Michael Graves Architecture Quotations

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

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'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.

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.