Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context - a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in a environment, an environment in a city plan.
Attributed
designSource: Time magazine, "The Maturing Modern" (cover story on Eero Saarinen), July 2, 1956
This is one of the best-documented Saarinen lines and is consistently traced to the July 2, 1956 Time cover story on him; the wording circulates with only trivial variation ("a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan"). I recall the Time 1956 attribution clearly but cannot confirm page number or exact in-article phrasing from memory, so I am not claiming primary verification. The input text has a typo, "a environment", which is not in the standard wording.