Name: How I Got Started: Frank Gehry I Fortune
Uploaded: 2025-12-08T15:14:36.000Z
Duration: 6 min 54 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

How do you create feeling with inert materials?

I've got a picture of the Charioteer 500 BC.

When I saw it when I was 40 years old, I started crying and I thought, that's what I want to do.

I want to be able to build a building that makes people, moves them 500 years from now.

What is it that made me want to come into this profession?

In high school I took shop and built things and I did well in that and loved it.

I looked at the professions one could go into and I remember looking at architecture at that time.

And architecture curriculum was to build a Cape Cod house or something.

You know, it was, was not very interesting.

So I closed the book on that and didn't even pay attention.

But I did go to the lecture series on Friday nights at the University of Toronto and there was a guy from Finland showing his buildings and furniture.

And that guy turned out to be Alvar Aalto.

So I was kind of peripherally interested.

I was intrigued by the way things were built.

When I got to LA, I went to night school, LA City College.

I took a ceramics class with Glenn Lukens, who was a well known ceramist.

And he's the one that after a year told me not to stay in ceramics.

He was building a house by Rafael Soriano.

Rafael Soriano was telling people to move beams around.

The first buildings I designed looked like Raphael Soriano.

My mother took me to concerts when I was a kid in Toronto.

And I'm still to this day very interested in the topic buildings for music because you get a relationship between the orchestra members so they hear each other and it's comfortable.

They hear each other in a way that is substantial and uplifting.

You create a relationship between the orchestra and the audience that's palpable, that they both feel, if you do it right, they both feel it.

And my belief that people talk to each other through the arts led me to the Divan Orchestra with Daniel Berenbar.

He and Edward Said created an orchestra where Palestinians, Syrians, Lebanese, Egyptians play in an orchestra with Israelis.

And so I designed their 700 seat concert hall in Berlin as a gift to the orchestra.

So that's the music stuff, the art stuff.

Bilbao was a working relationship with a genius, museum director, Tom Krentz.

And it's that collaboration that led to the project that we built, which was a very inexpensive building compared to museum buildings.

Bild Bough was built for $300 a square foot.

And its return on investment has been beyond everybody's wildest dreams.

I mean, if you start to use curves, you think it's more expensive than a box, right?

But we developed with our French friends who build airplanes with their software, we were able to demystify shapes so you could build them cheaply.

And we built it like a warehouse, a big warehouse.

Every contract has a 15% layaway for change orders.

If you show people exactly what to do, demystify the way you build something, they don't get the 15%.

Everybody would say that's too expensive.

So the amount of money that you saved actually went into the building instead of waste.

So we experiment with the feelings generated by materials in Bilbao, since it was a museum and not a lot of windows, the exterior scan became the building.

It's a rainy climate and so stainless steel went dead.

Stainless steel is exciting in California because you get a lot of sunlight by accident.

I had a piece of titanium and I looked at it and I put it out on a post and it rained and it turned golden and it felt right.

And so I said, that's what we got to use.

When you go to Bilbao and it's cloudy skies, the thing turns golden and it's really beautiful.

In Arles, France, we're just completing a building for a special lady, Maya Hoffman.

And it's where Van Gogh did Starry Night.

And I've always wanted to paint on a facade with natural light.

And we built blocks that are covered with stainless steel and they're set at slightly different angles.

And when you go there with the sun, it changes all day long.