Michael Graves Quotes

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

~ Michael Graves

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

~ Michael Graves

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.

~ Michael Graves

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

~ Michael Graves

I don't believe in morality in architecture.

~ Michael Graves

I have no requirements for a style of architecture.

~ Michael Graves

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

~ Michael Graves

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.

~ Michael Graves

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

~ Michael Graves

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

~ Michael Graves

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.

~ Michael Graves

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.

~ Michael Graves

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

~ Michael Graves

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

~ Michael Graves

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

~ Michael Graves

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.

~ Michael Graves

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

~ Michael Graves

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

~ Michael Graves

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.

~ Michael Graves

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.

~ Michael Graves

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.

~ Michael Graves