Building Art

“On a building, I don’t know where I’m going when I start,” he said. “If I knew where I was going, I wouldn’t go there, that’s for sure.”

for all the strength of Gehry’s form making, he does not force us to see the world as he does. His buildings transcend his own story, just as the work of any great artist, composer, writer, or filmmaker transcends his or her story. All artistic works emerge from their creators’ lives, but the greatest of them possess an inherent power that leads us

“The faculty of creating is never given to us all by itself. It always goes hand in hand with the gift of observation,” Stravinsky wrote, connecting his sensibility in a further way to Frank’s, “and the true creator may be recognized by his ability always to find about him, in the commonest and humblest thing, items worthy of note. He does not have

He has never sought to use technology to create the illusion of something that does not exist in the physical world. He creates buildings that are real physical presences, and that use the ancient architectural tools of proportion, light, materials, scale, and space to create the sensations that raise them to the level of art.

work of art closest to perfection is both most profoundly determined by its time and goes furthest beyond it into timelessness.”

The greatest of all art is both anchored in its time and able to transcend it;

works of architecture created for pleasure and for thought as well as for use.

Great art, Stravinsky was saying, is not arbitrary; it emerges out of knowledge and discipline, and of new—daring—ways to work within the constraints of reality to make new kinds of order.

Technology for him has always been a means, not an end, a way of getting ideas out of his head and into the built world.