Nate Berkus Quotes

I think it's really important to use your hands and get close to materials. To be up close to real things like rain and mud; to have contact with nature.

In contact with materials, I can see so much more with my hands than I can just with my eyes. I'm a participant, not a spectator. I see myself both as an object and a material, and the human presence is really important to the landscapes in which I work.

Seeing and playing with physical objects can enable access to symbolic ideas. When I studied physics and math at university it was all done through equations and textbooks whereas artists go to art school and start making stuff; they fling paint at the walls, they dance and bash things together with giant bits of metal. Our society has come to think of science as being a very abstractified thing, and art as being a materialized thing.

That's what I used to enjoy so much: Bringing a record home, having it arrive in the mailbox. Having the whole experience of hearing it as you're holding it and looking at it and reading the liner notes, if they're anything.

I think the only safe medium are books, because people like to hold books in their hand.

The world we live in is not purely visual. For me it's totally poly-sensorial so the tactile, sensual aspect of living in the work that I do is brought to the fore.

I love building spaces: architecture, furniture, all of it, probably more than fashion. The development procedure is more tactile. It's about space and form and it's something you can share with other people.

If I have the option, I always read the paper or a book or something I can touch and destroy in my own hands.

I love old books. They tell you stories about their use. You can see where the fingerprints touched the pages as they held the book open. You can see how long they lingered on each page by the finger stains.

I don't think as a creator that I could create an experience that truly feels interactive if you don't have something to hold in your hand, if you don't have something like force feedback that you can feel from the controller.

I drape a lot. I cut. I have to touch. For me, it's almost impossible to start without that.

I don't want technology to take me so far that I don't have to use my brain anymore. It's like GPS taking over and losing your internal compass. It's always got to be tactile, still organic.

Unlike sitting at a computer screen, printing is very direct and hands-on.

A lot of equipment can get in the way of the connection with food, with touching and feeling.

Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.

There are things you can get in that physical experience you cannot get virtually.

I'm very much a fan of having something tactile you can hold.

All bronzes are made to be touched. Bronze is a sensual 'living' material. The sweat and oil of your palms adds to the patination.

So much of our audience is on mobile and online platforms, but there's something special, unique, and unexpected about engaging with such great content at the street level.

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

It's important to read a book, but also to hold the book, to smell the book... it's perfume, it's incense, it's the dust of Egypt.

If you do something really cognitively demanding, like buying furniture, it turns out buying furniture is one of the most difficult things we do. Go into a furniture store and look at a sofa.

But by accident, not by cunning calculation, books, because of their weight and texture, and because of their sweetly token resistance to manipulation, involve our hands and eyes, and then our minds and souls, in a spiritual adventure I would be very sorry for my grandchildren not to know about.

Human beings thought with their hands. It was their hands that were the answer of curiosity, that felt and pinched and turned and lifted and hefted. There were animals that had brains of respectable size, but they had no hands and that made all the difference.

So let my hands and my face make their way in this world, let my hungry eyes see, my tongue taste.