Design Quotes

London is one of the most civilised places in the world for the procedure of making architecture and urban design.

~ Renzo Piano

In architecture the idea degenerated. Design allows a more direct and pleasurable route.

~ Charles Eames

I have played a few times in Barcelona, including the fantastic Olympic Stadium. It's undoubtedly one of my favourite cities in terms of the people, arts, food, architecture and design.

~ Jean-Michel Jarre

I wanted a real profession. And I'd always been interested in architecture and in design and in, really, what makes things work. And understanding what's kind of behind the walls and why things stand up and some things don't.

~ S. J. Rozan

I've always thought that design can have equal importance to the idea of internal architecture. Professionally, things can be very dogmatic - you do the architecture, someone else does the interiors, someone else does the furniture, the fabric, etc. But I think design is all-encompassing.

~ Zaha Hadid

I'm drawn to furniture design as complete architecture on a minor scale.

~ Brad Pitt

To me, form doesn't always follow function. Form has a life of its own, and at times, it may be the motivating force in design. When you're dealing with form as a sculptor, you feel that you are quite free in attempting to mould and shape things you want to do, but in architecture, it's much more difficult because it has to have a function.

~ I. M. Pei

I've gone to school for business, for design, for architecture.

~ Venus Williams

I'd like to do a lot of things - whether in design or architecture or business.

~ Caroline Wozniacki

If I weren't involved with food, I'd be working in architecture. Design is that critical to me.

~ Alice Waters

The details are the very source of expression in architecture. But we are caught in a vice between art and the bottom line.

~ Arthur Erickson

I was always really geeky about design and buildings. Always into architecture as a kid.

~ Aldis Hodge

I've always known I wanted to be in design somehow. It was going to be architecture, but I would've had to quit acting for it. I realized with horology, I could learn at my own pace.

~ Aldis Hodge

By the late Nineties, we had become a more visual nation. Big-money taste moved to global standards - new architecture, design and show-off contemporary art. The Sloane domestic aesthetic - symmetry, class symbolism and brown furniture - became as unfashionable as it had been hot in the early Eighties.

~ Peter York

By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades.

~ Martin Filler

Considering my specialization in architecture, I'm not surprised that the first graphic novel to thoroughly engage, not to say captivate, me is Chip Kidd and Dave Taylor's 'Batman: Death by Design.'

~ Martin Filler

I see the Beijing National Stadium as an architectural project. I accepted Herzog and De Meuron's invitation to collaborate on the design, and our proposal won the competition. From beginning to end, I stayed with the project. I am committed to fostering relationships between a city and its architecture.

~ Ai Weiwei

French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.

~ Stephen Gardiner

All those involved in the construction of an architectural design, from the architect to the builder, have an attachment to the architecture, although it's difficult to quantify the attachment.

~ Tadao Ando

My guilty pleasure is I like to watch a lot of HGTV. I really like watching design shows about houses, like extreme homes. Like buying a bridge and turning it into a house or something like that. I really am interested in home design or something like that... architecture.

~ Taylor Schilling

I'm inspired by many things, from landscapes to textiles. Art and architecture always influence my design process.

~ Francisco Costa

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

People kind of tend to mystify design and architecture by suggesting you need to train.

~ Marc Newson

If I was influenced by anything, it was architecture: structure having to do with logic. If you don't do it right, the whole thing is going to cave in. In a certain sense, you can carry that to graphic design. Fortunately, however, nobody is going to die if you do it wrong.

~ Paul Rand

I like to be surrounded by books. My wife Evelyn has a Ph.D. in comparative literature, so we have a lot of her Spanish and German literature books which are wasted on me, plus a lot of novels and books on art and architecture shared by us both. Evelyn used to edit an art magazine called 'FMR,' so we have a common interest in design.

~ David Chipperfield

Architecture students are generally given theoretical projects, often located at distant locations, and told to come up with a design.

~ Alan Huffman

Once I got out of architecture school I decided not to be an architect, I just started my own little design studio.

~ Joseph Kosinski

I live in a craftsman house, but I'm a big fan of modernist and mid-century furniture and architecture, too. But my dream is to do a truly original chair design, something that is all these different things but is my own, too.

~ Luke Macfarlane

I always look forward to the next project. That is one of the wonderful things about architecture - you always can hope for another project to design.

~ Cesar Pelli

To go back to architecture, what's organic about architecture as a field, unlike product design, is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm. Like, we have to design things which are coherent as a single object, but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale.

~ Greg Lynn

I started collecting aerial photographs of Native American and South Pacific architecture; only the African ones were fractal. And if you think about it, all these different societies have different geometric design themes that they use. So Native Americans use a combination of circular symmetry and fourfold symmetry.

~ Ron Eglash

There is a lot of interest in the arts, music, theatre, filmmaking, engineering, architecture and software design. I think we have now transitioned the modern-day version of the entrepreneur into the creative economy.

~ John Baldacci

No architect troubled to design houses that suited people who were to live in them, because that would have meant building a whole range of different houses. It was far cheaper and, above all, timesaving to make them identical.

~ Michael Ende

I'm involved in everything from highly progressive lighting systems to airline interiors. In the field of transportation I can go from the micro to the macro: architecture, transportation, industrial product design, right across the board. It's Russian dollism, because they all interrelate: one goes into the other.

~ Ross Lovegrove

For many years, I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose, it seems to me, must be the improvement of mankind.

~ James Rouse

I studied fine arts and architecture, but I decided to move into movie design because I grew up in a small town in the Marche region and spent a lot of time after school in the movie theater.

~ Dante Ferretti

The traditional notion of an architect having a vision of a building and then drawing it either on paper or on a computer and then constructing it isn't really how architecture works, and in reality, the computer has a lot of influence on design.

~ Michael Hansmeyer

Design, refine and repeat, and keep learning all the way along. It sounds bland and pedestrian, but in fact, it's the reverse.

~ Anouska Hempel

I had been impressed by the fact that biological systems were based on molecular machines and that we were learning to design and build these sorts of things.

~ K. Eric Drexler

If you only design menus that are essentially junk or fast food, the whole infrastructure supports junk.

~ Jamie Oliver