Michael Graves Read online

  They caught the ferry from Brindisi and went to Greece, driving all over the country. They saw Athens and the Acropolis. Michael got his first glimpse of the Parthenon he had drawn as a high school student.

  From Greece they headed to Turkey. They had been told that exchange rates for Turkish currency were more favorable on the black market on the Greek side of the border, but while Michael was negotiating for lira a group of women surrounded Gail as she stood by the VW.

  “One woman was holding a baby about ten months old,” Gail remembered. “They indicated that I should take the baby, and the woman put the baby in the back seat on top of our tent and blankets.” Shaking her head, frantically trying to wave the women off, Gail hurriedly removed the infant from the vehicle and returned it to its mother. Apparently shocked at her ungracious refusal of the proffered gift, the women instead asked if they could take some of Gail and Michael’s belongings from the car as recompense. The Americans sped off as fast as they could.19

  After Turkey, the Balkans. “We were warned not to go to Yugoslavia because the roads were terrible and sometimes impassable, but we decided to try,” Gail recalled. The advisory was spot on: the Byzantine churches and monasteries they were looking for were hopelessly out of reach. Instead, said Gail, “We decided to stick to the coast and drive through the country that way.”20

  In Greece they had begun to notice a faint hostility coming their way from some of the locals, and it sharpened measurably in Yugoslavia. Slowly they pieced together the reason: in lands only fifteen years earlier occupied by the Nazis, here they were driving a German-made car. As a countermeasure, they put signs in the front and back windows reading “USA.” It helped—somewhat.

  “The car was stoned once as we passed through mountains in Yugoslavia,” said Gail. “We also had a very unpleasant stop by military with guns pointed at us. They made Michael get out of the car and clean off the headlights again and again.”21

  Their final night, in the Croatian coastal town of Split, turned into a fiasco. Situated right on the edge of the sea, their campsite was struck hard by a gale-force rainstorm during the night that almost destroyed the couple’s tent. “It was off season,” said Gail, “but there were bungalows at the campsite and a caretaker. Even though we begged to be allowed in one of the bungalows he refused to open the door.” They slept in the car instead. By the time they woke up, the caretaker—repenting, presumably, the impolitic treatment he’d shown the smartly dressed and potentially well-connected young people from the West—did the only decent thing: “He begged us not to complain to the authorities,” said Gail.22 After a month on the road, she and Michael hurried back to Italy, happy to return to their home away from home.

  THEY STAYED PUT for a few months and then continued on their Grand Tour. In early September they set out for southern France. They saw the fortified town of Carcassonne and the scenic ruins at Arles, as well as a few spots of more niche interest: Le Corbusier’s Unité d’habitation, the 1952 apartment complex in Marseille that was the closest realization of the master’s urban vision. Michael captured its chunky, lumbering pilotis and sculptural details in heavily applied pencil, making it appear less like a building and more like a layering of abstract, irregular geometries jockeying for space on the page [PLATE 8].

  Making their way westward, they headed for Spain. In Barcelona, Michael sketched the still-incomplete Sagrada Familia and Casa Batlló of Antoni Gaudí, giving the latter a seasick, frenzied expression that recalled the contemporary landscape-cum-portraits of Willem de Kooning. Michael’s eye for painterly forms and contrast was equally visible in his Kodachrome photos in Italy, which sometimes focused on surfaces and details to a degree that was almost abstract. As time wore on, however, he took fewer and fewer pictures, relying on his hand alone to capture all that he and Gail were seeing. “You only really remember things,” Michael would often say, “when you draw them.”23

  From Catalonia, the couple drove across the Iberian peninsula, trying to make it all the way north to Santiago de Compostela, but the roads were washed out because of heavy late-summer rains. Back they went to Rome for another five months of dinners and library visits.

  THE “THIRD TRIP WAS our last ‘big’ one,” recalled Gail. Leaving Rome the first week of May 1962, they covered an enormous swath of Central Europe: St. Gallen, Einsiedeln, Zurich, and Basel in Switzerland; Colmar and Strasbourg in France. Someone broke into their car in Paris. In danger of running out of money, they had to skip Austria.

  They crossed the channel into England and hit London, Oxford, Bath, Stonehenge, and Salisbury Cathedral. By June 11 they were in Brussels: “Weather so miserable we decided to cut Amsterdam and head for Cologne,” Gail wrote in her diary, but they got to Germany only to be foiled again—“Our guidebooks are so old that we wasted much time seeking churches, chateaus, etc., only to find them in ruins after the war.” They did manage to take in Speyer Cathedral, Schoenberg Church, and the pilgrimage church of Marienkapelle in Würzburg, Germany. “By accident we drove through the tip of Austria and then back into Germany.”

  After nearly two months and thousands of miles, they turned the VW southward again, heading back to Rome, their Grand Tour complete.

  LOOKING BACK DECADES LATER, Michael would say that when he arrived in Europe, he “was not somebody who was wholly, how shall I say it, conversant with the idea of urbanity.” Indianapolis, he said, “was no place.” (Indian-no-place, he sometimes called it.)24 Cambridge and New York had given him some taste of the world beyond Broad Ripple Village and Cincinnati, but in his own view, it was Rome that made him the designer, and the individual, he became.25

  Those who knew him before and after sensed the change Europe made in him. “His time in Rome,” Richard Meier would speculate, had “some kind of profound influence on everything that happened after.” (“He started using Italian phrases,” Meier added. “He never did that before.”)26 Lois Rothert remembered the talented boy from Indy as one whose “grasp of architecture only went to some level.” When she saw him again afterward, he wasn’t just drawing buildings, but talking about them; the difference, she said, was “those two years in Rome.”27 “That was when my mom said he changed and buckled down and became more focused,” recalled Sarah Stelfox, Michael and Gail’s daughter. “She noticed a new push to succeed.”28

  It is at this juncture that any thought of returning to Indianapolis receded permanently from Michael’s mind. His expectations had been raised as much by the glamour of the experience—how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm once they’ve seen Saint Peter’s?—as by the caliber of his colleagues. At the Academy, unlike at Harvard, he met people of origins no less humble than his own who had excelled in their chosen fields. “We were there,” said Richard Brilliant, himself the son of a Jewish immigrant, “because we were smart.” Another art historian at the Academy, the Bronx-born Donald Posner, was the first in his family to receive a college degree, not from Harvard or Yale, but from Queens College.

  With examples like these before him, returning to the Midwest would have mortified Michael’s already vulnerable pride. But as throughout his life, the chemistry between his personal and his creative aspirations formed an unusual compound. His deep-felt need to compete with others was now seconded by a nascent conception of how he might get ahead in that other, larger competition—his “competition with architecture.”

  What revealed itself to him in Italy, both in what he was seeing and what he was reading, was not the “space value” he’d claimed to be in search of when he’d applied. It was what had been missing in the architecture of Modernism as he’d received it: the capacity to communicate. Mies’s chaste spatial and structural phenomenology had always registered to him as obtuse; Le Corbusier, though infinitely more adaptable, clung to a geometric order just slightly too Platonic to enunciate explicit ideas or narratives. In contrast, one could look at the facade of the Arcibasilica di San Giovanni in Laterano and, armed with a little history, apprehend not just i
ts functional hierarchy—how to enter it, how the inside is divided into nave and side aisles—but its spiritual hierarchy as well, the centrality of Christ and the nature of the Holy Trinity. The imperative that Michael first felt on the steps of the Capitoline on his first night in Rome, to “know what the meaning was,” was becoming the guiding principle of his thinking, an architectural idea not divorced from, but inextricably part of, the architectural image that his eye and hand could readily fabricate, thanks to his outstanding visual acuity.

  Much trial and error would be necessary before he found a way to realize, to his own satisfaction, his sought-after sense of meaning. But the goal was now in sight, and it would be the animating objective of his career from here on—whatever the consequences. In time, this dream would crowd out not just any thought of Indianapolis (too small a sphere by far to accommodate it) but many other prospects, other paths, that would periodically run parallel with its pursuit, pushing Michael always onward toward an architecture that “speaks of its accessibility,” in Peter Eisenman’s words, even if that meant eschewing architecture’s power “to speak of its own ‘sacred realm.’”29

  FROM GAIL’S DIARY:

  March 17, 1961. Climbed to top of the Pantheon. [A classicist from Bryn Mawr, T. Robert S.] Broughton took a group from the Academy. He obtained permission for us to climb to the top, go out on the exterior of the dome and at end [sic] crawl up on hands and knees to peek over the edge and down into the interior [PLATE 6].30

  For both Michael and Gail, the greatest pleasure of their time in Rome was always Rome itself. Having secured their second year there, the two finally felt comfortable joining in the conversation at the Academy’s nightly dinners, and they might happily never have left, spending every evening of their lives chatting away in the late southern twilight and every afternoon basking on the terrace with the whole of Rome at their feet. “Nothing was more interesting than the city,” Michael would say. “I can’t stress that enough.”31

  His drawings had changed during his time there. He had become good friends with another academician, the painter Lennart Anderson, who had advised him that by doing his drawings in such a large format and by resting his paper flat on the sidewalk, Michael was unable to look at the buildings as he drew them and was missing their proper proportions and perspective; Michael switched to smaller sketchpads.32 Anderson also had a pronounced disregard for Abstract Expressionism or for any artists, even figurative ones, whose canvases were too loosely constructed. Looking at one painting cluttered with thousands of stray lines, he turned to Michael and said, “Well, I’m sure one of ’em’s right.”33

  Anderson’s critique chimed with other visual stimuli that had by then floated into Michael’s ken: the wall drawings at Pompeii, the deftly composed still lives of Giorgio Morandi, and still more of the work of Picasso and his Cubist compatriots Georges Braque and Juan Gris, all of them less inclined toward pure abstraction than their latter-day American counterparts. Though evidently familiar with most of their work by the time he left Rome, he would not begin to register much of their influence for a while, though there was a slight reduction in the “hairy,” labored quality of his streetside drawings.

  Besides his artistic busking, Michael found other means to support his Grand Touring. In the summer of 1961, he picked up some work in the Rome offices of Walter Gropius’s TAC. The project he spent most of his time on was student housing for the University of Baghdad, part of Gropius’s master plan for the school’s campus. Michael’s only memorable encounter with the august founder of the Bauhaus was a sternly issued proviso that Michael not make the men’s and women’s dormitories “so close together that they could put a board over from one roof to the other and sleep together.” “Ve don’t vant to be responsible for any babies,” Gropius said.34

  More memorable was the afternoon when he was working in the office and two men stopped in: the British architectural historian and theorist Colin Rowe and his prize pupil at Cambridge, Peter Eisenman. “Michael remembered seeing us in our white shirts, white shorts, and long white socks, like people out of the 1920s, dancing into the Graves purview,” Eisenman recalled. Michael recognized him from their acquaintance back in Cambridge, said hello, and they went out for drinks. It was their second meeting, but it proved as inconclusive as the first, and the two lost touch immediately afterward.35

  By the time of Michael and Gail’s last sweep through the Continent in the spring of 1962 they were already looking ahead to their return to the United States. A position had recently been made available at Princeton University School of Architecture, and one of Michael’s colleagues at the Academy was a Princeton English professor on sabbatical. He encouraged Michael to apply, writing him a letter of recommendation and advising him that the current faculty of the school could make use of someone of Michael’s youth and energy. “They’re all tired,” he said. “You might give them a lift.”36

  Michael had received an offer from George Nelson to rejoin his firm as a junior partner, but it would have meant working in conjunction with Gordon Chadwick, whom Michael did not care for. The pull of New York was still powerful, but Princeton responded to his application with an attractive offer and wooed him further by making the case that he could easily commute to the city from New Jersey whenever he pleased, becoming a Princeton professor but a New York architect. Convinced, he took them up on the offer, accepting a position as a lecturer on a limited-term contract beginning in the fall semester of 1962.

  1 A model of Michael’s “Amenable Shelter” proposal, prepared for his undergraduate thesis, 1958

  2 An early Graves abstraction, circa 1960

  3 Michael drawing on the streets of Rome, 1962

  4 Among the most accomplished sketches of his Rome years, Michael’s drawing of Bramante’s Tempietto of 1502

  5 The Basilica of Maxentius, completed in 312 CE, sketched by Michael in 1960. Visitors can just barely get this close today, as fencing surrounds the site.

  6 “Nothing mattered as much as the city.…” Rome from the top of the Pantheon, photographed by Michael, March 1961

  7 One of Michael’s photos of the trulli houses, taken April 1961

  8 Le Corbusier’s 1952 Unité d’habitation in Marseilles, as rendered by Michael in September 1961

  9 One of Michael’s early presentation sketches for the Jersey Corridor proposal. The casual diagram with its simple declaratory text is unmistakably Corbusian.

  10 The final Jersey Corridor scheme, sketched by Anthony Vidler, 1965

  11 The first “layer”: the approach to Hanselmann

  12 Elevation of the Hanselmann House, 1967, on what would become Michael’s signature yellow trace paper

  13 A river—in the form of a blue banister—runs through Hanselmann’s third floor, one level above the entrance.

  14 Inside Hanselmann, Michael’s mural, the house’s visual centerpiece and narrative master key

  15 Benacerraf House, south facade. Note the cloudlike cutaway on the terrace, also suggestive of the treeline beyond.

  16 Alexander House, 1971

  17 Snyderman House, 1972

  18 Snyderman’s second-floor landing, a riot of overlapping frames

  19 One of the series of murals Michael produced for Gwathmey’s Transammonia offices, featuring the repeated cornice motif

  20 Claghorn House, 1974

  21 Schulman, garden facade

  22 Interior living room of Schulman, with fireplace as built

  23 Monumental image: the dramatically classicized Crooks fireplace drawing

  24 Yellow trace elevation of the Crooks House main facade

  25 A “referential sketch”: an imaginary temple by the eighteenth-century visionary Jean-Jacques Lequeu, from Michael’s 1977 maroon sketchbook

  26 Plocek House, 1977, as completed in 1982

  27 Interior section drawing of the original Warehouse scheme, 1977

  28 Fargo-Moorhead Bridge, south elevation

  29 The cover for a specia
l 1979 edition of Architectural Digest on the Roma Interrotta exhibition. The illustration was created by Michael; all twelve contributors were featured in its central panel.

  30 “A Case for Figurative Architecture”: Michael’s sketches for the Portland Building referenced the human body and classical motifs in countless configurations.

  31 Portland as it appeared after the installation of the “Portlandia” statue in 1985

  32 Michael Graves Architect’s Los Angeles showroom for furniture brand Sunar

  33 Dressing table for Memphis—a building for the boudoir

  34 From an early 1980s volume of the maroon sketchbooks, some early versions of the Alessi teakettle, with both squared and rounded handles