Architecture and the city

I just came back from a trip to a new site. We got a new job for a house renewal. A mess but interesting. But these two words got me thinking about the reality of architecture in our global urban context. The other night I got the chance to watch (again) the movie Sidney Pollack did about Frank Gehry "Sketches of Frank Gehry". I like Gehry for one and only thing, the same reason I also adore Zaha Hadid: they both were able to detach themselves from the ordinary, they were able to, in a way, deconstruct the already deconstructed world of architecture. I do not like everything he does. I believe his experimentations got, somehow stucked. Nice Bilbao but then he did the Disney Hall in LA that is basically an exact copy, conceptually talking. There is a fondamental issue in architecture which is...money. Rich clients and you get your creativity going, you can dare doing whatever your creative moment (always thinking about functionality) is telling you. But clients with money are kind of rare. Especially in the economic crisis we find ourselves in right now. People do not really want to invest and if they do they want to spent very little. You can do architecture, projects with little money but the result is usually very simple. Architecture has to be on top of everything functional and then, differet, not ordinary, beautiful, provoking, readable. Yet it is not. People usually describes things as "ugly" or "beautiful", never trying to read what's behind it. Frank Gehry buildings are beautifully different form anything else in a city. They provoke and create strange feelings. If you stand in front of the Disney Hall you'll see the building changing colors with the sun, with clouds and becomes a total different construction when it's raining. That's what I call architecture. ugly or beautiful it needs to respect what's around it. But good architecture has to talk to you, like with human interactions. When they asked Gehry what is architecture this is what he said: "Architecture is a small piece of this human equation, but for those of us who practice it, we believe in its potential to make a difference, to enlighten and to enrich the human experience, to penetrate the barriers of misunderstanding and provide a beautiful context for life's drama". But still...he got luckier then others!!!