His practice would be to review a model with the team of architects assigned to a project, study it intently, and suggest a few tweaks, after which the model shop would produce a new model that incorporated his changes and the process would begin again.

“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

“Mrs. Disney said she’d like it to be Frank Gehry because of the beautiful garden he’s created,”

‘No matter what you do, how little, how big, it’s got to be the best thing you ever did at that point. Just remember this, because you’re going to be judged by that.’

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

organize his practice so that it could produce large and complex projects, and to help build the firm into the kind of organization that could compete with big architectural offices that did not have his creative abilities. With that level of technical expertise combined with his creative strength, Frank reasoned, his office would have an unusual a

architecture as a part of culture

capable of executing demanding projects.

The great sails were a symbol of the new, but they were also a way of creating decoration, of giving the building an element that existed solely for visual pleasure.