Frank Gehry

I came into architecture at the height of modernism.

After the war, decoration was a sin.

Purity, functionalism...

All of that stuff.

Right, and it became very cold and inhuman and lifeless.

Probably some people yearned for bringing decoration back, and they tried it for a while.

I went a different route.

I thought it was possible...

within the aesthetics of the day to find a way to express feeling and humanistic qualities in a building.

And I got interested in movement, the sense of movement having a humanistic effect on an inert building.

And there are examples in history of that.

I've alluded, I've talked about it before.

The Shiva dancing figures from India, that a multi-armed...

dancer in bronze.

And the best ones, when you look at them and turn away and look back, you're sure they moved.

I was fascinated with that sense of movement.

And since our culture, when I started making my work, was a moving environment, planes, trains, cars, whatever,

I talked about it and I thought about it, but I wasn't clear about it until I started experimenting quite accidentally with fish forms.

I was interested in movement, and I loved the drawings of Hiroshige and the Japanese woodcuts of carp.

And I loved the quality of them, and I always thought they were very architectural.