Grid System Quotes

I have always thought that L.A. is a motor city that developed linear downtowns.

Hippodamus, son of Euryphon, a native of Miletus, invented the art of planning and laid out the street plan of Piraeus.

Bel Air, I am convinced, was laid out by some diabolic sadist who deliberately decided not to use a compass or a surveyor.

Manhattan has no choice but the skyward extrusion of the Grid itself; only the Skyscraper offers business the wide-open spaces of a man-made Wild West, a frontier in the sky.

The Grid makes the history of architecture and all previous lessons of urbanism irrelevant. It forces Manhattan's builders to develop a new system of formal values, to invent strategies for the distinction of one block from another. The Grid's two-dimensional discipline also creates undreamt-of freedom for three-dimensional anarchy. The Grid defines a new balance between control and de-control in which the city can be at the same time ordered and fluid, a metropolis of rigid chaos.

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.

I think New York is a good place to write in general because it's a grid. It's organized. You know where you are on the map. That centers you, and your imagination is perhaps freer to roam.

Today we live in a chaos of straight lines, in a jungle of straight lines. If you do not believe this, take the trouble to count the straight lines which surround you. Then you will understand, for you will never finish counting.

When the Great Fire of London destroyed most of the medieval city in 1666, Christopher Wren was invited to design a new one. Within days, he had drawn up an elegant grid of broad boulevards leading to majestic squares, but it came to nothing - the existing landowners wanted things as they had been.

I think, in our modern cities, there are a lot of boxes; there are a lot of straight lines. They often deal with efficiency, the function, the structure.

New York is on a grid system, so it's slightly less challenging logistically, but Londoners are more relaxed in their selling approach. With that intense shopping service in New York, it's easy to get carried away and make a wrong purchase. Here, there's a different flow. You are left to explore, and individuality is key.

The American order reveals a method that was largely the outcome of material necessity, as exemplified by the Colonial style and the grid.

Japanese maps tend to come in two varieties: small, schematic, and bewildering; and large, fantastically detailed, and bewildering.

I think it's really useful to create parameters. The term you use can be forwarded into something more like a grid, a rubric, a system that you apply to all environments, and in so doing you create a situation in which you can locate local color, local differences within new environments.

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 vertically center things in tables a lot, and the fact that there is no way to control vertical positioning in divs affects the way we do things across the board.