Michael Graves Quotes

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I don’t care what people call me, labels have the negative value of making smaller boundaries for people.

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

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

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.

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 don’t believe in morality in architecture.

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.

The avant garde is so narcissistic.

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.

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

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

I don’t clean now, because I’m paralyzed. But let me tell you, I would clean. I cleaned, and I ironed. It’s my inner femininity.