Michael Graves Quotations

We always correct people who say, 'You're trying to make this look better.' Well yes, we want it to look better, but that's easy. The look and the function are one and the same. They are not separate. It looks good because it functions beautifully. That message is very hard.

When I design a building, I'm making sure you and I can get to the front door, there's enough of a threshold for entry, and that the rooms are in a logical sequence.

We've taken on health care in a big way in our office, ever since nine years ago when I was paralyzed. I was in eight different hospitals, three different rehab centers, and all the rooms were dreadful. As an architect, designer, and patient, I can do something to help.

People want to sign, but it's hard to get the guys to commit the time.

On the first day I got my wheelchair, I was also given all my clothes for the next day, a little pile on the chair. I was so proud of myself for getting it all on - the socks and everything. Dressing is a struggle, and it can take up to an hour and a half.

I grew up in a time when Eames and Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright and other architects were putting their furniture and objects on the market. You could buy some of those objects on the open market. Eames was a huge influence on all of us in school.

I don't clean now, because I'm paralyzed. But let me tell you, I would clean. I cleaned, and I ironed. It's my inner femininity.

I don't care what people call me,labels have the negative value of making smaller boundaries for people.

I believe well-designed places and objects can actually improve healing, while poor design can inhibit it.

I have a requirement for myself in making designations of elements. I need to have full language and I do not want the language to be only space.

Form must never trump function. Some objects are made to look so smooth, you don't know where to pick them up or how to turn them on. If I'm designing a garlic press or cheese grater, I need my hand to fit comfortably on it. I like to know, instinctively, how to use it.

Good design to me is both appearance and functionality together. It's the experience that makes it good design.

Good design should be available to everyone - and I do mean everyone. What I spent on the wheelchair I'm in could buy a small Mercedes. It's not only unfair to me; it's unfair to someone who's indigent but has the same needs. My goal is to make all objects affordable.

I taught at Princeton for 39 years, and the school of architecture on the campus is the worst building on the campus.

I think it's a really good way to get people to come up here. It's good to expand your mind by meeting people of other countries and beliefs, a good experience.

I see architecture not as Gropius did, as a moral venture, as truth, but as invention, in the same way that poetry or music or painting is invention.

Someone once told me they didn't like taking the lid off the kettle because they'd just lose it in the kitchen, so we made a kettle with an attached lid that you slide. It was in response to that that we made one that did something different.

The daughter said, 'Look at these things -- these are terrific.' The mother agreed, 'These are really cool things. I'd buy a tea kettle if they had one.'

We use blue on the handle of the Alessi kettle. Blue is cool, so you're supposed to think that it's not hot. And the bird is red: you're supposed to think to be careful to remove the bird.

When you do what I do, there are a lot of institutions that give you awards. I've gotten maybe 20 medals. They're glorious, and there's a spirit behind them. But sometimes they give you this dreadful modern glass thing. I wish everyone could afford a loving cup.

You can never draw enough or read enough - reading about architecture, in other words.

When I started my own practice, I was criticized, not because I was doing product design but because, like Le Corbusier, I was insisting on paintings in all of my buildings. I would paint wall murals in the houses that I designed, just as he did in the '20s and '30s.

Views are overrated; it's light that counts. I have an apartment in Miami's South Beach, and I get tired of looking at the ocean. Even that view gets old after a while. Sunlight streaming into a room - it never gets old.

At the time we were planning the building, ... Joyce wanted to include a sensory park. But the budget wouldn't let us do both projects, so we agreed to work on the park when there was money to do so.

I used a kind of gray-green early on in my practice for painting steel, to make it look more like it had a kind of patina to it, like copper and bronze and so on. The color I used was a Benjamin Moore color called 2012. My then-young daughter started calling me 2012 - it was my nickname.

It would be nice if the cities knew who would be prosecuting before they passed the ordinance and started arresting people.

Rather than see the Art Center as an isolated object in the green, ... we were intrigued by the possibility of creating a positive, reciprocal relationship between the building and the landscape.

The oldest book I have is a treatise on architecture from the 17th century.

Architecture only does part of the work. How you fill the space matters just as much, sometimes more. I designed a beach house with a continuous living/dining area, but it had to have a table in the middle to give it a visual rhythm. Every room has a foreground and a background. But you also need a middle ground - like that table - to go between.

As an architect I've always believed that what can make a domestic setting truly home is the infusion of a cultural dimension.

This is one of the few things that would make me instantly drop Northwest as a carrier of choice.

It was always my goal to 'up the ante' on good design, and I've devoted much of my career to this.

Design has nothing to do with economic class. If I were designing for Cartier or Tiffany, I would expend the same energy.

As a child, I was obsessed with drawing things, like Mickey and Donald. And houses. My mother was worried I'd become an artist.

The cost is minimal, but one of the things that you want in a universal design is to make the plan as open as you can... and to still have walls around bedrooms and that sort of thing, and to keep the corridors wide enough so the wheelchair can do a 360 in the corridor.

I'm working on a school of architecture in China. It's rare that an architect gets to design a school of architecture, and here I get to do it. I'm so pleased that they asked me.

Instead of using the machine as a metaphor for architecture, as Le Corbusier did, I use the human body. I want the public to know that it's them I'm designing for.

I had been designing for Alessi and Swid Powell and Steuben and high-end people, and people always complained, 'Michael, we'd love to buy your stuff, but it's too expensive.'

For my first apartment, when I was first married, I went to the lumberyard and bought stuff and made couches. My then-wife made cushions. I was really very interested in furniture. I was in school for architecture, but I had to live, and making furniture was different from designing buildings, which I couldn't do for myself.

I do have some questions about the constitutionality of these city ordinances.

It was always my goal to 'up the ante' on good design and rye devoted much of my career to this

Alberto Alessi had asked a dozen architects to design a sterling silver tea service - with a teapot, a coffee pot, sugar, creamer, a spoon, and a tray. Our brief was that it didn't matter if it didn't work and cost wasn't the issue. It was a promotional project, not a commercial enterprise, and was going to be showcased in museums. And the coffee and tea piazza, as mine was called, received a great response. It was wonderful to walk into the Whitney museum and see all these objects on the first floor.

I know that's not something that people like to do - identify a favorite. But I do.

My favorite is the garlic press. I think it's beautiful as an object. But the awkward part of it all is that I don't use it much because I'm allergic to garlic.

The Alessi relationship and the Target one has broadened the role of architects in society and broadened the concept that design belongs to everyone.

I have architects write to me and ask me: How do you - and what do you do to - design the magic thing? I answer that very carefully. It's not necessarily about what you do, but the clients you do it for. You should write to Target, not me.

The dialogue of architecture has been centered too long around the idea of truth.

I don't believe in morality in architecture.

I stayed true to what I thought was good design no matter who it was for.

I once got a postcard from a French poet who wrote - "you don't know me but I'm always very grumpy when I get up in morning. But when I get up now I put the tea kettle on, and when it starts to sing it makes me smile - goddamn you!" That's what happened when we first designed it - we got a lot of mail.

Architects love to rethink a project - that's what we do. If something is successful, like a house or a kettle, in this case, it's a great compliment when someone wants another one.

In America, writers are afforded the freedom to express themselves in unlimited manners. Creative liberty is a privilege.

In designing hardware to be used every day, it was important to keep both the human aspects and the machine in mind. What looks good also often feels good

I don't care what people call me, labels have the negative value of making smaller boundaries for people.

I learned in architecture that you have to have a real plan. You have to have a client, they have to have distribution, start-up money, and have a vision of where it's going to go. All this has to be settled before you start, or else your work is just a story.

The design of the building addresses the public nature of both the urban context and the internal program. In order to reinforce the building's associative or mimetic qualities, the facades are organized in a classical three-part division of base, middle or body, and attic or head.

I've always believed that what can make a domestic setting truly home is the infusion of a cultural dimension.

In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.

Architectural and product designs have a narrative capacity - you can start to tell a story about them and imagine a lot of things.

Architecture is not all about the design of the building and nothing else, it is also about the cultural setting and the ambience, the whole affair.

I have no requirements for a style of architecture.

I wouldn't have been a health care nut if it hadn't been for my paralysis, so something good came from this.

If I have a style, I am not aware of it.

My favorite project is always the next one.