Michael Graves Read online

As they turned to descend once more the gently sloping stair, one of their hosts explained that the width of the ramp had been fashioned by Michelangelo so that the city’s cavaliere and other distinguished visitors could go up it on horseback. Something about that fact—the specificity of it, the way it revealed the fine grain of history, visible in built form if only one knew where to look—caught Michael’s imagination.

  “I wanted to make sure I knew things like that,” he said. “That they would influence my architecture. That I knew what the meaning was.”5

  It had taken them well more than an hour. Exhausted, the Graveses returned to the Academy at last and went to sleep.

  “NO OTHER CITY offers such a field for study or an atmosphere so replete with the best precedents,” declared the founders of the American Academy in Rome.6 It was true in 1894, when they said it, and it was still true in 1960. By some reckoning it may yet be true today.

  The Academy had begun life as the pet project of a group of prominent American architects and artists who had collaborated on the famed World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. The massive “White City” erected on Chicago’s South Side had brought French-inspired Beaux Arts architecture to America on a grander scale than ever before, touching off a vogue for decorative neoclassicism that its creators—designers such as Daniel Burnham and John Wellborn Root—were eager to sustain. To do so they envisioned a vehicle that could put talented young Americans in touch with the culture of antiquity, right in the very capital of the ancient world.

  Studio number nine at the American Academy in Rome during Michael’s residency. One of his abstract canvases is visible on the wall.

  The program they had in mind was modeled on that of other national academies that had sprouted up in the Eternal City—most especially the French Academy, which had produced some of the most noted practitioners of the Beaux Arts. Modest at the start, the American Academy in Rome struggled in its early years and was saved from insolvency only by a generous benefactor: Charles Follen McKim, a fellow White City architect and a partner in the celebrated firm of McKim, Mead & White. McKim’s patronage extended to designing the first permanent home for the organization. Aligned northeastward toward the city, McKim’s Academy was an idealized Renaissance palazzo, a cousin to his stately buildings for Columbia University in Manhattan but here centered on an elegant cortile and shady portico, with a rambling hillside garden at the rear and a grand carriage entry in front embraced by terraced pavilions.

  Michael’s studio, number nine, was above one of these, on the building’s northern side. The space had direct access to the adjoining rooftop so that he could walk straight out the huge picture window into the open air, sitting alone or with a companion and taking in spectacular views that stretched clear across the city as far as the Villa Medici, home of the French Academy, miles away on the Pincio.7 Any visitors making their way to the American Academy he could hear coming as they crunched along the gravel path, and he could dash down the staircase just outside his studio door to greet them as they arrived in the high-ceilinged forecourt, decorated in first-century spolia and engraved plaques with the names of Academy benefactors including Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and Carnegie. It was a privileged perch, and the best part was that Michael had very little to do except to enjoy it.

  Fellows at the Academy weren’t expected to produce anything in particular during their stay. No final exam would be administered, no more portfolios would have to be submitted to a panel of stone-faced worthies. Michael had even won an additional fellowship to round out the stipend provided to most of the incoming academicians. What he and Gail made of their time in Europe would be entirely up to them.

  There were, however, certain codes and rituals that were more or less obligatory. “Within the first week I was in Rome,” Michael recalled, “the director of the Academy asked us to dress properly, to remember that we were representatives of the US.”8 For the men, shirts and ties would be standard; this was easy enough for Michael, who at the time rarely wore anything else. Beyond that, a certain level of individual activity, and of collective participation, ensured that one remained in the good stead of the administration (and thereby increased one’s likelihood of being asked to stay on for a second year). Group dinners were a central event, and all thirty-odd fellows, working in every kind of scholarly and artistic field, were expected to show up on a near-nightly basis to sit around the long tables in the dining room or in the central courtyard, sharing with their peers whatever exciting new research or boldly avant-garde creative project they were embarked upon at the moment.

  For a person who, at twenty-six, had already earned a Harvard degree and held down demanding jobs at two highly successful design firms, attending a string of splendid Italian dinner parties must have seemed a very attractive proposition. But it wasn’t as clear-cut as that.

  Within the first few days of his arrival, Michael began to get the measure of his new colleagues. In the year he arrived, he was sharing the palazzo on the hill with an outstanding clutch of talent from across the intellectual spectrum. There was John C. Eaton, a composer who would go on to help develop some of the earliest electronic synthesizers. There was John La Montaine, another composer and pianist who had won the Pulitzer Prize for music the year before. There was Richard Brilliant, a historian of art who had just earned his PhD from Yale on Roman painting and sculpture, his dissertation a tour de force of formal analysis that explained how figures in classical art communicated to their audiences by way of gesture. And there was R. Ross Holloway, another classicist who’d gone from summa cum laude at Amherst to a PhD at Princeton—his thesis had been titled “The Elder Turtles of Aegina.”9 To the uninitiated, such as Michael was, the name alone could cause a shudder of incomprehension.

  Michael didn’t know what the Turtles of Aegina were, any more than he knew about Pompeian second-style illusionism or how to compose microtonal music. Fortunately, he knew that he didn’t know. “I realized that these people knew what they were talking about,” he recalled, “that these were very, very smart people, talking about minute conditions of their investigations and so on.”10 At Harvard, when he beheld the worldliness and sophistication of Sert’s other students, he reacted by showing off: he could outdraw them, and he could prove it. But drawing wouldn’t save him at the dinner table at the American Academy. He would have to adopt a different, more cunning strategy.

  In those first nights, he laid out a new plan. “I sat there,” he said, “and I thought, ‘Boy you’ve got to be smart enough, Michael, to be quiet and not say a thing. Don’t reveal what you don’t know yet.’ And I didn’t reveal it. I just listened. For an entire year.”11

  HE LISTENED, AND HE LOOKED. To satisfy the expectation that he do something with his time other than take lunch on the terrace, he began once again to do as he’d done in Broad Ripple Village: he went into the street, and he started to draw.

  He began, necessarily, at a degree of remove from the city. Michael did not yet speak Italian (and only ever acquired an elementary command of it), and life at the Academy tended to be somewhat cloistral, with most of the other fellows spending hour after hour lost in books or working in their studios.12 His colleagues could point him toward major monuments, and the rest he could piece together with guidebooks, but once he made his way beyond the Academy’s tall iron gates, he was essentially on his own.

  In the shade of a portico, on a crowded sidewalk, or in the corner of a teeming piazza, Michael would sit down, still in shirt and tie, and begin to draw [PLATES 3–5]. He might have kept up with the watercolors he had first experimented with at the University of Cincinnati, but opted against it; he did continue the paintings he had begun in his shared Manhattan studio with Richard Meier, and he might have done those outdoors if he chose. (“Corot for his entire life wore a tie to paint,” Michael would point out, and Corot did most of his work en plein air.) But what paintings he completed he did in the privacy of studio number nine, and they were never his primary focus during hi
s time in Rome. For his safaris into the city, his weapons of choice were pen, pencil, and, for the first time, a camera—a clunky old Kodachrome.

  Originally using spiral-bound sketch pads forty by twenty-eight inches, Michael laid down thick washes of ink to create suitably monumental images of the monumental edifices scattered about the city. His style drew on at least one major source: before coming to Rome (and at much greater length after his arrival), he had received some exposure to the Carceri and other architectural etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi. The effect that the Italian achieved with his engravings—the aggressive, high-contrast chiaroscuro that gave his Roman landmarks and cave-like interiors their feeling of amplitude and drama—Michael was able to re-create, to a limited extent, without the complex apparatus Piranesi used to produce his prints.13

  He went everywhere. In front of the Arcibasilica di San Giovanni in Laterano, Michael got down the architect Alessandro Galilei’s solid, palatial facade, capped by the heroic figures of Christ and the Apostles. Just down the hill from the Academy, he executed a perfect sketch of Donato Bramante’s Tempietto of 1502, a tiny rotunda built as a tomb in the courtyard of San Pietro in Montorio; he portrayed it as though semitransparent, showing the full ring of the main colonnade with the balustrade above and the drum of the false clerestory topped by the domed roof. Just up the road, he produced an elevation of the Fontana dell’Acqua Paola, part of the enormous waterworks erected by Pope Paul V in the early seventeenth century to provide water to the city—he included the full inscription on the architrave, though for whatever reason he omitted the portals from which the water jetted. He drew the spindly, winnowing tower of Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, just off the Corso, and the dome of Santa Maria del Loreto. He drew anything and everything that struck his fancy as he trudged in all weather along the hard paving stones of Rome, long before the city’s metro system was large enough to make it of much use.

  More than anyplace else, Michael came again and again to the Forum. In the early 1960s, preservationist measures were not so highly developed as they would become: arches, temples, and stoas that today can only be seen from a safe distance could be walked into and touched. Going wherever he pleased through the deep valley in the heart of Rome, Michael sketched it all. He sat at the base of the Colosseum on its southwestern side, capturing the bold diagonal cut where the original facade shears away to reveal the ruin within; he drew the Forum’s triumphal arches, his lines wavering nervously as though sensing the full weight of the years upon them; and he pictured, in all its half-wrecked gigantism, the Basilica of Maxentius, the last great testament to the old Roman constructive genius before the city fell, in 312 CE, to the Emperor Constantine and his Christian legions from the East.

  WHEN HE RETURNED from these marches through the ancient world, Michael’s routine at the Academy was always the same. He would play a quick game of pool and then head into the Academy library, remaining there until it was time to join the other fellows for dinner. As he put it at the time—in a reference to the popular American television show—he would use his stay in Rome to finally “get smart.”14

  There’s no reliable account as to what he was reading during those long sojourns through the vaulted reading rooms of the Academy. Its holdings on architecture, however, were immense and included volumes (most of them in English translation) that he would cite repeatedly in the years to come. Musty old editions of the great Renaissance theorists Sebastiano Serlio, Leon Battista Alberti, and Giacomo Barozzi da Vignola were all at his fingertips; from these he would learn the nature of the classical orders, the differences between the unadorned Doric, spool-like Ionic, and vegetative Corinthian capitals that topped the columns of the porticos he was seeing all over Rome. He could read Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, the first-century BCE architect and engineer whose Ten Books on Architecture described Roman building practices as they were carried out in the time of Julius Caesar, explaining the proper way to lay out everything from the plumbing system of a private villa to the plan of an entire town. And he could find some of the foundational scholarship that established the history of art and architecture as formal academic disciplines: the writing of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Giovanni Morelli, who spelled out for the first time the fundamentals of connoisseurship, how to date and categorize sculptures and buildings by way of stylistic hallmarks, and how—above all—a work of art can be subjected to visual dissection, revealing the sometimes-hidden messages of its creator.

  In the hours between billiards and pasta, Michael slowly taught himself the history that had been withheld from him at Harvard and at Cincinnati. But the real revelation was still to come.

  “IT MAY PERHAPS yeeld some little encouragement,” wrote Thomas Coryat, “to many noble and generose yong Gallants…to travell into forraine countries, and inrich themselves partly with the observations, and partly with the languages of outlandish regions, the principall meanes (in my poore opinion) to grace and adorne those courtly Gentlemen.”15

  In 1611 Coryat, an English courtier and writer, published a record of his peregrinations through Europe under the title Coryat’s Crudities. It was among the first, arguably the first, full account of what would come to be known as the Grand Tour, that traditional Continental jaunt of aristocrats, dandies, artists, and poets in search of inspiration and adventure abroad.

  Coryat’s chronicle helped touch off a phenomenon. Not just from England, but from France, Germany, and points beyond, the well-moneyed and the well-bred began migrating south and eastward in journeys that could last months or years, adding a final gloss to their education with visits to cathedrals, cemeteries, and scenic sites of sea, lake, and mountain. The itinerary differed depending upon the traveler’s whims and country of origin, but by the mid-1700s its basic contours were fairly well established: the Low Countries, Paris, the Alps, northern Italy, and on to the Mediterranean—the cradle of Greco-Roman civilization, the common heritage of Western Europe a millennium and more after the collapse of the Roman Empire.16

  Well into the twentieth century, this circuit was common practice. Le Corbusier had done a version of it between 1907 and 1911, straying as far as Turkey and the Balkans; Louis Kahn had done the same. Yet two successive world wars had somewhat broken the cultural habit, and the increasing popularity of foreign travel among the postwar middle class—particularly among Americans—tended to stress tourism at the expense of grandeur. No more did patrician treasure hunters scrounge at leisure amid the ruins of Pompeii, pulled along by their cicerones, picking out ancient amphorae to adorn their mantels back home.

  The American Academy, however, had been an outgrowth of that tradition, and many of its fellows still used Rome as a staging ground for expeditions throughout Europe. Michael and Gail determined to do the same. Only more so. “We did our own Grand Tour,” Michael said.17

  Michael’s discoveries in the library were a prime motivating factor: many of the figures whose work he’d encountered there (Winckelmann in particular) had been formed intellectually during their time in Greece and southern Italy. Gail, more game to see the glories of Europe than the towers of Racine, was placed in charge of sorting through the foreign-language travel guides and working out their general route; Michael chimed in with particular sites he wanted to visit and helped gather funds to get them there. His major moneymaking scheme—the reason many of his Rome drawings are lost to us—was to sell them, freshly inked, to passersby for a cool fifty bucks apiece.

  Before beginning in earnest, they started with a brief initial excursion in late January 1961, not planned by themselves: a group trip in company with a few of their colleagues, escorted by one of the senior fellows who sometimes took up temporary positions at the Academy. The trip leader was Max Abramovitz, architectural partner to Wallace K. Harrison, the court favorite of the Rockefeller family. He guided the party up the boot of Italy, stopping in San Gimignano, a town rich in Gothic and Romanesque buildings, before continuing on to Bologna. (Though not usually remembered as the most accomp
lished designer, Abramovitz proved to have excellent taste in restaurants, taking the group to Pappagallo’s, one of the oldest and most extraordinary eating establishments in a town famous for its food.) The rest of the trip, spanning about a week, packed in a full sweep of northern Italy’s most beautiful cities: Padua (Giotto’s frescoes were a highlight), Vicenza (loaded with Palladian villas), Verona, Bergamo, Milan, Viterbo, and more.18

  It was a short trip, and rather rushed. Thereafter, Michael and Gail would break their makeshift Grand Tour into several segments of a couple of weeks or months, taking their time in each town and each country before resuming their residency in Rome. To help stretch their meager funds, they would stay in campsites for twenty-five cents a night, driving as far as three hundred miles in a single day before pitching their tent in the evening and staying as long as they pleased, while hewing to the outline of Gail’s itinerary. For the first of their solo expeditions, in April of that year, they bought a black Volkswagen Beetle and headed south, to the area around Bari and Brindisi. Their objective was Alberobello.

  Gail wrote her mother a postcard the day after their arrival: “Alberobello yesterday and the countryside was very beautiful. Saw fields of red poppies growing wild. The Trulli houses (Mike’s thesis at U.C.) were everywhere you looked.” In her diary she was more frank, confessing that the town had turned out to be more “commercialized” than they’d hoped.

  But the trulli did not disappoint. Seen in person, the distinctive details that marked each hut were easier to make out: the pinnacles at the top of each dome were not extraneous decorations but markers, unique signatures identifying the builders who made them. Some huts were short, some tall; some domes were painted with symbols, some not; some doorways had a straight lintel and others an arch. What was more, seen in a long file down the steep hills or in small groups of two and three in front of a piazza, the trulli formed coherent ensembles, their varying features giving them an almost human quality, like a family gathered together for a festive occasion. Individually they were remarkable, but en masse they formed an ever-changing but unified streetscape, a thousand variations on a theme coming together to create a sense of community [PLATE 7].