Michael Graves Quotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 believe in morality in architecture.

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.

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

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 have no requirements for a style of architecture.

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

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.

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

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.