Quotes About Design

The one garment in the world with the greatest and longest popularity—over a century now—is Levi's denim blue jeans. Along with their practical durability, they show age honestly and elegantly, as successive washings fade and shrink them to perfect fit and rich texture. Ingenious techniques to simulate aging of denim come and go, but the basic indigo 501s, copper-riveted, carry on for decades. This is highly evolved design. Are there blue-jeans buildings among us?

The fashion game is fun for architects to play and diverting for the public to watch, but it's deadly for building users. When the height of fashion moves on, they're the ones left behind, stuck in a building that was designed to look good rather than work well, and now it doesn't even look good.

The temptation to customize a building around a new technology is always enormous, and it is nearly always unnecessary. Technology is relatively lightweight and flexible—more so every decade. Let the technology adapt to the building rather than vice versa, and then you're not pushed around when the next technology comes along.

We came to believe that we could concrete over the fields and design a better life for ourselves, free of nature's wildness and uncertainties. But it's very obvious now that this was the wrong way to go.

His mouth seemed designed for kissing. Maybe it was all that non-conversation. Maybe talking too much undermined a man's ability to kiss.

those new, fancy ones. With granite

Art Nouveau objects, typically, convert one thing into something else: the lighting fixtures in the form of flowering plants, the living room which is really a grotto. A remarkable example: the Paris Métro entrances designed by Hector Guimard in the late 1890s in the shape of cast-iron orchid stalks.

stores that specialized in furniture alone.

I've never had anyone define purity. You probably can't define purity. Purity is to live according to original design.

I have a Volvo S60R and it's a pretty fast car, the R says it all.

Not the richest, the best. Promise?" When he nodded, she went on. "And anyone who's delivering a baby has to wash his or her hands first. And you have to build Thornwyck Castle and leave records behind that show that you designed it. I want history to know.

Embroidery entwined

God designed each one of us for His purpose-and God doesn't make junk.

The door handle is the handshake of the building.

Architecture domesticates limitless space and enables us to inhabit it [...]

Modernist design at large has housed the intellect and the eye, but it has left the body and the other senses, as well as our memories, imagination and dreams, homeless.

The body knows and remembers. Architectural meaning derives from archaic responses and reactions remembered by the body and the senses.

arhitecture domesticates limitless space and enable us to inhabit it, but it should likewise domesticate endless time and enable us to inhabit the continum of time

one particular metaphysical debate, namely whether there are purposes in nature or not, and if so what they are.

Architecture is a visual art, and the buildings speak for themselves.

My buildings will be my legacy... they will speak for me long after I'm gone.

Higher ceilings allow the use indirect lighting, which is much healthier and reduces glare.

At the basic consumer level, the profusion of fonts appeals to a culture that celebrates expressive individualism.

If a piece is individually made to measure, then it's couture.