The game is if the orchestra can hear each other, they play better. If they play better and there's a tangible feeling between the orchestra and the audience, if they feel each other, the audience responds and the orchestra feels it.
I would like to make a building as intellectually driven as it is sculptural and as positive as it would be acceptable to hope.
Well, I've always just - I've never really gone out looking for work. I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head.
I think people care. If not, why do so many people spend money going on vacations to see architecture? They go to the Parthenon, to Chartres, to the Sydney Opera House. They go to Bilbao... Something compels them, and yet we live surrounded by everything but great architecture.
I don't think all buildings have to be iconic, but the history of the world has shown us that cultures build iconic buildings for their major public buildings.
When I was a kid, my father didn't really have much hope for me. He thought I was a dreamer; he didn't think I would amount to anything. My mother also.
Most of our cities built since the war are bland. They're modernist, they're cold, and now architects want to go back to that.
I used to sketch - that's the way I thought out loud. Then they made a book of my sketches, and I got self-conscious, so now I don't do it much.
You have freedom, so you have to make choices - and at the point when I make a choice, the building starts to look like a Frank Gehry building. It's a signature.
I never said I was opposed to the LEED program or to green building - I'm not.
There is stuff I would have liked to have done. But there are no sour grapes.
My buildings are all on budget.
I think my attitudes about the past are very traditional. You can't ignore history; you can't escape it even if you want to. You might as well know where you come from, and you might as well know that everything has been done in some shape or form.
There are a lot of questions about whether architecture is art. The people who ask that think pretty tract houses are architecture. But that doesn't hold up.
Bilbao opened in 1997. It was only ten years later that I was asked to do another museum. A lot of other people got work because of Bilbao.
I'm a leftie, and I've always believed in doing things on a modest scale.
When I went to Harvard and studied planning, I found I didn't have the skills or the strength to become the kind of public person who could go out and lobby government agencies.
An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art - or at least people call it that.
There is a backlash against me and everyone who has done buildings that have movement and feeling.
My father probably - he had flashes of creativity - he used to do store windows for fruit stores that he worked in and stuff.
