WORLDPOST: You once commented on your fascination with a dancing Shiva sculpture that belonged to the Norton Simon Museum. And you seem to have tried to capture this "frozen motion," as you put it, in your buildings in Bilbao and at the Disney Hall in Los Angeles.

Interestingly, your attempts to capture this "frozen motion" in architecture correspond to the scientific pursuits of Ilya Prigogine, the chaos theory physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1977.

"If the clock was the symbol of classical science," Prigogine has said, "sculpture is more the symbol for today. Sculpture is time put into matter. In some of the most beautiful manifestations of sculpture, be it the dancing Shiva or in the miniature temples of Guerrero, there appears very clearly the search for a junction between stillness and motion, time arrested and time passing. It is this confrontation -- a hidden unity just like dark and light -- that will give our era its uniqueness." A sculpture like the dancing Shiva is the symbol of the new work being done in physics because it "embodies some elements that conform to given rules and other elements that arise unexpectedly through the process of creation."

Though your buildings look as if you've throw together disconnected fragments, isn't there really a synthesis, a hidden unity as Prigogine suggests, in your designs?

GEHRY: You are absolutely right. I am amazed to hear this quote from Prigogine. That too is what I am seeking, though guided by intuition and not so consciously by intellect. It is all about a sense of movement. When I look outside the door what do I see? An airplane flying over, a car passing by. Everything is moving. That is our environment. Architecture should deal with that.

For example, the best way to look at the building I did in Bad Oeynhausen, Germany is to go across the road to the bar and just sit there and look out. Big trucks are whooshing by. When they come along the road, they fit into the form of building. The movement of the trucks doesn't conflict with the motionless building, but integrates with it.

I didn't do this on purpose, but intuitively. Such a building strikes me as very much like the dancing Shiva. I used to sit there and just look at Norton Simon's dancing Shiva. It was a remarkable sculpture. I swear it was moving. How did they do that?

I had a similar feeling when I saw the Elgin Marbles. The shield of the warriors seemed to be thrusting out. You could just feel the movement. These observations affected my work very much. When I would go out to the suburbs and see these huge tracts of housing under development, I was fascinated. You would see row after row of wood frames going up with piles of wood stacked all around. It was really vibrant. It looked far better than when the houses were actually finished.

I used to fantasize: What would it look like if you just threw all those piles of wood into the air and just froze them there in mid-air? It would be magnificent. Indeed, the great organ in the new Disney Hall has some of that sense to it.