very collaborative. They were very open to the process and grasped using this technology very quickly. The reason being, they were already computer literate. Permasteelisa installed CATIA in their office after this, and they began using it on all their subsequent projects.