Words matter. These are the best Michael Graves Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I have no requirements for a style of architecture.
It was always my goal to ‘up the ante’ on good design, and I’ve devoted much of my career to this.
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.
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.
I believe well-designed places and objects can actually improve healing, while poor design can inhibit it.
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.
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.
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.
In any architecture, there is an equity between the pragmatic function and the symbolic function.
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 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.’
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.
You can never draw enough or read enough – reading about architecture, in other words.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 oldest book I have is a treatise on architecture from the 17th century.
