Instead of using the machine as a metaphor for architecture, as Le Corbusier did, I use the human body. I want the public to know that it's them I'm designing for.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes designing architecture that is human-centric rather than machine-centric.
Michael Graves expresses a philosophy of architecture that prioritizes the human experience over mechanical or industrial design aesthetics. He contrasts traditional views, such as those of Le Corbusier, and emphasizes the importance of recognizing the users of a space, aiming to create designs that resonate with people's needs and feelings, making architecture a reflection of humanity itself.
In practice
This quote can be used in a presentation on modern architectural philosophy.
Form must never trump function. Some objects are made to look so smooth, you don't know where to pick them up or how to turn them on. If I'm designing a garlic press or cheese grater, I need my hand to fit comfortably on it. I like to know, instinctively, how to use 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.
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.
I believe well-designed places and objects can actually improve healing, while poor design can inhibit it.
Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing -to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.
For me painting is a dramatic action in the course of which reality finds itself split apart
I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made an intense effort to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me.
Colors in painting are as allurements for persuading the eyes, as the sweetness of meter is in poetry.
Often, especially young artists, you feel like you should be doing something. And I think that can be very destructive because creativity is about connecting with the stuff that's deep inside you and making something out of that.
If you can't play all the instruments in the orchestra of story, no matter what music may be in your imagination, you're condemned to hum the same old tune.
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