Michael Graves Page 15
So far as the two friends were concerned, it seemed that karmic justice had been done. Eisenman had been denied a lifetime academic sinecure, but Michael still had no work as an architect. In his office, Michael painted a large, de Kooning–esque mural that fit snugly into the steep gable of the annex space, creating a rather grand focal point for what was otherwise a most ungrand workspace. In it, with so little in the way of architecture work to do, Michael had time to continue painting—not just the aggressive brushwork and “all-over” canvases of his Abstract Expressionist years, but increasingly more Cubist-inspired paintings, the patches of color bigger, juxtaposed collage-style, the palette lightening from brooding reds and oranges into pellucid blues and whites, closer to the creamy look of Morandi. The Italian artist, along with the Cubists Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso, were occupying more of Michael’s thoughts; a young student named Peter Carl, later an associate in the studio, recalled his first conversation with Michael as being about “rotated squares in Cubism.”46
Art seemed always on his mind. Books on Édouard Vuillard, Renaissance altar-pieces, medieval diptychs, Henri Matisse—he riffled through them all, dog-eared them, marked pages with slips of paper. But what did all these murky historical ponderings have to do with architecture, or making architecture more “meaningful”? Michael couldn’t prove that it did, since he hadn’t built anything. Until, remarkably, he did.
ALL THROUGH THE YEARS they’d spent in Cincinnati, Cambridge, New York, and Rome, among the few Indianapolis acquaintances with whom Gail and Michael had stayed in contact were their old friends Lois Hickman and Jay Hanselmann. Now married to each other, they too had gotten out, having left Broad Ripple Village for Los Angeles. Unlike Gail and Michael, they had then gone back, at least part of the way, returning to Indiana and settling in Fort Wayne, where Jay had taken a job with the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company. Michael had kept his former girlfriend and former football teammate abreast of his progress, telling them tales first of Roush and then of Rome, later of Eisenman and Princeton. The Hanselmanns had always thought that if they had the chance, they would ask him to design a house for them, and their return to Indiana afforded just such an opportunity. They had acquired an undeveloped one-acre property to the southwest of Fort Wayne, and they asked Michael if he thought he could put together a tentative proposal.
Michael first requested that the family write up a program—“not what we wanted, but the way we lived,” Lois recalled.47 Jay was a classical music fanatic; Lois was a weaver; their daughters, Jennifer and Julie, were taking ballet lessons. The family on The Brady Bunch had a patio, and nine-year-old Julie asked for one too (even spelling it right, to her enduring pride).48 Michael worked up a scheme that included a studio for Lois, space for Jay’s hi-fi, a practice room for the girls, and not just one patio but several outdoor areas. The family had a budget of exactly $40,000, no more. It would have to cover materials, permits, the contractors, and the architect’s fee.
On a visit to Princeton, Jay and Lois Hanselmann were treated to a lengthy presentation of Michael’s initial plan, complete with a slide show that brought together Le Corbusier, Picasso, Rome, and all the inklings and insights he’d been storing up for years. His design took as its starting point two touchstones of his Grand Tour: Athens and Alberobello.
“His first presentation was of two separate small buildings,” Lois recalled, “one for Mama and Papa and the other for the kids.” Using Le Corbusier’s crisp, white geometries and strip windows, Michael created a trulli village for the twentieth century, the two disengaged buildings related to each other in form but distinct as befit their respective inhabitants. The smaller, foregrounded building would also act as a gatehouse—a processional entrée to the main structure behind it, echoing the propylaea of the Acropolis that stood before the Parthenon. Both of these historical precedents Michael cited to defend his multibuilding scheme—to no avail, as Jay and Lois were anxious to keep costs low and to keep themselves and their four children (the girls had a pair of brothers) under the same roof.49
Over the next year, Michael set up a small satellite office to work up the final construction documents, spending a few days at a time in Fort Wayne while the Hanselmanns put the project out to bid with local contractors. They were alarmed to find that the lowest estimate came in $8,000 above their stated maximum. Walking into Michael’s studio, Lois gave him the bad news.
“We just don’t have the money,” she remembered telling him.
Michael, who rarely ever raised his voice (least of all at his friends), resorted to actual shouting: “Lois,” he begged, “be resourceful!”
His combativeness paid off. Lois got resourceful. Discussing the matter at length with Jay, she decided that the couple would act as their own general contractors, building the house by themselves with the help of a few subcontractors. The do-it-yourself method would, they estimated, run them $39,000, within a hairbreadth of their price ceiling but feasible if all went well. Neither husband nor wife had any experience whatsoever in building a house, but they forged ahead, heedless of pitfalls.
They started with an actual pitfall, a large ditch that prevented the backhoe from entering the site. “The first thing Jay and I had to do was put in these two twenty-foot, thirty-six-inch-diameter culverts,” Lois remembered, channeling and covering the gap. “We rolled them in, and they were perfect.” The date was October 6, 1969, Lois’s thirty-fifth birthday.
What ensued was a seemingly interminable cavalcade of harrowing near misses, lucky breaks, and heart-wrenching setbacks. Building a house on one’s own while raising four children was not perhaps a thing that any two sane people, however “resourceful,” should seriously have contemplated. But that is what the Hanselmanns had bitten off, and for nearly two years, that is what they chewed. As Lois later admitted, “We were pretty dumb.”
“It was Murphy’s Law,” she continued. The Teamsters went on strike, and Jay and Lois had to drive to Wisconsin to pick up the windows. Before they had a chance to install them, a subcontractor insisted on putting in the siding first, allowing rainwater to seep in. They hired a subcontractor to hang the Sheetrock, only to have him quit on the spot, refusing to work without proper scaffolding; they had to hang it themselves. They hired still another subcontractor to pour the concrete; he didn’t like the steel joists, and he quit as well. And then there were the floors. The house was to have oak flooring on the first and second levels, and Jay laid it down expertly around the columns of Michael’s open plan, with Lois crawling along behind him to apply the varnish. (“When I put my jeans in the washer,” she remembered, “they came out with the knees bent.”) Everything looked perfect—until they turned the heat on.
“All the boards shrank,” said Lois. Jay had to start all over, sanding down the planks and refitting them as best he could.50
The children, meanwhile, thought all of this was a grand adventure. “My mom put all of us to work,” said Julie. She and her siblings were charged with putting the flags in during the surveying, sweeping up the site at the end of the workday, and doing whatever other odd jobs could keep them busy while their parents continued to build.51 From time to time, Michael would come by and stay at the Hanselmanns’ temporary home nearby; on one visit, he brought along his daughter, Sarah, who promptly got stuck in a tree and had to be helped down by her father. The episode lowered her stock in the eyes of the very self-sufficient Hanselmann children but raised their already lofty esteem for Michael, the “exotic” and “cosmopolitan” easterner in their midst, whom their parents claimed, dubiously, was really a simple midwesterner like them.
Even in the most difficult moments, Lois said, “I was never mad at Michael,” saving her spleen for the inept hired hands who came and went.52 When it was all over, they awoke from their nightmare to find themselves at last in their dream house, a dream as much Michael’s as their own.
With the multibuilding arrangement jettisoned, the house does not read—at least at first—as anything la
den with meaning or reference, presenting instead a flat white front in the conventional Corbusian manner, albeit interrupted by horizontal bands of varying configurations and by a projecting stair and bridge leading to a second-floor entrance [PLATES 11 AND 12]. Only as one begins moving inward, channeled along that very prominent gangway, does the logic of the house begin to disclose itself.
As Julie Hanselmann Davies wrote years later, the house unfolds over several layers, as though one were presented not with a building but with a succession of paintings—or as if one were looking at a single, highly involuted painting, like a work of Cubist collage, peeling it back one stratum at a time.53 After that initial impression of stair and facade, the next layer in the sequence opens up as the visitor enters the house on the second floor, alighting directly in the Hanselmanns’ living room. Dead ahead is a twenty-foot-long mural, painted by Michael himself, a riot of color and swirling shapes that makes literal the building’s dedication to artistic collage: occupying the whole rear wall of the room, it represents a terminus of the linear procession. It is not, however, the last of the house’s highly composed visual moments, which appear again at intervals—both upstairs in the parents’ bedroom and study as well as downstairs around the children’s rooms and play space.
Many of the subtler details of the design, its jumbled asymmetries and irregular windows, could be considered simply for effect. Recollecting Sert’s teaching (“animate the facade!”), Michael’s painterly tactics were sometimes deployed here for no better purpose than to keep things interesting. But the liberties he took with Le Corbusier went further than that.
Above all there is the use of color. Corb advocated polychromy in architecture for its “psychological and physiological effects,” as the scholar Barbara Klinkhammer observed.54 Michael plainly recognized color’s power to alter the mood of a space, but atmospherics are not the primary aim of the Hanselmann painting program. Progressing through the house’s successive strata, Julie Hanselmann Davies described how color added narrative to each one in turn:
The blue spandrel on the entry facade is a reference to the stream that flows through the site. The same blue is repeated on the top floor, as a gently curved shelf parallels the stream and recalls its path [PLATE 13]. The soffit of the upstairs skylight is painted a bright yellow, warming the light and recalling the sun. The powder room on the main floor is painted a vivid green, a tongue-in-cheek reference to a bush, behind which one could find a private moment. The closet behind the master bed is a painted haystack.55
Most dramatically, there is Michael’s mural [PLATE 14]. The attentive viewer could pick out a tablecloth, trees, a garden, the head of the family cat, and the angles and curves of the house itself encrypted in the loose, painterly composition.
False windows, windows between rooms, a window frame on the rooftop terrace looking out to the landscape—the house is freighted with references to its own condition, its own uses and organization, engaging its inhabitants in an ongoing dialogue that changes with every point of view, every framed encounter. Michael had always complained that much of Modernist design didn’t speak to him. Here was a Modernism that was trying to speak.
This, Michael’s first commission, was an attempt to reinvigorate Le Corbusier’s pure, abstract language of “masses brought together in light” using the formal techniques of art—of Cubist painting specifically—to furnish a narrative about the house, about the site, and about the family who lived there. Whether it said what it meant to, or whether anyone understood it, would be a question that would preoccupy Michael for years to come. But for all of its intricacies and aspirations, and whatever its failings, real or perceived, for the family that occupied it the house was an extraordinary place to live. The Hanselmanns divorced some years later and have long since moved away, but Lois still returns on occasion to visit. “Living there was the most amazing time in my life,” she said. “I cry every time I go back.”56
OVER THE NEARLY TWO YEARS between the Hanselmann commission’s beginnings and its groundbreaking in Fort Wayne, much had happened to transform Michael’s practice in Princeton. New work, new opportunities, and new responsibilities at the university had taken him from a sole practitioner to the proprietor of a tiny but bustling office, as well as the rising star—absent the now-departed Eisenman—of the School of Architecture faculty.
Having granted him his tenured position, Dean Geddes had become an active partisan on Michael’s behalf. As early as 1966, he’d recommended Michael for a proposed master plan of the town of Oyster Bay, New York, on the North Shore of Long Island. “I spent a lot of time, made presentations,” recalled Michael; his efforts came to nothing, and the project was shelved.57 Geddes had also been instrumental in helping Michael get a small commission for a nature and science museum in New Jersey’s Watchung Mountains. The client, apparently objecting to Michael’s elaborate color scheme and artfully arranged windows, “drew a red line” through the plan (as Caroline Constant recalled), and when the project was finally completed years later, it bore little resemblance to the intended design.58 Nonetheless, Geddes allowed Michael to exhibit his original scheme in a small exhibition at the school.59
Also in 1966 the Newark Museum asked Geddes to recommend three architects for the institution’s planned expansion, and Michael’s name was at the top of the list. Museum director Sam Miller and the trustees gave him the nod, and he spent the next year and change working up a multicomponent scheme that featured an amphitheater, passerelle galleries surrounding outdoor sculpture gardens, and more. By 1968 the city of Newark was wracked by riots and a major donor had died, leaving the institution in no position to move forward with construction. Still, Michael’s proposal was included in a MoMA show on new museums, his second appearance there in as many years, and the Newark Museum—and Miller—would go on to become one of Michael’s most loyal and longest-running clients. The firm would design a number of small renovations, one major addition, and several more master plans over the next forty-plus years.
Meanwhile, there was more built work. Paul Benacerraf, a Princeton philosopher of mathematics who had been at the university since 1960, owned a gracious Tudor-style house not far from campus, part of a row of nearly identical homes on Broadmead Street. He had become acquainted with Kenneth Frampton, who had taken up a full-time post at Princeton after his initial introduction to the school via CASE. During what Frampton called “a casual conversation,” the architectural historian happened to hear that the philosopher was considering building an addition. “Why don’t you think of Michael Graves?” asked Frampton, thus bringing about Michael’s second residential commission.60
The Hanselmanns’ grindingly slow construction process meant that the Benacerraf House was the first to be completed, wrapping up work in 1969. Completely invisible from the street, the extension springs from the rear facade, occupying a good portion of the backyard. Taking up the basic stylistic trappings of Hanselmann, it is still more vexed in composition, more eager to express its narrative content, and while ostensibly an homage to Le Corbusier’s villas of the 1920s—their Mediterranean airiness implausibly relocated to central New Jersey—the project exhibits an ever more willful symbolism, seeping further into its disparate formal elements.
Most of its area consists of a series of outdoor terraces, wrapping around and perched atop a glazed volume that shelters expanded living spaces for the family. But both that and the outdoor spaces themselves are secondary to the disengaged elements that spin around them: a giant L-shaped steel bar, painted bright yellow; a beam on the southern facade, painted bright green; and a retaining edge, a thick blue column turned on its side. All reference elements of sun, garden, and sky, in an effort to fuse house and environment. Its most theatrical gesture is a ripple in the upper portion of an unglazed faux window above the southern-facing terrace: acting in part as a sunshade, its wavy outline deliberately mimics the shape of clouds or trees [PLATE 15]. Still in line with Cubist aesthetics, and still basically Corbusian
in character, it is a moment of deliberate humor, representational rather than abstract and best appreciated when viewing the house straight on from the outside.
Michael’s most promising unrealized commission of the late 1960s was for a client who signified, and not just in Michael’s view, the absolute last word in establishment credibility: the Rockefeller family. How precisely this opportunity came to him is not entirely clear, though by general consensus the likeliest vector was a figure many years Michael’s senior—and later a major player in his career—the Zelig-like architect and impresario Philip Johnson.61 Johnson was aware of Michael as a bright young entity on the Princeton staff, and through his long-standing relationship with the Rockefellers (on whose behalf he had designed a Manhattan guest residence in 1950) he would have known that they were contemplating an additional house on their compound in Pocantico Hills, New York. Nelson Rockefeller’s son Steven was a Princeton alumnus, and Michael may have seemed a logical recommendation, especially given the Rockefellers’ extensive patronage of new American architecture.
Their faith in Michael did not last long. His design for the Rockefeller house tuned the tactics of his previous two houses to an even higher volume, amplifying them to the scale of the much larger house (and its much bigger budget). A gaping open portal on the facade telegraphed an internal entry court, curved surfaces mimicked the slope of the hillside site, and a raised canopy and sculpted balustrades signaled the presence of an enormous rooftop deck. The scheme was a very busy one, indeed—too busy for the Rockefellers, who were not sold on Michael’s claims that all these features served as communicative motifs. They pulled the plug on the project.
There wasn’t much opportunity to mourn it, or much reason to. Between ongoing projects, prospective projects, and teaching, Michael already had his hands full, to the point that he now required other hands. For his earliest competition proposals he’d collaborated with Eisenman, but that was out of the question now; in any case, what he wanted was not a design partner but people who could attend to the technical nitty-gritty that had never been his forte. And so he began to assemble a small band of associates, mostly culled from the ranks of favored graduate students, many of whom would cycle in and out of the office in the following years as their academic and professional careers (and, occasionally, their personal relationships with Michael) evolved.