You can be a mason and build 50 buildings but it doesn't mean you can design one.
I think there is a new awareness in this 21st century that design is as important to where and how we live as it is for museums concert halls and civic buildings.
When I design buildings I think of the overall composition much as the parts of a body would fit together. On top of that I think about how people will approach the building and experience that space.
Good buildings come from good people ad all problems are solved by good design.
I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.
There are hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the United States and in other countries too. Wright lived into his 90s and one of his most famous buildings the Guggenheim Museum in New York was completed just before his death. Wright buildings look like Wright buildings - that is their paradox.
When I was in high school my friends and I would drive out into the country to abandoned houses and structures... haha... to ghost hunt. We would scare each other so bad! We would sometimes camp out by the abandoned buildings just to scare ourselves! Such good times. The adrenaline of real fear is so cool!
I used to love to draw. I didn't want to go to art class because I felt that would be too corny when I was young but architectural drafting was the cool thing to do because there was more precision. It taught me a lot about building and structures and doorways and frames and windowsills.
My friends are people who like building cool stuff. We always have this joke about people who want to just start companies without making something valuable. There's a lot of that in Silicon Valley.
It is time for corporate America to become 'the third pillar' of social change in our society complementing the first two pillars of government and philanthropy. We need the entire private sector to begin committing itself not just to making profits but to fulfilling higher and larger purposes by contributing to building a better world.
My goal was never to just create a company. A lot of people misinterpret that as if I don't care about revenue or profit or any of those things. But what not being just a company means to me is not being just that - building something that actually makes a really big change in the world.
Every song has a composer every book has an author every car has a maker every painting has a painter and every building has a builder. So it isn't irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.
By the time the children go to bed I am as drained as any mother who has spent her day working car pooling building Lego castles and shopping for the precisely correct soccer cleat.
At least 50 times. I've jumped off a building jumped off a cliff in a car. I've been in bedrooms when women came in with knives and guns.
I'd get kicked out of buildings all day long people would rip up my business card in my face. It's a humbling business to be in. But I knew I could sell and I knew I wanted to sell something I had created. I cut the feet out of those pantyhose and I knew I was on to something. This was it.
When I was building the Vietnam Memorial I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war because from my point of view you don't pry into other people's business.
When I started Netscape I was brand new out of college and all the aspects of building a business like balance sheets and hiring people were new to me.