Mr. Gehry serves as a member of the Americans for the Arts’ Artists Committee and as an artist for the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities’ Turnaround Arts initiative, where he worked with students at Hoopa Valley Elementary School in Hoopa, California.

Terresa McCovey: Mr. Gehry, what age did you realize you wanted to be an architect?

Frank Gehry: I was in my twenties. I was 21 or 22. I was a truck driver, and I was working days and I went to night school, and then I took a class in ceramics, quite by accident, and I didn’t do good in the class, but the teacher was building a house with a well-known architect, and he got it in his head that I would be interested. It was all on a hunch, by chance, you know. He took me to the house to watch the construction, and then when we came back he put me into an architecture class at night school.  We were poor so I think he must have paid the tuition, I don’t remember how that happened. It was all a blur to me, it was kind of a miracle actually. I did really well in the architecture class, and the university at the end of the year offered to skip me into second year architecture.

T: That’s amazing.

F: It was amazing, yeah. And then the crazy thing happened. At the end of the first semester in architecture school, the teacher of the class called me in, and he said, “Frank, I don’t think architecture is for you, I think you should do something else.” Can you believe that?

T: Did you give up after that or did you keep going?

F: Oh I was hooked already, I didn’t care what he said, I told him that. And then that guy used to be the architect for taking care of the LA airport, and so I used to see him all the time. I got more and more well-known and stuff, and I used to see him and he would say “Okay okay, I know I know, I made a mistake!”

T: You really proved him wrong. Do you enjoy where you work and your fellow workers?

F: Yes, I do.

T: How was your childhood?

F: We lived in Canada, in Toronto, and then we moved up to Timmons, Ontario, which is in northern Ontario. There were first nation tribes there—the Canadian ones. So I was exposed to them very early in life. In Northern Ontario, there was a lot of fishing and hunting, and there were gold mines. My father had slot machines and pinball machines and stuff like that, like you see in the casinos, and he would take them to stores, like a bar or a restaurant, and he would put them there and then every week he would go and make the collections of the money that was paid in those. He did that for 4 or 5 years, and then the Canadian government declared that illegal, and so he didn’t have anywhere to go. He didn’t have an education. He grew up in the streets of New York, very poor, and so for him it was kind of downhill after that, it was sad. He tried a lot of things and he couldn’t do them. Then he got sick and he had a heart attack when he was 49 and died when he was 63. So it was not a great, pleasant thing to watch. So it wasn’t easy during those times. He didn’t think I was going to amount to much. He always told me that I was going to be a failure- I think he was more talking about himself, but I didn’t know it at the time. It was a very sad time, very difficult.

T: I’m sorry to hear about that. Architects when they’re little are expected to have tinkering toys, so I was wondering—what toys did you play with?

F: So this is a great story. My grandma was from Poland, and when she was in Poland, she ran a steel foundry—can you imagine a woman running a steel foundry in Poland? That’s what she did. When I met her, she was kind of religious—Jewish religion—she went to synagogue and all that stuff. They had coal stoves, they didn’t have electric stoves and stuff yet. Around the corner from her house, there was a wood shop, and she would go and buy sacks of the wood cuttings. They were in all shapes. I don’t know what got in her, but she opened the thing, poured it on the floor, sat down with me, and made a city. She did it a few times, and you know, I don’t know if you’ve experienced this, but when adults do something like that—give you a sort of a license to play—it’s the beginnings of learning about work and learning about the world because you start to think about how these things make up a city and it’s visual and how they join together. So to have a grandma willing to play with me on the floor like that was spectacular. I’ll never forget it; it was an inspiration for the rest of my life.

T: Speaking of inspiration, who are you inspired by?

F: Well, I’m inspired by a lot of stuff. I always was interested in sculpture and painting and music and literature and all those things. There’s no one thing. I read. I used to read more when I was a kid than I do now. It was all sort of fuel for the fire to teach you how to think and how to make things and it informed the architecture that I was doing. It’s better coming in with that history and that kind of knowledge and depth of understanding of humanity that is very important for building buildings- for understanding people and how they should live and how you could make your lives better and stuff like that.

T: I heard about Frank Lloyd Wright, and I looked up facts about you, and in a lot of interviews you had you mentioned Frank Lloyd Wright. Does he inspire you?

F: He did, a lot. But when I was studying architecture, he was kind of a big star guy that wore a cape and carried a cane and a funny cap and he sort of had a persona that looked like he was better than all of us. And some of his proposals for housing and things were more for rich people. I think it was that time, that the only architecture that was being done was being done for rich people. That was probably his way of getting business, and it was a turn off to me. I had three chances to meet him and I never took them. But later, now, years later, I certainly have been inspired by some of his work, and over the years I’ve read a lot of his writing and so on. He was a great master.

T. You’re doing really well now and you’re inspiring a lot of people.

F: That’s nice. If I’m inspiring you, that’s all I care about.

T: You’re inspiring me a lot!

Read part two of the interview here.