Michael Graves Read online

  IF THIS CLASSROOM DEVIATION from the Modernist norm sounds suspiciously Grayish, it should be borne in mind that although Michael had read Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966)—as well as its follow-up, Learning from Las Vegas (1972), written with Venturi’s wife, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour and published the same year as Five Architects—he was not much invested in the philosophical literature that preoccupied the Yale-Philadelphia axis. Semiotics, structuralism, and the other hothouse theories that informed their readings of the city were slow to reach Michael, and even when they did, he was more concerned with their application to art history, which was where he made his other signal contribution to Princeton’s academic culture.

  In the 1974–75 academic year, Michael began teaching an undergraduate seminar, denoted in the SOA bulletin as Architecture 402, “Visual Studies in Architecture.”13 It was arranged as a series of lectures and classroom conversations that explored the history of architecture not chronologically, nor through types and forms, but through images and encounters, the subjective miscellany of architecture as its makers make it and its users live it. While the reading list neglected the touchstones of the Grays—neither Charles Sanders Peirce’s work on signs nor Roland Barthes’s on pop culture was on it—it did highlight, in keeping with its experiential premise, the phenomenology of the French thinker Maurice Merleau-Ponty.14

  Most important, however, were the formal analytics of those scholars, Ernst Gombrich and Ernst Cassirer especially, whom Michael had likely first happened upon in the American Academy in Rome’s library. With their ideas as a baseline, the content of 402 changed from year to year as Michael’s thinking changed, each new lecture receiving an evocative title (“The Plan,” “Fragments,” “Replica”).15 In them, Michael would deliver highly nuanced close readings, not just of buildings, but of paintings and sculpture, showing his pupils how architecture existed in a visual continuum with art—how, for instance, Le Corbusier’s Villa Stein could undergo the same interpretive treatment as a painting by Sandro Botticelli.

  “It was meant for seniors,” Michael said of the class. “It got to be so popular that all the grad students wanted to take it, too.”16

  The lectures were a hit because they were informative, but they were also fun, and often very funny. One was devoted to questions of exteriority, interiority, and how movement between the two could be expressed in buildings: it was called “A Little of the Old In and Out,” the name a quote from the novel (and film) A Clockwork Orange. Jokes and pop-culture references grew to be regular features of the class, a bait and switch to hold students’ attention as Michael inducted them into an understanding of art, design, and history—an understanding that, as he’d long felt, was necessary for the making of an architecture that was more than vapid gestures. “The lectures were history and theory lessons,” remembered a former student, John DaSilva, “but they were also lessons in the practical application of history and theory.”17 In the class, Michael would show his students how to connect the dots between art and architecture just as he’d begun to do in his practice, explaining how the hinged diptychs of the fifteenth century created a spatial narrative of difference and change; how the symbolic drama of entering or exiting a space could be seen in an open door in an Henri Matisse painting; how the maps of Rome by Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Giambattista Nolli articulated the continuities and disjunctures between public and private, past and present.

  “One way or the other, most students had me,” said Michael.18 Between 402 and the Asplund Problem, he had become a leading light of the department, a star performer in what had turned into a star-studded school. And because he was building—and because he was a member of the New York Five—Michael exuded a glamour that his more bookish colleagues did not. In the view of Robert A. M. Stern, “He dominated that school. He was the new Labatut.”19

  AS HAD BEEN THE CASE since he’d come to Princeton, Michael’s teaching was running a few steps ahead of his evolution as an architect. It wasn’t just that his built projects had been restricted to private homes and small offices. Even as he traveled throughout the United States, lecturing and sitting on university juries with his friends in the New York Five—three of them anyway; Hejduk rarely left Manhattan—Michael felt more and more that he, rather than Hejduk, was odd man out.

  “Richard would get on stage,” Michael recalled, “and he’d say, ‘The entry is here, here’s the dining room.’ I was determined not to do that. I wanted to have something more to say about my work.”20 Michael was beginning to feel ill at ease with the underlying assumptions of his own practice, and of the whole White enterprise.

  In 1974 the dawning apprehension that there would have to be a change—that an architecture of meaning might not be attainable within the neo-Modernist idiom of his fellow Fivers—broke into Michael’s work in the unlikeliest of places: right in the middle of a Charles Gwathmey project. Gwathmey had invited his friend to design one of his famous murals, just as Michael had done for so many of his own clients, for the Manhattan offices of the petrochemical firm Transammonia Inc. The interior by Gwathmey Siegel (the firm Gwathmey had founded with his friend Robert Siegel—effectively the sixth of the Five) was pure Charlie, a rippling landscape of contoured white walls broken up by courses of glass blocks. Michael’s trio of murals, their watery palette similar to Snyderman’s, seemed at first like pure Michael, the typical mélange of fragmented geometries and faintly suggestive figures.21

  Only now, as if they had only been waiting to congeal into some more solid state of matter, the geometries no longer looked so fragmented, and not all the figuration was merely suggestive. A new and unmistakable motif intruded into the composition, not once or twice, but over and over. It was a molding, pictured in various formations—clearly a response to the crowns of the Beaux Arts office buildings visible through the office window [PLATE 19].

  Seemingly out of nowhere, moldings—those humble details derived from the classical cornice but as commonplace as any baseboard in any middle-class living room—were everywhere in Michael’s work. The same year as Transammonia, he designed another one of his Princeton additions for another local client, the Wageman family; here the moldings multiplied, creating a lower datum at the height of the windows and another, almost a true cornice, toward the top. The house was put on hold (indefinitely, as it turned out), but Michael stuck with the theme, and it cropped up in his next built work, the Claghorn House.

  Yet another extension to yet another Princeton residence, this one a Queen Anne–style home from the 1890s, Claghorn discarded the more free-flowing interiors of Michael’s previous additions in favor of discrete functional spaces for kitchen, breakfast room, bar, and pantry, as well as an outdoor terrace. Fragments of molding appeared in the interior, both on the countertop and on a wall in the existing dining room, as well as outside, tracing a false pediment on the extension volume—a classical allusion more blatant by far than the Athenian and Italian echoes of Hanselmann. The deck was topped by a white frame structure, but its Benacerraf-like abstraction was subverted by something more conspicuous: a lattice, applied to the northern wall, reminiscent of the skirting screens found below old American houses [PLATE 20].

  The first time Steven Harris saw the house and that stuck-on latticework, he recalled, “I thought it was hysterical—like my grandmother’s back porch at the beach.”22 Then a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, Harris met Michael in 1975 as he was preparing to apply to graduate school at Princeton, and despite some familiarity with Michael’s work (or, rather, because of it) he didn’t “get” Claghorn right away. He would in time.

  Appearances to the contrary, the project was only a half step away from Michael’s Five Architects houses. Its chief innovation was to couple his customary Cubist grammar with a new glossary of architectonic images, images derived less from Le Corbusier and more from the traditional building next door. (And from further afield as well: the lattice was inspired in par
t by a trip Michael took to Newport, Rhode Island, in search of the old shingle-style houses that Vincent Scully had chronicled.)23 The same narrative content present in Michael’s older projects—the house telling of its own coming into being—was now expanded by its interleaved quotations—the lattice, the moldings, the pediment—to tell a bigger story, one about the suburban good life and the persistence of the past.

  All the extrusions and whirling forms that had borne the weight of Snyderman’s visual plot making were compressed, in Claghorn, into the walls themselves—a strategy that had the ancillary benefit of reducing building costs and making the addition more structurally sound. Its departure from the Whites’ Corbusian minimalism may have raised eyebrows (Harris’s among them), but at least the kitchen worked better qua kitchen. “I don’t know what they say about Michael,” Marge Claghorn was known to have said. “I just know it feels like a million bucks to do dishes here.”24

  LEAKING ROOFS ASIDE, what precipitated Michael’s movement away from his earlier, more Modernist work was the growing suspicion that he had been speaking above his audience’s heads, a suspicion reinforced by the criticism of Five Architects. The book was reissued in 1975 by Oxford University Press in a far larger printing, drawing still more attention and with it still more criticism, much of it directed at Michael and his supposedly hermetic, overheated stylistics. Looking back, Michael told an interviewer in 1980, “I thought it was going to be a lonely world out there for me if I continued to speak in what seemed to be a more or less private language.”25 The statement seems a poignant reflection of the speaker’s psychological complexion.

  In his architecture as in his teaching, the reasons behind Michael’s changing attitude were only tangentially related to those that underwrote the Grays’ critique of Modernism. For them, the problem of Modernist design—be it the towers in a park of Le Corbusier or the icy monumentality of Mies or the repetitious and car-centric planning schemes of Mies and Corb’s American heirs—was the damage that it had done to the physical and social coherence of the American city. For them, the crisis was a civic one; for Michael, in the 1970s, the crisis was rather more personal.

  Almost all of his completed projects to date had won prizes, many from the New Jersey chapter of the American Institute of Architects (Oyster Bay Town Plan in 1967, Hanselmann in 1973, even the mangled Union County Nature and Science Museum in 1974). Yet none of these accolades, nor the copious media coverage surrounding the New York Five, registered with Michael as the kind of recognition he longed for. Or at least it was not all the recognition he longed for. His proposal for the Rockefeller house had garnered him a Progressive Architecture Design Award citation, a high honor that came with guaranteed publication in the eponymous magazine; but when the Progressive Architecture issue featuring the project hit newsstands (“a brilliant tour de force,” juror Thomas Vreeland declared the house, from an architect “deeply immersed in the heroic period of modern architecture”), Michael remembered that he “sent the magazine to my parents and waited for a response.”26 He heard nothing. “They didn’t realize what a big deal that was for a very young architect to win.”

  Whatever Erma and Bud made of Michael’s divorce (and they would have done well to hold their tongues, given Bud’s secret first marriage), their son’s work was still completely impenetrable to them. His brother, Tom, was now a major executive at the Union Pacific Railroad, living with his family in comfort in the Midwest; Michael was living in Princeton Community Village with children who weren’t even his own. What good were his buildings, his talk of abstraction and figuration, if this was all it got him? And his parents were only a proximate barometer of the larger problem: they didn’t care for his early houses, and neither did Charles Moore. Neither perhaps did the average Princetonian, ambling through the village and wondering: What were these baffling white excrescences, sprouting incongruously from the sides of otherwise normal houses?

  From a strictly practical angle, too, Michael recognized that it would avail him nothing to stump his hoped-for clientele. Paul Benacerraf, a philosopher of mathematics and no slouch on matters intellectual, lived in the Princeton house that Michael had designed for him for forty-two years, without ever once having understood it in the least. “No clue,” said Professor Benacerraf. “I have no idea what he was trying to do.”27

  It had all seemed so simple to Michael. The exhilarating imago of a technological form in a natural setting—“the machine in the garden,” as the literary critic Leo Marx termed it—was part of what had drawn him to Le Corbusier’s work since his Harvard days. All the machine wanted, Michael inferred, was a pictorial schema, like Cubism, that could make its operations intelligible to everyone. Not so, he now concluded. He began to turn to other sources, some of them new, some very old indeed, in hopes they might succeed where Corb had failed.

  Though confounded by this sudden volte-face (“For whatever reason,” Meier said, “he wanted to go in a different direction”), Michael’s friends could at least take heart that he was inserting these new forms into the same Cubist framework, in the same collage-like way he always had.28 So long as he did that, he was still doing nominal obeisance to Modernism; so long as he did that, he was still a White, albeit one straying further and further into heterodoxy.

  EMBOLDENED BY CLAGHORN, Michael continued to elaborate his new language in two more projects, one realized and the other not, for a pair of clients in Princeton and Fort Wayne, respectively.

  In New Jersey, he and his associates designed and executed the Schulman House, an appendage enfolding two sides of a very plain two-story colonial. It included a new living room, a new street facade, and a new backyard enclosure, and, like Claghorn, it sported a trellis-like lattice on the garden front, this time blown up in scale to match the gridded wall beside it [PLATE 21]. But that wasn’t the only one of its allusive flourishes.

  The grid formed around a network of windows that incorporated glass blocks, a material common enough at the time—Gwathmey loved it—but here calling to mind its more common application in Art Deco buildings of the 1920s and ’30s. To the street, the renovated house now presented a color scheme that again flattened the visual narrative to the depth of the wall: bands of dark and light blue connected a portion of the existing structure to the new one, creating the illusion of a triad of related forms that read as a kind of primitive village. What was more, a pair of towering columns, their classical origins only slightly obscured, now stood to the left and right of the front door, one segmented into a lower and upper portion and the other rising unbroken into the chimney of the new fireplace.

  Then there was the fireplace. The interior of the new dining and living room, festooned in colorful sconces and moldings, played an ongoing game of alternating scale and perspective that culminated above the firebox in a false-ziggurat “mantel.” It was an arresting image: like the fragments of molding that appeared in the walls and in the recessed living-room soffit above, the fire hood receded into the surrounding pattern of windows and decorative elements when viewed at an angle. Yet when seen from the living room, it was a commanding presence, imparting a neat symmetry to the space [PLATE 22].

  This dual character is all the more interesting because this was not Michael’s sole proposal for the fireplace. In sketches made in late 1976 or early ’77, he imagined a much larger, much grander hood, one that could be read properly only from within the living room itself. With a lower course of rusticated masonry blocks, it was decked out in pendant dials and a large, decorative swag—very much in the mode of the Villa Snellman—at the top. The sketch may have been only a passing thought, but it shows how quickly history was encroaching into Michael’s design process.

  The alternative Schulman fireplace (at bottom), alongside other sketches

  A fireplace for the Fort Wayne house of the Crooks family, begun in 1976, also became the repository of Michael’s historical fascination. Drawings for the Crooks inglenook, from slightly later in the design process, show it as ev
en more decorative, and figurative in the most literal sense: in bas-relief on the lower trapezoid of the hood, an actual figure in classical dress and another, possibly statuary form stand on either side of a column of rising smoke. Above them, on projecting wings beside the flue, two sets of peplos-clad women bearing what appear to be ritual offerings gesture toward the central axis of the chimney [PLATE 23]. The depiction is obviously that of a ceremonial rite—a hecatomb being burned to some pagan god—and while the narrative rationale for putting this Grecian scene over a fireplace seems clear enough, putting it in this particular house seemed almost like heresy.

  The never-executed Crooks House might be judged Michael’s collagist achievement par excellence, his adroit use of layered montage reaching its most sophisticated and varied articulation yet. In plan it carried the germ of his early projects, comprising two discrete structures connected by a slender ligature, in this instance a decorative wall that carried the visual themes of the buildings’ facades. These themes alternated among grids, lattices, pediments, glass blocks, French windows, and keystones (their first appearance to date), and they were variously isolated, chipped, separated into discrete squares, or slipped one over the other. In the garden elevation, the house met the viewer with a strikingly human aspect, its symmetry punctuated by a triangular “nose.” Arriving vehicles would have passed through an opening in the connecting wall that matched inscribed square “openings” beside it. Drivers might have been unsure, if only for an instant, whether they were entering a real opening or a fake one [PLATE 24].

  Axonometric drawing of the Crooks House, 1976

  Steven Harris worked on the house’s design, and, as he put it, Crooks marked “a transition”: the project found Michael midshift between “all these ideas of diptychs, flips, references to Juan Gris” on the one hand and on the other, his “more figurative work.” The grandiose fireplace, conceived in 1978, shows the extraordinary speed with which Michael’s practice was changing during the project’s rather lengthy lifespan.29 Running, as many of Michael’s schemes did, more than slightly over budget, Crooks was subject to constant changes, though in the end it was doomed not by cost but by a local property ordinance that made the area less attractive to development.