Michael Graves Page 13

  35 The Alessi 9093 in its final form. The wings of the bird were swept back, recalls firm associate Donald Strum, to “receive the fingertips.”

  36 Stage set for the Joffrey Ballet, commissioned for a 1982 performance by the choreographer Laura Dean, for which Michael also designed the costumes. In foreground, the easel—a recurring feature of his artwork since the mid-1970s.

  37 A poster for one of Michael’s shows at Max Protetch. The outline of his Sunar chair is visible at left; on the table sits one of the original Alessi “Coffee Tea Piazza” coffeepots. (The image had originally been used as a cover design for Architectural Review in 1981.)

  38 Interior courtyard of the San Juan Capistrano Public Library, 1982

  39 Diane von Furstenberg’s Fifth Avenue storefront, 1984, recently spared destruction by local preservationists

  40 The “Winter” fireplace from Michael’s living room for Charles Jencks in London, 1984. Jencks had originally commissioned a suite of themed rooms from other architects, including Rem Koolhaas; only Michael’s was completed.

  41 Humana’s lobby: forty-five thousand square feet of marble under forty-foot-high ceilings

  42 Humana Building, 1985, seen from the plaza of Mies’s 1969 American Life Building with Harrison & Abramowitz’s 1972 National City Tower at left

  43 Model of the original Whitney scheme from Michael Graves Architect

  44 The second, more moderate Whitney proposal

  45 Third time not a charm: the final, much-reduced Whitney proposal

  46 The model for the Dolphin and Swan Resort, Orlando, 1987

  47 The interior of the Swan, opened in 1990

  48 Engineering Research Center, College of Engineering, University of Cincinnati, 1990

  49 The Fukuoka Hyatt Regency Hotel and Office Building, Fukuoka, Japan, 1990

  50 Denver Public Library, 1991, south elevation

  51 Southwest corner of Denver Public Library—the alternative entrance is in the base of the “Pencil.”

  52 Michael’s sketches for the Target teakettle

  53 Michael’s sketch of the Target toaster, one of the original products included in the 1998 rollout

  54 The Target toaster in its final form

  55 The Washington Monument scaffold by night

  56 St. Coletta of Greater Washington, 2006, a school and physical therapy center for special needs children

  57 Drive Medical shower head, 2005

  58 Stryker Patient Chair, the Michael Graves Design Group’s stand-assist chair

  59 The Stryker Prime TC Transport Chair, released in 2013 and the product of intensive real-world research by the firm

  60 Michael’s drawing for an ideal hospital room, 2009, featuring elements of the Stryker collection

  61 Michael’s upstairs study at the Warehouse. After his disability, it was mostly a repository for furniture and artifacts.

  62 The Warehouse dining room in its final iteration

  63 Wounded Warriors house, one of two completed by the firm in Fort Belvoir, Virginia, 2011

  64 Digital aerial rendering of Michael Graves College in Wenzhou, China

  65 The Painting, also called by Michael Archaic Landscape. He produced countless similar canvases in the last years of his life.

  66 Michael in his home studio at the Warehouse in 2011

  V

  THE GARDEN AND THE MACHINE

  OBLIGATED UNDER MICHAEL’S CONTRACT to spend their first year in Princeton, he and Gail installed themselves in an unassuming faculty-housing block on the shore of Lake Carnegie, a stone’s throw from campus.1 It was in some ways a return to the kind of life they had led in Cincinnati, a little more picturesque but no less humdrum, and after the excitement of their time in Europe it required some readjustment. That might have been so wherever they’d gone. But they hadn’t gone just anywhere.

  It had been nearly half a century since F. Scott Fitzgerald described Princeton University as “the pleasantest country club in America,”2 and at the time of Michael’s arrival Princeton remained perhaps the most insular of the Ivies: close as it was to New York, it was an ivory tower within an ivory tower, an academic citadel in a small town girded by miles of bucolic farmland. Notwithstanding the progressive mood of Kennedy-era America, Princeton in the early 1960s was still a place of nearly pristine conservatism, an attitude that touched almost every department in the school. Its first-ever female graduate student had enrolled only the year prior to Michael’s arrival.3

  And no program was sleepier than architecture. “Stagnant!” Peter Eisenman called it. “No one had been hired there for seventeen years.”4 Few promising design students bothered applying there—Michael hadn’t. The director who recruited him, Robert McLaughlin, was typically rated an affable and capable administrator, though one without a clear vision of what the school, or architecture in general, ought to be. Instead, the dominant presence on the faculty was that of Jean Labatut. The French-born and French-trained Labatut had been in his post since 1928, and his engaged, energetic teaching style made him a favorite among his students (who nicknamed him “Labby”). But his Modernist convictions were grounded more in his own highly refined intuition than in any rigorous theory. “He was very much a rationalist about design,” recalled Robert Hillier, who studied with Labatut in the 1950s and early ’60s. “He didn’t really have any direct influences.”5 If Cincinnati had preached the gospel according to Mies and Harvard the gospel according to Corb, Labatut’s Princeton was a church with no evangel.

  It didn’t even have a chapel. When Michael began teaching, the school did not yet have its own building, sharing a suite of spaces with the Department of Art and Archaeology in and around the Princeton Art Museum. This kind of arrangement wasn’t unusual—Yale’s architecture school had had a similar one for decades—but the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century buildings in which Princeton’s architecture students studied were woefully inadequate. In 1962 the university began work on a new stand-alone facility for the school: designed by the alumnus-led Fisher, Nes, Campbell and Partners, the structure was a charmless midcentury assemblage of glass and brick, but it would add new drawing rooms, offices, preceptor rooms, and more. Dedicated in October 1963, the building was already under construction by the time Michael joined the faculty, and there was a sense that with its completion a different kind of school might emerge.

  This sense of optimism, despite the program’s many flaws, was the appeal of Princeton—and Michael wasn’t the only one who felt it. “I thought if I wanted to go somewhere and do something,” said Peter Eisenman, “I wanted to do it in a place that’s a void.”6 Entirely unaware of what his not-quite-friend from Cambridge and Rome was planning, Eisenman had gone seeking a job at Princeton in the summer of 1962 and had joined the faculty the following year. Each was a little surprised to see the other. “There he was again,” Eisenman recalled. “Third time we’d crossed paths.”

  But this encounter was different. Thrown together into the relative backwater of Princeton, bursting with energy and ideas, the two young architects formed a bond that would become the most significant of either of their careers. “We became instant buddies,” said Eisenman.7 It had only taken them four years.

  PERPETUALLY BOW-TIED, usually clutching a pipe, Eisenman cultivated the image of the tweedy young academic, though the impression was slightly undercut by his puckish, gap-toothed smile. In those early Princeton days, he and Michael spent most working hours and not a few off-hours in each other’s company, with and without their wives. Dinners and cocktails, trips into New York for lectures—and, of course, football games—all became standard fare. Occasionally they even talked about architecture.

  Besides being the only young faculty “for miles,” as Eisenman noted, there was a concurrence in their progress as architects that would not have been the case had the two met for the first time a mere four or five years later. Both had lived abroad, both had worked for major design firms in the States, and neither much wanted to
work in someone else’s studio again. The theoretical side of architecture was already emerging as Eisenman’s demesne, and given Michael’s historical and artistic preoccupations, the two found themselves similarly at odds with the plodding, unimaginative atmosphere that hung about the American design scene at the time.

  Peter Eisenman and Michael at Princeton, 1965

  What Rome had been to Michael, Rowe was to Eisenman.8 The forty-two-year-old Colin Rowe—whom Michael had met in passing at the TAC office, when Eisenman brought his professor there—was a product of London’s Warburg Institute and had become a fly in the academic ointment on two continents, having moved from Cambridge to Cornell the same year Michael came to Princeton. A specialist in the work of the Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio, Rowe had built his reputation discovering links between cultural and architectural developments that spanned centuries, upending prevailing thinking on architectural history and unearthing hidden truths about how Modernist architecture had come into being—and how it might yet be practiced. Recognizing, as he wrote in 1956, that “the idea of modern architecture is a subject of some confusion” (his emphasis), Rowe saw that within and around the movement’s fissures there had grown a smothering orthodoxy, a moralistic regard for formal purity that “threatens to become injurious to [Modernism’s] whole idealization of the future.”9 Rowe’s tutelage had instilled in Eisenman a conviction that Modernism needed to be saved from itself.

  Rowe’s Modernist revisionism differed from Team X’s. The latter called for an architecture of deeper and more complex feeling, while Rowe gestured toward an architecture of deeper and more complex thinking; Team X represented the heart, Rowe, the head. (“He was, in a way, my enemy,” Team X leader Peter Smithson would later say of Rowe.)10 But together, they were part of the same tectonic shift in global architecture. Alone in New Jersey, Michael and Eisenman saw that they were poised to make Princeton a part of the same movement.

  They couldn’t be sure how they were going to do it; if pressed, they would have had to admit they didn’t really know what their new architecture would look like. They agreed that Mies’s Modernism, and the proliferation in American cities of the immaculate glass boxes of the International Style, had unfairly sidelined the true and more vibrant Modernism of Le Corbusier—which could yet be reinvented, if only one applied the right intellectual tools. What those tools were, however, and how they should be wielded, they couldn’t say. Still, nearly from the moment he arrived, Michael felt he was in the right place to figure it out. “I liked it,” he recalled. “I liked the university and what we could do there—what Peter and I could do there—in remaking it.”11

  TEACHING, THEY KNEW, would have to play into their remaking. They had to prove their chops in the classroom if either was to be put in line for a tenured position. Their teaching methods evolved in tandem, as did their commitment to teaching as an integral part of the architect’s craft; unlike many of their most prominent contemporaries, neither Michael nor Eisenman ever put aside pedagogy for practice. It became another part of their friendship, this shared feeling that they were scholar-architects, working both sides of the professional fence.

  Michael’s professorial duties in his first semester were confined to advising graduate thesis candidates, but thereafter they expanded into regular studio courses. In the spring of 1963 he began teaching undergraduate design students. The class—Architecture 204, a GSD-ish, Bauhausian studio—was oversubscribed, and Michael recalled being asked to invite one of his “fancy friends from New York” to teach with him.12 Michael selected Richard Meier, Eisenman’s cousin, with whom he had rekindled his Manhattan friendship following his return from abroad. Meier would stay at Michael and Gail’s house while in Princeton; periodically Michael would stay over at Meier’s New York apartment, sleeping on a spare mattress on the floor. Once, while Meier was out, Michael remembered sneaking over to look at whatever he had up on his drafting boards, and then retracing Meier’s work with his own revisions. Meier accepted them. “Richard was easily influenced,” said Michael.13

  Meier never really got hooked on teaching—not the way Michael did. In his first undergraduate studio course, and in all the studios that followed for the next thirty-eight years, Michael typically taught between fifteen and twenty students, tasking them with the same kind of speculative projects he had carried out under Sert but never exerting so heavy a hand. Julie Hanselmann Davies, a student of Michael’s in later years, spoke of his “singular delight in teaching and being with young people”; he was as happy, perhaps happier, to sit with struggling pupils, poring over their drawings and making minute suggestions, as he was to do anything else in his professional life as an architect.14 Eisenman remembered him as “one of best teachers I know, an encyclopedic memory for what he needed to teach, to draw, to show the diagrams of the buildings he was talking about. He’d just sit there with a roll of paper and give them the design.”15

  Pedagogically, Michael’s studios were less innovative for what they did than what they did not do: they did not, by and large, foist his own architectural prejudices onto his students, as Sert had done. That first semester, one of his students was Peter Waldman, a future associate and friend, who recalled one assignment for which—instead of the tidy boards of his peers—he strung up some of his crumpled sketches, calling it an experiment in texture. Far from chastising Waldman for breaking form, Michael praised his inventiveness and hung his project up beside the rest.16 Another, later pupil, Steven Harris, characterized Michael as “an extraordinary critic, particularly with work very different from his own”; Michael could be unsparing on a jury, but rarely on the grounds that the work failed to conform to his own tastes.17 Especially at the outset of his academic career, when those tastes were still in flux, the Princeton studios were as much a space for him to train his own eye as they were an opportunity to train the eyes of his students. It remained so for as long as he taught, another reason he kept at it despite the distractions of his practice.

  “I wanted them to be self-critical,” Michael would say of his students. “There will be a day I won’t be there to criticize their plans, nor will their colleagues.”18 To back up their critical capacity and to ground their architectural training in a larger body of knowledge, Michael would speak to his students about and encourage them to read the work of theorists and art historians—figures like the humanist cultural philosopher Ernst Cassirer; the scientifically minded art historian Ernst Gombrich; and, in time, Colin Rowe—trying to equip his pupils with the kind of intellectual firepower his own schooling had left out. (When Rowe was briefly a visiting critic at Princeton, Michael assisted him in a graduate design studio and later wrote, “I learned as much or probably more than the students.”)19 Those thinkers, and their ways of seeing and speaking, became part of deskside chats, as well as conversations over lunch and parties and wherever students and faculty mingled around Princeton.

  None of this signaled as such the kind of new direction that Michael and Eisenman were seeking for architecture. The basic outline of design training at Princeton remained—and still remains, everywhere—much the same as it was in the days of the Beaux Arts, with students slaving away on design charrettes (the term comes from the French word for the wheelbarrow in which students’ work was carried) and finishing their models and drawings just in time for a jury that, in Michael’s studio, might include Meier, Eisenman, and other visitors from New York. Michael had found his niche in the academy, though the more intellectually ambitious and more uniquely Gravesian side of his teaching career would not get underway for some years.

  HIS NICHE AS AN ARCHITECT was slower to take shape. But there was progress, however halting: within months of his arrival in Princeton, Michael secured his first independent commission, a house in town for a professor and his wife. Michael had not officially launched his practice, but after his first year in Princeton he and Gail moved into a converted carriage house in Hopewell, New Jersey, about seven miles away, where a spare ro
om acted as his “so-called office,” as he termed it. It was there that he prepared the working drawings for the project.20

  Michael described the house design as “really a box, plus walls that went out,” the suggestion being that these projecting wings served no real programmatic or structural purpose.21 If so, the proposal may have been an opening bid in Michael’s search for meaning: a Modernist box, but with disengaged surfaces that did nothing save announce the building’s presence, the walls operating almost as poetic representations of themselves. (Such a description smacks of the work of Michael’s future colleague John Hejduk.) We can’t be certain, however, as the house was never built, and none of the drawings can be located in the Graves archive. “The university came to the couple,” Michael recalled, “and said, ‘Somebody is leaving, and there’s a house available right now.’” The clients took the empty house rather than have the new one constructed.