Michael Graves Read online

  Among the first were Peter Waldman and Peter Carl; in the ensuing years, they would be followed by Bruce Abbey, Caroline Constant, Robert Carey White, and others. The mood around the office was freewheeling, congenial: “He’d get a pound or two of spaghetti and some white clam sauce,” recalled Waldman, and the young designers would eat together and talk about art, architecture, and theory, a re-creation of Michael’s Rome days around the tables at the American Academy.62 During these early years, his associates’ influence on Michael was every bit as important as his influence on them; Peter Carl, in particular, would expose Michael to the writings of philosophers like Gaston Bachelard and the architecture historian Joseph Rykwert.63 They were not just employees but colleagues—though he did at least make a token effort to pay them, along with the rent on the little studio on Nassau Street. Already, Michael could see that if he wanted to keep building, he would have to be not just a good architect but a savvy businessman.

  AS RAPIDLY AS HIS PRACTICE had been changing, the alteration in Michael’s personal affairs had been even more precipitous. Among the closest friends Gail had made in Princeton was Lucy James, a former dancer and widowed mother of two daughters nearly the same age as the Graves children. The women were a study in contrasts: Gail, medium in stature, maintained the self-effacing sincerity of her Broad Ripple Village days, though seasoned now by travel and culture; Lucy was tall, and by all accounts much earthier and more assertive in her opinions. Born in Virginia to a wealthy doctor, she was employed following her husband’s death as a social worker, managing a low-income housing development near the university known as Princeton Community Village.

  In view of the strains in Michael and Gail’s marriage, a reemergence of the adolescent romantic whom his friends had called “François” was perhaps only a matter of time. The negative example of his father’s boozy indiscretions might have afforded some conditioned restraint, but that had largely worn off by this point, and although it was—in Michael’s account, anyway—Lucy who pursued him, the history of the male Graveses demonstrates a definite susceptibility.

  Whatever the case, Michael found himself drawn to her, and his marriage to Gail swiftly unraveled. That it unraveled as quickly as it did was in part because, as was immediately apparent, Michael and Lucy’s was no fleeting passion: they had fallen in love. “We were very much alike verbally,” recalled Michael. “We liked humor and playing jokes on each other.”64 Feeling a kinship that he hadn’t known he’d missed, Michael was, as he put it, “hooked.”65 He moved in with Lucy, divorcing Gail in 1969.

  The year is worth noting. Michael and Gail were a long way from the Midwest of the early 1950s. The world around them had changed, and they had changed too. Michael was now on the rise professionally, and Lucy’s openness and energy resonated with his growing self-confidence; here, he thought, was a partner for his new life as a major East Coast architect. But the changes were not Michael’s alone. Following the divorce, Gail left Princeton, taking Sarah and Adam with her and moving them to Cambridge, where she had lived a decade before. She might have been intimidated by it then, but she wasn’t any longer. She chose it, Sarah recalled, “because she loved it.”66

  In declaring, as he sometimes did, that Gail was a shade too impassive, a shade too self-contained—in short, a shade too Broad Ripple—Michael perhaps revealed more about his own desires and anxieties than he did about his wife’s. Gail, meanwhile, had come into her own, and she demonstrated both her good nature and her newfound sense of empowerment in how she handled the separation.

  “They had, to my mind, a very amicable breakup,” said Sarah. “I never heard either say anything bad about the other.”67

  LUCY AND MICHAEL MARRIED three years later, but the course of their relationship never ran smooth. “Lucy was everything negative [where] Gail was positive in terms of my career,” recalled Michael. As with his previous relationship, Michael’s assessment was slightly biased; doubtless Lucy wanted to see Michael succeed, and in fact would later introduce him through a family connection to an important client, the Claghorns. But Lucy was never prepared (or not so prepared as Gail had once been) to simply play the supportive helpmeet, her own independent streak rivaling Michael’s.68 Still, regarding his work as an architect, Michael felt that Lucy “could take it or leave it—what it meant to her was that she didn’t get to see me, and I was with pretty girls all the time,” primarily his students and young associates.69 Lucy’s jealousies came with the package, another facet of the extroverted and voluble personality that had attracted Michael in the first place.

  The difficulty, even the friction, was part of the appeal, and when Lucy and Michael were together the relationship seemed to work almost in spite of itself. Once the Hanselmann House was rendered livable, the couple came and stayed there with Michael’s clients and old friends, and their hosts looked favorably upon his new partner. “Lucy was great,” recalled Julie Hanselmann Davies. “They were great together.”70

  Michael had been returning to Indiana with some frequency, thanks to another commission that had come his way courtesy of the Hanselmanns. Not long into their time in Fort Wayne, Jay and Lois had made the acquaintance of prominent local doctor Sanford Snyderman and his wife, Joy. The latter couple had recently purchased a hilly forty-acre site near suburban Ellisville, and on a visit to the Hanselmanns’ newly completed home, Joy posed what seemed an innocent enough question: “Do you think Michael could talk to me about who should design the house?” she asked Lois.

  Lois said yes—an answer she had occasion to regret. “I feel partially responsible for what happened to them,” she said.71

  Problem plagued as Michael’s last project in Fort Wayne had been, this one was worse. Once again the clients decided to serve as general contractor, and though the Snydermans did less of the heavy lifting themselves, their progress was every bit as star-crossed. “Everyone who worked on it blames someone else for the problems,” Sandy Snyderman claimed years later, while the local architect who oversaw the work, Matt Kelty, contended that the detail and sophistication of Michael’s design was simply “beyond the ability of most home contractors to carry out,” at least in central Indiana. (“The roofing material was put down by a carpet contractor,” he added.)72 In fairness, the design might have stumped even more experienced builders than those of Fort Wayne. It was the apotheosis of the earliest stage in Michael’s career as an architect.

  Since Benacerraf, Michael had continued to expand the lexicon of his architectural idiolect, in the hope (as it seemed) that the introduction of still more color and more recognizable forms would allow his audience readier access to the plotlines threading through the work. In a professional office back in Princeton, Gunwyn Ventures, hatches and stairways and banisters proliferated with reckless abandon, producing a fraught visual system tied together once again by a huge mural, this time wrapped halfway around an undulating wall. For a medical office in downtown Fort Wayne, he placed multiple freestanding doorjambs over the waiting room entry, each a different size and hue, as if to proclaim the varying scales and colors within. (It was, in fact, Dr. Snyderman’s office, completed before the travails of the house.) Two uncompleted houses—Mezzo and Keeley—played on the same themes, while a third (completed) one in Princeton—Alexander House, a Benacerraf-like extension [PLATE 16]—showed Michael, arguably for the first time, referencing an existing work of architecture, with a raised steel square that clearly mimicked the window on the upper story of the adjacent 1930s colonial.

  Snyderman outdid all these. Though not so spacious as the Rockefeller project would have been, it was roomier than most of Michael’s early residential commissions—five thousand square feet in all, nearly twice the size of Hanselmann. Like the previous Fort Wayne house, the new one was at first envisaged not as a single structure but as a group, three in all, connected along a slender walkway. This scheme was abandoned in favor of a single two-story building, but one whose larger scale allowed for a plan more wrought than any that had
preceded it. It was as though Le Corbusier’s simple columnar grid were being incessantly attacked by forces pushing at it from inside and out.

  “An overlay of several different oppositions,” as the scholar Alan Colquhoun would write (his emphasis), the house was not merely a three-dimensional collage but an architectural kaleidoscope.73 Instead of offering discrete pictorial impressions following one after the next, as Hanselmann had done, Snyderman confronted the visitor with an array of images piled up in thick profusion. On its completion, Progressive Architecture’s Suzanne Stephens wrote of the house that it was “attempting to do more than create gradual transitions from one domain to another.”74 Between interior and exterior, first floor and second, and from room to room, Michael staged a continuous and revolving scenography, with the forms of the landscape repeatedly intruding on the house and the house’s forms extending beyond the white frame that surrounded it, becoming a part of the landscape [PLATE 17]. Polychromy reappeared as a guiding element, but this time the solid walls of color almost entirely concealed the glass windows, and their tones had drifted from emphatic primaries into soft pastels: faded pinks and washed-out blues [PLATE 18]. The effect is less reminiscent of early Modernist architecture of the 1920s than of one of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s landscape paintings of the 1820s.

  The original axonometric rendering of the Snyderman House, with unbuilt adjacent structures

  These departures and others signaled a change in mood. For while the house represented the apogee of Michael’s neo-Modernist thinking, it also bespoke a sense of frustration—almost rising to the level of violence—directed at its own language. The vocabulary was still Le Corbusier’s, and the syntax was still Cubist, but every inch of wall space was now being wrung for potential signification. What seemed all too assured in the giant Rockefeller scheme here appeared beset by nervous energy. Visiting the house in 1980 and looking at it in the context of Michael’s subsequent work, the critic Martin Filler diagnosed the condition perfectly. As he put it, “This is an early Michael Graves building with a later Michael Graves building trapped inside it, fighting to emerge.”75

  WHEN, AS SOMETIMES HAPPENED during a summer storm in Fort Wayne, the Hanselmann family found themselves dashing to put buckets under the assorted drips coming from their ceiling, Lois, with characteristic wit, would lighten the mood by paraphrasing a quote usually attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright: “If the roof doesn’t leak,” she’d say, “the architect hasn’t been creative enough.”76

  By the time the Snyderman House was finally finished in 1977, its owners discovered that they too had many leaks to contend with. But they did not greet the situation with half so much good humor. In Lois’s view, her friend Sandy “developed a hatred for Michael”; Joy was more measured in her criticism, saying of the design only that “it should never have had a flat roof, not in this climate.”77

  The Snydermans spent nineteen years in the house, and though it had its pleasures (one family reunion featured a multistory water-gun battle) it was, at the best of times, a trial. “It was hot in summer, cold in winter. The stucco cracked,” recalled the couple’s son, Sanford Jr. “Something was always wrong with it.”78 When the family finally moved out, they sold it to a local developer, who planned to demolish it to make way for a subdivision; local preservationist groups sent up a distress signal, and the local government stepped in to save it. It was all for naught: after being repeatedly vandalized, the Snyderman House was destroyed by fire in 2002, in what the authorities suspect—but have never confirmed—was an act of arson.

  Notwithstanding its sorry fate and the justifiable gripes of its owners, the Snyderman House was far from a failure: at least until it was built, it was a resounding success. In the architectural ambit that Michael inhabited when the project was moving forward, the mere fact that he was building it was a badge of honor. John Hejduk had been pursuing similar themes in his own work but had built almost nothing, while dozens of the field’s most prominent figures seemed destined to spend their lives spinning their theoretical fancies in permanent academic seclusion. The 1970s produced more than its share of “paper architects”—the combined products of a bumpy economy and the cerebral mood of the field—and in this group Michael stood out as one of the few who had shown, on a limited basis, that brains and building were not incompatible.

  It was this distinction that prepared the way for the next major development in his career. And while Michael could thank his clients for setting the stage, the one who lifted the curtain was Peter Eisenman.

  Even after Eisenman started the IAUS, his neglected stepchild CASE still limped on, divided into regional groups that assembled episodically to discuss recent work. With the support of Arthur Drexler, two CASE meetings, numbered seven and eight, were held at MoMA in 1969 and 1971, both of them presentations highlighting the work of CASE’s East Coast membership: Eisenman, Michael, Gwathmey, Meier, and Hejduk.

  “The marginal figure,” Eisenman later averred, “was John Hejduk—because he was John Hejduk.”79 Born of Czech parents in 1929, Hejduk cut an odd figure on the national architecture scene: an enormously tall man with wild, thinning hair, a mien of the absent-minded professor, and a voice that came directly from the streets of New York. In addition to having no built work to speak of, Hejduk was the most senior of the five—fully a decade older than Gwathmey—and in his longtime position at Cooper Union, and before that at the University of Texas at Austin, he’d had ample opportunity to elaborate his “mystical ideas about architecture,” as one observer called them.80 He was at once one of architecture’s best-known characters and one of its most elusive. “Everybody seemed to know John,” said Michael, who could never quite recall how they met.81

  For the latter of the two CASE MoMA meetings, Eisenman also persuaded Anthony Vidler, the New Haven–based architect Allan Greenberg, and a host of others to attend as critics. The designers hung up their work and then engaged in a daylong colloquy in the museum’s trustees’ room. Michael could remember little of the event—“I have no idea what they said,” he claimed—and though Eisenman called the discussion a lively and engaging one, it received no substantive attention from the architectural public.82 This was the third providential outcome of Michael’s CASE association, though at first it seemed to be a dead end. A pamphlet was considered but never appeared.

  Another year and more would go by before Eisenman’s estimable abilities as an architecture tout once again brought the five together. Living at the time on the Upper West Side (having also divorced his first wife), Eisenman would sometimes take the Seventy-Ninth Street bus across town to the Madison Avenue bookshop of art publisher George Wittenborn—another in Eisenman’s wide circle of well-placed acquaintances. Arriving in the store on a certain Saturday in 1972, he approached the proprietor with an idea.

  “I’ve got a good book for you,” Eisenman told him.

  “What is it?” asked Wittenborn.

  “Well, we had this meeting…” Eisenman began, and went on to explain the daringly avant-garde work that he and his four fellow travelers were doing. Then he announced his suggested title: Cardboard Architects.83

  It was one of Eisenman’s pet phrases at the time. Wittenborn liked it well enough and printed up a flier; as soon as the other four friends caught wind of it, they declared themselves adamantly opposed to the title.

  They consented to another. Five Architects was published in 1972, in a tiny hardbound edition of “about fifty,” as Eisenman recalled.84 It featured two projects from each of the included designers—Hanselmann and Benacerraf being Michael’s—as well as essays written to accompany the photos of Eisenman’s, Michael’s, and Meier’s buildings. Eisenman’s essay was a lengthy exegesis on his theory of “deep structure,” as derived from the linguist Noam Chomsky; Meier’s a more measured account of his progress; while Michael’s was a brief appreciation from the critic William La Riche. More pertinent, however, were the contributions of Colin Rowe and Kenneth Frampton, who were responsib
le for the introduction and opening essay, respectively, and neither of whom seemed to much endorse the whole undertaking. “It is indisputably bourgeois,” Rowe wrote of the Five’s work, “and it is all of it belligerently secondhand.”85

  The Five—minus one, plus one—eating ice cream, ca. 1972. Left to right: John Hejduk, Robert Siegel (sitting in for partner Charles Gwathmey), Richard Meier, Michael, and Peter Eisenman

  In hindsight, it’s hard to resist the sense that Five Architects was unpardonably flimsy in pretext: a group of white men making white buildings, their sole raison d’être being Eisenman’s knack for public relations. The Five’s most effective defense against these accusations is that, for the most part, they felt the same way themselves. “The group that admits it wasn’t,” in the words of the critic Paul Davies, the Five were bound together less by their shared enthusiasms—their fascination with Le Corbusier, their belief in design as high intellectual art—than by the constellation of differences that allowed each to admire something in the others that he himself lacked.86 “Each of the Five Architects could have had his own separate show, a little exhibition with a little catalogue,” Michael once said. “Can you imagine a show of John’s work? It would have been wonderful.”87

  But there was strength in numbers. As representatives of a hypothetical trend, however specious, the Five were able to attain a visibility they might never have found separately. In early 1973 they were invited to participate in the XV Triennale di Milano, with Meier and Peter Carl accompanying Michael to present their work (plus an original Graves mural) alongside that of other international exhibitors. Here Michael met for the first time two future friends and collaborators: the show’s curator, Aldo Rossi, and another participant, the Luxembourger Léon Krier, whose booth was right beside the Five’s. Krier recalled looking over into the neighboring stall and seeing a slender man in glasses with longish hair, sitting on the floor. “It was Michael,” said Krier. “He was drawing.”88