The essence of interior design will always be about people and how they live.
Albert HadleyRead
So many young decorators are trying to reinvent the wheel, and the results are sometimes very dubious. They're striving to do things that have never been done before. Quite often it is done without authority, without knowledge, and without a background in taste. They need to be educated about the past, and they need a richer vocabulary.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of understanding historical context and foundational knowledge in creative fields.
Albert Hadley suggests that many emerging decorators attempt to create innovative work without a sufficient understanding of established design principles and history. He highlights the need for education and a deep appreciation of past influences to cultivate genuine taste and skill in their craft.
In practice
This quote can serve as a reminder during a design seminar to emphasize the importance of foundational knowledge.
The essence of interior design will always be about people and how they live.
Too much of what passes for design now is theater. It's one thing to be eccentric- and by the way, most eccentrics tend to be rather well-educated people - and quite another to be a faddist, by which I mean someone who tries to conjure a totally foreign aesthetic in a misplaced environment.
Decorating is not about making stage sets, it's not about making pretty pictures for the magazines, it's really about creating a quality of life, a beauty that nourishes the soul.
Decoration is really about creating a quality of life, and a beauty in that life that nourishes the soul, that makes life beautiful.
I consider the world, this Earth, to be like a school, and our life the classrooms.
I will defend the importance of bedtime stories to my last gasp.
It's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether or not our work fulfills us. Being a teacher is meaningful.
Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.
Child development: Most damaging course of action is attempting to keep children from experience or protect them from pain, for it is this time that children learn that life is a magic thing, if "not a rose garden." The parent's role is primarily to stand by with a good supply of band-aids.
Children learn what they live. Put kids in a class and they will live out their lives in an invisible cage, isolated from their chance at community; interrupt kids with bells and horns all the time and they will learn that nothing is important or worth finishing; ridicule them and they will retreat from human association; shame them and they will find a hundred ways to get even. The habits taught in large-scale organizations are deadly.
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