Michael Graves Design Quotations

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

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.

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

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.

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'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.

Design has nothing to do with economic class. If I were designing for Cartier or Tiffany, I would expend the same energy.

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.

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

Architecture is not all about the design of the building and nothing else, it is also about the cultural setting and the ambience, the whole affair.

Architectural and product designs have a narrative capacity - you can start to tell a story about them and imagine a lot of things.

The design of the building addresses the public nature of both the urban context and the internal program. In order to reinforce the building's associative or mimetic qualities, the facades are organized in a classical three-part division of base, middle or body, and attic or head.

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

I stayed true to what I thought was good design no matter who it was for.

I have architects write to me and ask me: How do you - and what do you do to - design the magic thing? I answer that very carefully. It's not necessarily about what you do, but the clients you do it for. You should write to Target, not me.

The Alessi relationship and the Target one has broadened the role of architects in society and broadened the concept that design belongs to everyone.

It was always my goal to 'up the ante' on good design and rye devoted much of my career to this