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.

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.'

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Someone once told me they didn't like taking the lid off the kettle because they'd just lose it in the kitchen, so we made a kettle with an attached lid that you slide. It was in response to that that we made one that did something different.

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

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

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.

I don't clean now, because I'm paralyzed. But let me tell you, I would clean. I cleaned, and I ironed. It's my inner femininity.

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

I used a kind of gray-green early on in my practice for painting steel, to make it look more like it had a kind of patina to it, like copper and bronze and so on. The color I used was a Benjamin Moore color called 2012. My then-young daughter started calling me 2012 - it was my nickname.

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.

I have no requirements for a style of architecture.

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 always correct people who say, 'You're trying to make this look better.' Well yes, we want it to look better, but that's easy. The look and the function are one and the same. They are not separate. It looks good because it functions beautifully. That message is very hard.