Holistic Design Quotes

No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.

I've always thought that design can have equal importance to the idea of internal architecture. Professionally, things can be very dogmatic - you do the architecture, someone else does the interiors, someone else does the furniture, the fabric, etc. But I think design is all-encompassing.

The details are not the details. They make the design.

The word design is everything and nothing. The design and the product itself are inseparable.

To go back to architecture, what's organic about architecture as a field, unlike product design, is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm. Like, we have to design things which are coherent as a single object, but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale.

The Venus Project is not about new cities or new architecture. It's about a way of thinking

The Venus Project is neither Utopian nor Orwellian, nor does it reflect the dreams of impractical idealists. Instead, it presents attainable goals requiring only the intelligent application of what we already know. The only limitations are those which we impose upon ourselves.

The dumbest mistake is viewing design as something you do at the end of the process to 'tidy up' the mess, as opposed to understanding it's a 'day one' issue and part of everything.

The design process is about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers.

Design is the patterning and planning of any act toward a desired, foreseeable end... any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself works, counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life.

It turns out it's not rocket science to design a sacred space.

A building or a town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed in a timeless way. It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it.

While a great many other ideas and measures are of prime importance for the good life of the community, that which concerns its architectural expression is the notion of the community as limited in numbers, and in area... To express these relations clearly, to embody them in buildings and roads and gardens in which each individual structure will be subordinated to the whole - this is the end of community planning.

In order to design buildings with a sensuous connection to life, one must think in a way that goes far beyond form and construction.

Design must be an innovative, highly creative, cross-disciplinary tool responsive to the needs of men. It must be more research-oriented, and we must stop defiling the earth itself with poorly-designed objects and structures.

A great product isn't just a collection of features. It's how it all works together.

Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.

I'm not a mother of children, but I'm a different type of mother where my approach to design is more in line with nature. It's less about dictating and more about editing and listening and allowing something to grow. So I nourish and let the material express what it wants to be.

We've been fighting from the beginning for organic architecture. That is, architecture where the whole is to the part as the part is to the whole, and where the nature of materials, the nature of the purpose, the nature of the entire performance becomes a necessity-architecture of democracy.

This is a fundamental view of the world. It says that when you build a thing you cannot merely build that thing in isolation, but must repair the world around it, and within it, so that the larger world at that one place becomes more coherent, and more whole; and the thing which you make takes its place in the web of nature, as you make it.

I don't divide architecture, landscape and gardening; to me they are one.

Nothing is as dangerous in architecture as dealing with separated problems. If we split life into separated problems we split the possibilities to make good building art.

I'm an interior designer from the soul. It's not about just putting things in a room. It's much deeper and broader. It's about self-discovery.

Could we design an all-glass building with internal channels and networks for airflow and water circulation? Can we surpass the great modern tradition of discrete formal and functional partitions and generate an all-in-one building skin?

Does an architecture to assuage the spirit have a place?