Michael Graves

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“The avant garde is so narcissistic.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“I don't believe in morality in architecture.”

“Sometimes we need fellow radicals to remind us of what we, as writers, have set out to proclaim.”

“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.”

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