Frank Gehry

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.

I promised a lot of people I'd slow down when I turned 80.

My only extravagance in life is my sailboat. I'm bonkers about that, but other than that, I don't spend money on myself.

On certain projects, on big public projects, people definitely are interested in making them greener, but on smaller projects with tight budgets it can be harder.

I can't just decide myself what's being built. Someone decides what they want, then I work for them.

There are people who design buildings that are not technically and financially good, and there are those who do. Two categories - simple.

I have always thought that L.A. is a motor city that developed linear downtowns.

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 don't make things with my hands, although I studied woodworking and made furniture.

This neo-minimalism super cold stuff is weird to me. I need a place where I can come home and take my shoes off.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

And I realized, when I'd come in to the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I'd just landed from Mars. But I couldn't do anything else. That was my response to the people and the time.

I was in Peru and visited a building near Lima built by the Incas. It was low in height, with no windows at all, but all the way in the back there was air movement. And I couldn't figure out how they'd done it; it was incredible.

Green issues have been used as a marketing tool. Sometimes these green claims are completely meaningless.

One of my greatest influences is the Italian artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini.