Michael Graves Architect Quotations

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.

Architecture only does part of the work. How you fill the space matters just as much, sometimes more. I designed a beach house with a continuous living/dining area, but it had to have a table in the middle to give it a visual rhythm. Every room has a foreground and a background. But you also need a middle ground - like that table - to go between.

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.

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

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

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

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 don't believe in morality in architecture.

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

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.

I have no requirements for a style of architecture.

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

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

I have a requirement for myself in making designations of elements. I need to have full language and I do not want the language to be only space.