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

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

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

I don't believe in morality in architecture.

In designing hardware to be used every day, it was important to keep both the human aspects and the machine in mind. What looks good also often feels good.

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

I have no requirements for a style of architecture.

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

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

For my first apartment, when I was first married, I went to the lumberyard and bought stuff and made couches. My then-wife made cushions. I was really very interested in furniture. I was in school for architecture, but I had to live, and making furniture was different from designing buildings, which I couldn't do for myself.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The avant garde is so narcissistic.

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.

We use blue on the handle of the Alessi kettle. Blue is cool, so you're supposed to think that it's not hot. And the bird is red: you're supposed to think to be careful to remove the bird.

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.

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.

When I started my own practice, I was criticized, not because I was doing product design but because, like Le Corbusier, I was insisting on paintings in all of my buildings. I would paint wall murals in the houses that I designed, just as he did in the '20s and '30s.

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

In addressing a task, one almost always has several possible options, sometimes only a few, and they may all be practical and functional. But they lack the aesthetic aspect that raises it to architecture.

People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that's both liberating and alarming.

The organizational architecture is really that a centipede walks on hundred legs and one or two don't count. So if I lose one or two legs, the process will go on, the organization will go on, the growth will go on.

The intellectual architecture means focusing on doing great work instead of focusing on agency politics.

Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.

The new architecture of transparency and lightness comes from Japan and Europe.

Every man's work, whether it be literature, or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.

All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.

My interest in architecture has always been sculptural. Most of my photography is of architecture.

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.

Japanese traditional architecture is created based on these conditions. This is the reason you have a very high degree of connection between the outside and inside in architecture.

I studied architecture in New York. So, really I was very moved, like everyone else, to try to contribute something that has that resonance and profundity of it means to all of us.

Architecture in general is frozen music.

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.

The team architecture means setting up an organization that helps people produce that great work in teams.

French architecture always manages to combine the most magnificent underlying themes of architecture; like Roman design, it looks to the community.

What is being called the UN 'gender architecture' is more like a shack. Women need a bigger global house if equality is ever to become a reality.

Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years, so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.

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

The greatest advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science and literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.