Creative Repurposing Quotes

There are hundreds of manufacturers always producing dvices that in general do the same things. Since they have slight structural differences if you take one and fool around with it and give it a good kick it will actually do something that it wasn't designed to do. I have this relationship with my synthesizers. I've had them for so long, and I've never had them serviced, so that now practically all of their functions operate differently from what they were designed to do. They do very interesting things now, but that means nobody else can use them either.

For a house, somewhere near Los Angeles I found an old church. Very old, no longer used. So we moved the church to the land, and I took off the steeple, and I got my hands dirty.

A big leather-bound volume makes an ideal razorstrap. A thing book is useful to stick under a table with a broken caster to steady it. A large, flat atlas can be used to cover a window with a broken pane. And a thick, old-fashioned heavy book with a clasp is the finest thing in the world to throw at a noisy cat.

Tile is going to the landfill by the metric ton. All we have to do it gather it up, glue it down to the floor and grout it. Then you have a tile floor, and not just any tile floor: it's a mosaic of your own choosing.

I buy shoes sometimes and use them as bookends. They're too beautiful to wear.

The whole point of American culture is to pick up any old piece of trash and make it shine with more facets than the Hope Diamond.

New ideas must use old buildings

I once received a cape that was made from the little purple bags that Crown Royal Whisky comes in.

When a technology is replaced by another technology, the previous technology either becomes art or it dies.

I'll buy an old jacket and attach gold buttons and a couple royal patches. Or I'll find an old busted sweatshirt, tear out the zipper, and replace it with a $700 zipper. I make things my own.

One of our neighbors is a salami distributor, and they pretty well - I mean, we used their salami to make a rocket engine out of. They just look at us and they're amused, they're fine with it.