Fleischman has left a lasting impression on Cleveland. After founding his own architecture firm in 1961, he completed more than 400 projects in Northeast Ohio, including St. Paschal Baylon in Highland Heights and the Polymer Science Building at the University of Akron. Fleischman and his wife, Helen Moss, who died in 2013, hosted more than 30 fundraisers at his 111-year-old mansion in Bratenahl in an effort to give back. Now, he’s a finalist in a $50 million competition run by Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell, to design a concept for a new high school.
My grandparents are from Budapest. We learned that discipline was a freedom, not a restraint.
We’re losing that idea of learning how to think.
I don’t give up. I’m here in the morning, I leave at 7 at night, sometimes later. I work on weekends. I don’t need recreation. My life is a vacation.
Every time you meet another human being, your life gets to be richer. We have so much to offer each other.
I graduated from Columbia University in 1954. They sent me to Rome for a yearlong fellowship. The Pantheon in Rome is a fantastic building. They have an oval opening in the roof.
Every day, I’d go and watch people come in and I’d take a picture of them as they would walk into the Pantheon. And every time they’d say, “Wow.” And I’d say to myself, As an architect, isn’t that my responsibility, to create an emptiness that allows you to respond that way?
I want to create the Ohio Riviera from Toledo all the way to Ashtabula: one continuous city, one continuous beach.
I wish I could know another person like Christopher Columbus.
He could keep going west and going west and assume something was out there.
Da Vinci and those individuals made things happen because of their vision.
How many people have taken the time, the insight, trained their mind, their eyes, their brain, to look and find the invisible — that blank piece of paper — and find the solution?
My wife taught me a lot about how we should feel about family. In her life, nothing was more important than her kids.
When you learn to bond with another human being, you can feel the blood in their veins and know it’s running.
Tomorrow is not a new yesterday.
