Material Selection Quotes

The tubular steel chair is surely rational from technical and constructive points of view. It is light, suitable for mass production, and so on. But steel and chromium surfaces are not satisfactory from the human point of view.

There is no Sixth Commandment in art. The poet is entitled to lay his hands on whatever material he finds necessary for his work.

My writing is of a very different kind from anything I've heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I'm writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can't write unless that happens ... I don't write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works.

I knew I had the right material and I knew what I was going after.

I see myself stepping more heavily into the producing world. I like having that control, and being in control so to speak, and being part of picking great material and bringing it to life.

I don't like to use expensive materials. I take care to make costs reasonable. It's very similar to the way I make clothes.

As a designer I like to work with fabrics that don't bleed. That's why I avoid all animal skins.

Frank Lloyd Wright made houses right up until the end. I think that's important because it gives you a direct connection to all the basic aspects of architecture - the spatial energy of the place, the construction, the materials, the site, the detail.

I work a little bit like a sculptor. When I start, my first idea for a building is with the material. I believe architecture is about that. It's not about paper, it's not about forms. It's about space and material.

I don't think I'll ever be a producer who's into taking the meetings and fighting the big fights with studios. I really don't like that part. I'm much more interested in the material.

The material I did was lasting material. A lot of people thought I wasn't doing anything, but I was in the studio. The biggest factor is the material you choose. You hunt, you cut.

For me, all the materials and objects I employ come from a specific space that's very personal.

Architecture depends on its time. It is the crystallization of its inner structure, the slow unfolding of its form.

The ideas keep going, you have the material, you cut because there's a limit to the space allowed to you. And the space is limited because of some other constraints that have to do with money or printing or whatever.

Make each product the best it can be. Focus on form and materials. What we don't include is as important as what we do include.

So many young designers are focused on styling rather than materials now. We have to change that.

I choose material instinctually - at the heart of it are characters that I feel are fresh and original, and allow for an opportunity to, I suppose, explore uncharted ground.

Once you start compromising, once you start trying to keep cost lower, this is not luxury. Luxury is wanting the best and using the best materials with which to do that.

Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.

The idealism [in architecture] is in the formal arrangement, the relationship to the city, the use of materials that are available to me. That's where I say our powers are limited.

Learning how to print the lens in layers was not trivial. But once we managed to optimize our materials for each color and understand how to design our layers, getting the focal points of each layer to align properly was the easy part. We can now use what we have learned about optimization to control other optical elements.

The way of architecture is the quiet voice that underlies it and has guided it from the beginning.

I haven't shut any doors, and I'm really open to anything, so I think it's just about the material and what is going to get made.

Choosing the right mask helps you... We went through many masks. It was very particular leather that as soon as you smudged it, you had to get a new one. We went through about 55 masks.

Providing, meaning to a mass of unrelated needs, ideas, words and pictures - it is the designer's job to select and fit this material together and make it interesting.