Miguel McKelvey Quotes

Life is all about seating and lighting.

I would not be at all surprised to find out... that the dimensions of buildings affect us in ways we don't guess.

To me, lighting really sets the mood for a room. A 40 watt bulb in a cheap lamp is the same as a 40 watt bulb in an expensive one.

You might say that when you step inside, you're entering a honorific space, but that's something totally different than experiencing it. And in architecture the experience comes first. That has the deepest effect on us.

She said the object and color in the materials around us actually have a physical effect on us, on how we feel.

Architecture is how the person places herself in the space. Fashion is about how you place the object on the person.

I think space, architectural space, is my thing. It's not about facade, elevation, making image, making money. My passion is creating space.

I've always had a great feel for space and how objects occupy it.

People don't realize that lighting can change the whole look of a place and the feel.

Architecture is about experience: not only visual but also what you can touch, what you can feel.

I'm not an interior decorator; I'm a designer, and that includes the architecture. The package must be strong and controlled, the rooms aligned, and the windows positioned to make sense with the furniture. Fluff it up, and you've got big trouble.

Taking architecture seriously therefore makes some singular and strenuous demands upon us...It means conceding that we are inconveniently vulnerable to the colour of our wallpaper and that our sense of purpose may be derailed by an unfortunate bedspread

I'm interested in the space between the viewer and the surface of the painting - the forms and the way they work in their surroundings. I'm interested in how they react to a room.

I can look at a photo and the dimensions of any piece and tell you if it's going to sit well with the four other pieces in your room.

If you have white walls, human beings look better in a room than if you have red walls.

I've come to believe in the primacy of form - the notion of art seducing you through your senses, through your eyeballs.

I don't really get into architecture in the hotel room. But maybe a little Feng Shui here and there.

If you're lucky, and a building succeeds, the real product has many more dimensions than you can ever imagine. You have the sun, the light, the rain, the birds, the feel.

Food is one part of the experience. And it has to be somewhere between 50 to 60 percent of the dining experience. But the rest counts as well: The mood, the atmosphere, the music, the feeling, the design, the harmony between what you have on the plate and what surrounds the plate.

The design of a dress, furniture, a house, a room, a street and a city are all the same process.

Places seem to me to have some kind of memory, in that they activate memory in those who look at them.

Design, to me, is part psychology, part sociology, and part magic. A good decorator should know what's going on in someone's marriage and how their kids are doing in school.

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.

Somehow, architecture alters the way we think about the world and the way we behave. Any serious architecture, as a litmus test, has to be that.

I don't think there is anything wrong with white space. I don't think it's a problem to have a blank wall.