Frank Gehry Quotes

A lot of times, L.A. is desaturated, and cement and freeways, and downtown.

To me, Los Angeles was the invention of the suburb. They figured it out and perfected it and created a city that was dependent on the automobile.

The thing you gotta understand about L.A. is that everything is suburbia. Los Angeles isn't set up like San Francisco or New York.

I don't like L.A. It's just not fun. I don't know why, but I just don't get it. You have to drive to get everywhere, and when it rains everybody freaks out.

Between a quarter and a third of Los Angeless land area is now monopolized by the automobile and its needs-by freeways, highways, garages, gas stations, car lots, parking lots. And all of it is blanketed with anonymity and foul air.

Sprawl is the American ideal way to develop. I believe that what we're developing in Denver is in no appreciable way different than what we're doing in Los Angeles - did in Los Angeles and are still doing. But I think we have developed the Los Angeles model of city-building, and I think it is unfortunate.

I never knew how small L.A. was until I started to work here.

Elevated locations imply elevated purposes, even in American cities departing as radically as Los Angeles does from the traditional planning patterns of the Eastern Seaboard.

I really don't know the Chicago School. You see, I never walk. I always take taxis back and forth to work. I rarely see the city.

I've driven in L.A. probably three times. I'm a slug in L.A.

One thing about Los Angeles is it feels like it's not new. It feels like it's already been built, and it's deteriorating, except for the places they're trying to make nicer. But in general, you drive all through the city, and the city feels like it was new a long time ago.

In L.A., it's the sort of city where you have to have a car to get around.

I grew up in L.A., and it's one of those cities designed around cars instead of the people that live there. I spent hours every day stuck in traffic, having the experience of looking around and seeing one person in every car.

Why is everything so far apart in Los Angeles?

In 1970, Los Angeles became the first place where the total acreage used for roads and parking exceeded the amount of space given over to habitation.

Los Angeles is often described as the nadir of vapidity, a smog-choked space cradle.

We have stopped making communities in which people want to live and are making communities where people drive through.

As you move away from mass transit you become more dependent on the automobile, so you have to spread the housing out more to accommodate the cars.

Mayor Mitchel has too much 5th Avenue and not enough 1st Avenue.

The energy crisis has given new urgency to the need to improve public transportation, not only in our cities but in rural areas as well…. Mass transit is an essential element of the improvement of life in our cities and towns.

L.A. is a town built upon segregated, individual fantasies.

From the late 1940s, into and through the '50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.

They say that no one walks in L.A., and it's definitely true, and I'm embracing that.

Everybody knows that L.A. is known for its addiction to the single-passenger automobile, the gridlock, the congestion on the freeways.

The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed U.S. society enormously.