Quotes on Design

Quotes are infectious things in the design world. A good quote is often more timeless than the work it speaks of – guiding generations of architects. So for today’s post we’re bouncing around some words of wisdom that often guide us in our own design process.

Good design means not leaving traces of the designer and not overworking the design-Naoto Fukasawa

I don’t want to be interesting, I want to be good.-Mies van der Rohe

I would like my architecture to inspire people to use their own resources, to move into the future.-Tadao Ando

When engineers and quantity surveyors discuss aesthetics and architects study what cranes do we are on the right road.-Ove Arup

It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.-Steve Jobs

It is essential to an architect to know how to see: I mean to see in such a way that the vision is not overpowered by rational analysis.-Luis Barragan

Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.-Le Corbusier

Good design is as little design as possible.-Dieter Rams

The engineer’s first problem in any design situation is to discover what the problem really is.-Unknown

If everyone loves your work you’re playing it much too safe.- David Carson

Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.-Bruce Mau

I think so many of the objects we’re surrounded by seem trivial. And I think that’s because they’re either trying to make a statement or trying to be overtly different. What we were trying to do was have a very honest approach and an exploration of materials and surface treatment. So much of what we try to do is get to a point where the solution seems inevitable: you know, you think ‘of course it’s that way, why would it be any other way?’ It looks so obvious, but that sense of inevitability in the solution is really hard to achieve.- Jonathan Ive

When architects get prizes, the people suffer.-John McCarthy

Trapped by a Cartesian cage I wanted to break out-Cecil Balmond

Simplicity, sincerity, repose, directness and frankness are moral qualities as essential to good architecture as to good men.-C.F.A. Voysey

Honor your clients – they could have gone out and bought a new home on their credit card instead of hiring an architect.-Will Bruder

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency.-Daniel Burnham

A man is not idle because he is absorbed in thought. There is a visible labor and there is an invisible labor.-Victor Hugo

The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.-Paul Rand

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.-Jane Jacobs

We require from buildings, as from men, two kinds of goodness: first, the doing their practical duty well: then that they be graceful and pleasing in doing it; which last is itself another form of duty.-John Ruskin

When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty but when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.-R. Buckminster Fuller

-From BUILDBLOG

passage & images from: http://buildllc.wordpress.com/2008/05/27/quotes-on-design/

posted by afterrabbit