Peter York Quotes

Building design isn't trendy.

Trends in fashion, design and pop culture are taking on more global influence, and of course, one thing that's always in style is color.

During the eighties and nineties, people wanted to be chic, elegant, bourgeois.

We use fashion for status and to beautify and there's nothing wrong with that, but when it becomes completely unbalanced, then you're living a decadent life. And when that happens on a global scale, you're living in a decadent world.

By 1970, the first stirrings of the revolt against Modernist orthodoxy in architecture had been felt, although it would be several years more until Postmodernism was widely accepted and made classical motifs permissible in high-style building design for the first time in decades.

The 20th century is a period defined by cultural and artistic movements. However, the 21st century creative-scape that we occupy now doesn't really have movements in the same way. Instead it's made up of diverse individuals working across various platforms simultaneously; art, architecture, film, music and literature.

After 1980, you never heard reference to space again. Surface, the most convincing evidence of the descent into materialism, became the focus of design. Space disappeared.

Architecture is art, nothing else.

People think that I live in a space pod, but it's pretty mid-century modern.

I live in a craftsman house, but I'm a big fan of modernist and mid-century furniture and architecture, too. But my dream is to do a truly original chair design, something that is all these different things but is my own, too.

Something I always wanted to do, to capture that later half of the '70s. It's like the early half of the '70s is still the '60s, in that there's still kind of a playfulness and inventiveness in terms of design and the things that were going on in the culture. The second half, it got much more commodified. It's possibly the ugliest era of architecture and clothes and design in the entire 20th century, from 1975 to '81 or '82.

The designers [of the 1930s] were populists, you see; they were trying to give the public what it wanted. What the public wanted was the future.

I really prize and love great painting. It's so out of date now. It's slightly come back in.

We're not living in a school-of-Paris world, you know, and the things we really see in America are like this. It's McDonald's, it's not Le Corbusier.

People who are rich want to be richer, but what's the difference? The toys get different, that's all. The rich guys buy a football team, the poor guys buy a football. It's all relative.

Saeed quickly found employment at a Banana Republic, where he would sell to urban sophisticates the black turtleneck of the season, in a shop whose name was synonymous with colonial exploitation and the rapacious ruin of the third world.

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao looks like a great adventure.

I want to do interiors, furniture. I want to do architecture, although I'm not an architect. Nor am I a trained interior designer.

I love to decorate and redecorate. Now it's called interior design, but the term decorating is fine with me.

Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard.

With their tinted windows up, the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then an egg will crack open a woman's hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road and then the window goes up, and the egg is resealed.

Pride is as loud a beggar as want, and a great deal more saucy. When you have bought one fine thing, you must buy ten more, that your appearance may be all of a piece; but it is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it.

I also love real estate and decorating.

A lot of my ideas come from McNally Jackson bookstore. One of my favorite things to do is just go there and look through architecture books and interior design books. Something about the aesthetics of space and beautiful images works with my brain.

I liked working in advertising, but don't believe my taste in art, such as it is, was entirely formed by TV commercials. And I don't feel especially conflicted enjoying a Mantegna one day, a Carl Andre the next day and a brash student work the next.