Chapter 1 of 24
Frank Gehry
Well I arrived in California in 1947 I was an immigrant from Toronto, Canada. But my formative years clearly had been in Los Angeles and I'm a Los Angeles architect and my work grows out of the Los Angeles aesthetic, the freeway, the fast food, the movies and it has seeped into my work. My early work was in city planning. I was always a super liberal who felt that building houses for rich people was not very interesting to me. I was more interested in the greater problems of the world. I was a confirmed 'do-gooder', something I find abhorrent now but I still feel that my work is involved with the less expensive kind of housing. I'm very interested now in the 'tract house'. By tract house I mean the individual dwelling that's become sort of symbolic in America, the single family house on its own piece of land, fifty by one hundred and fifty, usually with a two car garage and a den and a swimming pool, in various sizes. And it is the most pervasive form of housing in this country.