Quotes from Michael Graves

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.

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.

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 wouldn't have been a health care nut if it hadn't been for my paralysis, so something good came from this.

I've always believed that what can make a domestic setting truly home is the infusion of a cultural dimension.

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

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.

On the first day I got my wheelchair, I was also given all my clothes for the next day, a little pile on the chair. I was so proud of myself for getting it all on - the socks and everything. Dressing is a struggle, and it can take up to an hour and a half.

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

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.

We always correct people who say, 'You're trying to make this look better.' Well yes, we want it to look better, but that's easy. The look and the function are one and the same. They are not separate. It looks good because it functions beautifully. That message is very hard.

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.

When you do what I do, there are a lot of institutions that give you awards. I've gotten maybe 20 medals. They're glorious, and there's a spirit behind them. But sometimes they give you this dreadful modern glass thing. I wish everyone could afford a loving cup.

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

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.

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.

As a child, I was obsessed with drawing things, like Mickey and Donald. And houses. My mother was worried I'd become an artist.

Architects love to rethink a project - that's what we do. If something is successful, like a house or a kettle, in this case, it's a great compliment when someone wants another one.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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