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.
Architecture should speak of its time and place, but yearn for timelessness.
Architecture has always been a very idealistic profession. It’s about making the world a better place, and it works over the generations because people go on vacation and they look for it.
Architecture is a service business. An architect is given a program, budget, place, and schedule. Sometimes the end product rises to art – or at least people call it that.
It’s not new that architecture can profoundly affect a place, sometimes transform it. Architecture and any art can transform a person, even save someone.
I don’t want to do architecture that’s dry and dull.
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.
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.
Chicago’s one of the rare places where architecture is more visible.
The best advice I’ve received is to be yourself. The best artists do that.
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.
I would like to make a building as intellectually driven as it is sculptural and as positive as it would be acceptable to hope.
There are people who design buildings that are not technically and financially good, and there are those who do. Two categories – simple.
A lot of people don’t get it, but I design from the inside out so that the finished product looks inevitable somehow. I think it’s important to create spaces that people like to be in, that are humanistic.
A well-designed home has to be very comfortable. I can’t stand the aesthetes, the minimal thing. I can’t live that way. My home has to be filled with stuff – mostly paintings, sculpture, my fish lamps, cardboard furniture, lots of books.
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.