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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“I have no requirements for a style of architecture.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“Good design should be available to everyone - and I do mean everyone. What I spent on the wheelchair I'm in could buy a small Mercedes. It's not only unfair to me; it's unfair to someone who's indigent but has the same needs. My goal is to make all objects affordable.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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