Michael Graves
Michael Graves

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.

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

Views are overrated; it's light that counts. I have an apartment in Miami's South Beach, and I get tired of looking at the ocean. Even that view gets old after a while. Sunlight streaming into a room - it never gets old.

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

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

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

I have no requirements for a style of architecture.

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

Good design to me is both appearance and functionality together. It's the experience that makes it good design.

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

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

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

I don't believe in morality in architecture.

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

The dialogue of architecture has been centered too long around the idea of truth.

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

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.

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

It was always my goal to 'up the ante' on good design, and I've devoted much of my career to this.

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

You can never draw enough or read enough - reading about architecture, in other words.

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

On the first day I got my wheelchair, I was also given all my clothes for the next day, a little pile on the chair. I was so proud of myself for getting it all on - the socks and everything. Dressing is a struggle, and it can take up to an hour and a half.

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

When I design a building, I'm making sure you and I can get to the front door, there's enough of a threshold for entry, and that the rooms are in a logical sequence.

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

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.

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

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

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

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.

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

I believe well-designed places and objects can actually improve healing, while poor design can inhibit it.

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

The cost is minimal, but one of the things that you want in a universal design is to make the plan as open as you can... and to still have walls around bedrooms and that sort of thing, and to keep the corridors wide enough so the wheelchair can do a 360 in the corridor.

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

I had been designing for Alessi and Swid Powell and Steuben and high-end people, and people always complained, 'Michael, we'd love to buy your stuff, but it's too expensive.'

Michael Graves
Michael Graves

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.