Michael Graves Page 20
Michael’s eye, meanwhile, was still up for grabs—and in short order, that sensitive organ was captured by another thinker who passed through Princeton in 1977, the man who had first espied Michael sitting on a floor in Milan: Léon Krier, who came to the university that fall at Michael’s invitation to fill in for Anthony Vidler, then on sabbatical.
Unlike Rowe—a key figure in the United States for more than a decade, the disputed idol of both the White and the Gray factions—Krier was an outsider, a wild-haired visionary who blew in from the London office of the architect James Stirling. Rowe’s thinking had been integral to Michael’s own since the early 1960s, changing as he changed; by contrast, Krier struck in a flash, his friendship with Michael lasting only a few short years but its effects long outliving their personal and professional association.
Krier had not yet emerged as the scorched-earth sloganeer he would become in the early 1980s, renowned for such fiery declarations as “I am an architect because I don’t build” and “Forward, comrades, we must go back” (the latter commandeered from the novelist Wolfgang Parth). But already he had begun to stake out a reputation as a daring iconoclast, one who would proclaim himself in opposition not just to Modernist architecture but to the entire mechanism of modern consumer culture. Possessed, as the scholar Joseph Rykwert would write, of “a political innocence verging on insensibility,” Krier’s critique of the Western city as rebuilt by Modernism was so unyielding that he would even suggest a reappraisal of Albert Speer’s Hitlerian classicism.52 Although he had not yet reached that conclusion in 1977, it was well in train, evident in his drawn work like his echt-classical Blundell’s Corner proposal for the English town of Hull. If Rowe had become a Gray, Krier was edging ever closer to being something like a Black.53
Léon Krier, Blundell’s Corner proposal for Hull, England, early 1977
From the Year of Krier: Michael’s house sketches for then-friend Leo
Initially reluctant (despite a few visits) to take up a longer lectureship at Princeton, Krier at last had relented to Michael’s entreaties, and on the drive from the train station to the Warehouse Michael waxed enthusiastic about the fun they were about to have.
“Leo,” he said, “we’re going to teach together!”
Krier answered with a dark joke: “Why not rather stay friends?”54
His pessimism turned out to be prescient. “In the end it was a disaster for our relationship,” Krier recalled.55 Michael’s prestige at the school was now nearing its height, and he was unaccustomed to having a presence in the classroom as large as Krier’s. The two attempted to coteach a studio, but immediately gave up, clashing over the treatment of students, the content of the course, and even over the direction of Michael’s work, with Krier confessing a preference for the early Corbusian houses as opposed to the more muddled stylistic wanderings of the middle 1970s. By the time the semester was out, they were barely speaking.
The falling-out made little difference, for Krier had already cast his spell. It may be wondered why Michael—unencumbered as he was of almost any politics more profound than the platform of the Democratic Party—would gravitate toward a zealot like Krier. The answer lies not in his doctrine but in his drawings. “I know drawing better than any of my colleagues,” Michael once said. “I’m better at it. But I’m not better at it than Leo Krier.”56
Like his (somewhat more worldly) architect brother, Rob, Krier was a draftsman of unsurpassed delicacy, his superb sketches and diagrams conjuring a misty past of simple town squares and column-lined public buildings, often portrayed in didactic contrast to the faceless towers of Modernism. The temples and the dwellings and the civic basilicas that filled his sketches were symmetrical, with the classical tripartite division of foot, body, and head, and they radiated a mesmeric aura, redolent as much of memory or dream as of history. More than Krier’s incisive rhetoric, it was his drawings that persuaded Michael of his genius, and Michael began to recapitulate some of their qualities in his own work. On one page of the 1977 maroon sketchbook there is a group of drawings labeled “Houses for L.K.” A triad of archetypical, quasi-Tuscan vernacular buildings, they are plainly by Michael’s hand, though they could almost as easily be by Krier’s.
Not just Michael but a whole generation of critics and practitioners heard the siren call of Krier; among them was Colin Rowe, who had long had his own classical fixations. But Rowe’s native circumspection inoculated him against Krier’s polemics—an immunity Rowe passed to Michael, for whom the Englishman always remained the design intellectual. What Krier gave Michael was not a new philosophy but a new visual order, less labored and convoluted than Cubism, in which to set the images that made up Michael’s new architectural dialect. This order would favor symmetry over asymmetry, and it would expand the use of recognizable figures from bits and pieces to the whole of the building. In Eisenman’s opinion, “After Krier, Michael’s life changed.”
“Krier was the Great Destroyer,” Eisenman added, “the destroyer of the Whites.”57
OTHER CLASSICALLY INFORMED SOURCES had begun to seep into Michael’s teaching and drawings by the late 1970s; these included the work of the nineteenth-century German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, as well as that of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, whose architecture parlante (speaking architecture) attempted to rationalize classical forms to spell out the precise function of his buildings. But nothing served to reawaken Michael’s long-held infatuation with the architecture of Rome and Greece quite like the Year of Krier.
The impact was not felt all at once but began to percolate steadily into Michael’s work during and after his sometime-friend’s Princeton residency. That same year Michael and his associates were commissioned to design an office expansion for Chem-Fleur, a Newark-based manufacturer and materials laboratory. The uncompleted proposal deployed the grid-like cladding that Michael had favored in previous projects, only regularized and reduced, turned into something more like masonry blocks. The reference became even more explicit in the Kalko House a year later, which furthered Chem-Fleur’s modulation toward symmetry with a central entryway under a broad, pedimental curve. Neither was built.
The most outstanding realized project begun in 1977 was the Plocek House, located in Warren, New Jersey [PLATE 26]. Originally envisioned as a sprawling compound incorporating a central house, walled terrace, and backyard pavilion, it crouched on its cliffside site like a Florentine palazzo in the hills above the Arno. Almost totally symmetrical on its main southern facade, the four-thousand-square-foot central structure (the only portion to be completed) initially appeared in Michael’s drawings and sketches as the “Keystone House,” a reference to its signature feature: a volume in the rear garden, which the owner intended to use as a study, was shaped as a large trapezoidal wedge, while a void of nearly identical proportions was to be located above the house’s columned south front. The narrative sequence is fairly glaring in its clarity—the front keystone is missing, and one must go looking through the house before finding it hidden in the back.58
So far as the office was concerned, however, private commissions vanished in importance next to its biggest project of 1977. In that banner year, Michael Graves Architect unveiled its proposal for a new and altogether novel public structure: the Fargo-Moorhead Bridge.
Straddling the Red River of the North between the towns of Fargo, North Dakota, and Moorhead, Minnesota, the bridge had been the brainchild of a fifth-year architecture student at North Dakota State University named Clyde Schroeder. To commemorate the cities’ joint centennial in 1975, the young designer put forward an idea for a new project that could be as much a cultural attraction as a piece of infrastructure. Combining a symphony hall, radio and television stations, and an interpretive center on the natural and human history of the region, the bridge would be the centerpiece of a complex occupying both the eastern and the western banks of the river. To find a designer, a local task force was formed and immediately began to aim high, cooking up a far-fetched list of prospecti
ve architects that included Le Corbusier, then twelve years dead.
Five (living) architecture firms were ultimately selected to present before the task force: Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, Moore Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker, Stanley Tigerman and Associates, Malcolm Wells Architect, and Michael Graves Architect. As a group, the selected designers suggested something of the task force’s architectural leanings, with most of its members—Tigerman and Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer especially—having lately drifted toward the Grayer end of the spectrum. Whatever emerged, it was not going to be a glass box, and Michael and his team took that as their cue.
As Karen Nichols put it, Fargo became “a mystical project” for Michael.59 His design began to take shape in mid-1976, but the final version would not be unveiled until nearly eighteen months later, showing his Cubist grammar as it was tempered more and more by a Krierian sense of classical organization. The bridge declared its presence with a pair of broken pediments facing north and south, set off from each other in line with the bend in the waterway so as to appear symmetrical both upstream and down. These twin arches were to be flanked by columns whose flaring “capitals” emulated the form of an empty keystone at the center of the bridge—not unlike Plocek’s but faced in glass and issuing forth a constant stream of water from an opening at the base. Adorned in comparable regalia of columns and keystones, the adjoining structures housed the broadcasting facilities and other functions, while the museum exhibitions would have continued into the enclosed margins of the vehicular span.
A model of the Fargo-Moorhead Bridge proposal
As evidenced in Michael’s “reference sketches,” the design finds its historical basis in a sculptural jug that can be seen atop the Medici Fountain in Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens. That image, made flush with the bridge facade, served for Michael as the unifying impetus of the whole scheme. It tied together the separate wings of the complex as well the river—imagined as the foundational floor of the building—and the sky—the top of the keystone symbolically opening into it and then drawing upon it to produce the water that gushed below. The poetic valence of this organizing metaphor is conveyed, in the final elevations, in light pastel washes of terra-cotta, delicate red trim, and long strips of pale blue, their gauzy translucency making the monumental bridge seem practically weightless [PLATE 28].60
Michael’s office had scrambled to get the commission, and his team scrambled to build momentum behind the design when it made its public debut in December 1977. With no experience to speak of in designing an auditorium, they had brought in an auditorium specialist; with no real knowledge of the local landscape, Michael had made repeated trips there to take photos and make drawings. On one trip he brought Karen Nichols, who ventured outside briefly to see the site. The temperature that winter was approaching thirty below. “I walked halfway around it and decided I had to come back,” she recalled.61
Despite the firm’s best efforts, fortune once again was fickle. To raise funds for its half of the project, the city of Fargo staged a referendum in November 1978, which failed by just 3 percent. The firm continued to produce designs for a less ambitious project on the Moorhead side, but without the cooperation of its sister city the enterprise was sunk. The unachieved, “mystical” bridge remained only that; indeed, even had it been built, much of the otherworldliness of the elevations would have belonged forever to the page: as the architect Peggy Deamer has written, no head-on view of the bridge, fountain, and river would have been possible, since the concert hall would have stood in the way.62 Still, the mystique of the drawings wasn’t felt by Michael alone. In a cruel twist, the proposal snagged the firm another Progressive Architecture Design Award only two months after the bond issue was denied. It even elicited interest from outside the parochial limits of the architecture world.
“I was interviewed by ABC, CBS, NBC,” Michael recalled—mostly local affiliates, perhaps, but there was national recognition as well, with the New York Times’s redoubtable Ada Louise Huxtable calling the rendering “probably one of the most beautiful architectural drawings of recent times” and “the sort of work that sends the viewer away with the sense that some kind of breakthrough is being made.”63 There was international attention too. According to Michael, his local collaborators in Fargo reported that for years afterward, the flat, unlovely slab of a bridge that crosses the Red was regularly frequented by Japanese tour buses. They were still coming to look for Michael’s bridge, unaware that it had never been built.64
TWO FINAL GRACE NOTES sounded the end of Michael’s long and tumultuous 1977. The first came from Italy: following a conversation with the Italian architect Piero Sartogo, Michael helped conceive Roma Interrotta (Rome Interrupted), an exhibition featuring himself and eleven other architects and critics to be held the following year in Rome.65 Using the 1748 Nolli map of the city, which Michael had known since his American Academy days and had used in his classes, the selected participants were assigned separate slices of the city, which they were to reimagine in drawings and sketches, creating fantasias on Rome’s history and future [PLATE 29]. True to his recent idée fixe, Michael pictured keystones blown up to the level of city blocks and parkway corridors and then inserted into the landscape—another demonstration of his equation of elevation and plan. His submission sat side by side with others from some of Michael’s closet allies, not the least being Colin Rowe.
Returning to Rome for the opening the following spring, Michael came back to where it all began, where he’d first discovered what he felt was the real purpose and power of architecture. “Rome was always a welcome place for me,” he said, and he was only too glad to have reason to stay: he was made a visiting fellow that year at the Academy, resuming the same pleasant course of evenings around the dinner table that he’d enjoyed night after night with Gail all those years ago.66 He’d come to the table then as a supplicant, cowed into silence by those he felt to be his betters in knowledge and understanding; two decades later, he was back as a possessor of understanding, a new understanding for a transformed field in which he and his work now towered.
For by now Michael had been, in a sense, canonized. Early in 1977 his firm’s work was included in a new book, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, by the American-born, British-based historian Charles Jencks. The critic and author had met Michael in the early 1970s, and the two had been in periodic contact since, many of their conversations revolving around the problem of whether architects should favor an “implicit” or “explicit” approach to symbol making.67 Jencks inclined toward the latter, and while Michael was not yet sold on the critic’s robust, literal approach to signification, he was moving closer to that position by the day.
It was further proof for Jencks that what Venturi and the Grays had begun was fast reaching maturity, as more and more architects branched off from the Modernist family tree to form a discrete and original genus. In Jencks’s estimate, the designers’ common tactics—exterior ornament, historical quotation, visual wit—qualified them as members of a new movement, a subversive counterassault on Modernism that might restore to the American city some of the color and character that had been steadily leached out of it after three decades of featureless International Style curtain walls. To describe this coalescing anti-Modernist mutiny, Jencks had first coined the term post-modernist architecture in a magazine article in 1975, and in his book he named Michael as one of its protagonists.68 After 1977 the names “Michael Graves” and “Postmodernism” would be forever conjoined, their fortunes rising and falling together.
APOSTASY, SUCH AS MICHAEL’S WAS, was bound to draw condemnation, and the fiercest came from those who had always held his talent in the highest regard—especially Peter Eisenman. His friendship with Michael had weathered the Princeton tenure debacle, and it would weather this too. But Eisenman always detected a venal motive in Michael’s PoMo switch. “He had a sense,” Eisenman said later, “that Modernism wasn’t selling.”69
True, Modernism had fallen on hard times, and jumping ship might have
seemed the prudent move. The degraded state of cities both in the United States and abroad had been widely blamed on the deadening monotony visited upon them by Modernists who’d anointed themselves, Prometheus-like, as the sole bearers of the light in architecture. This conceit had been methodically skewered by the theorist Jane Jacobs in her much-lauded 1961 study, The Death and Life of Great American Cities; championing small-scale, traditional city streets over the megablocks and highways of Modern planning, the book had been an early rallying cry for the Grays, and in the ensuing years it had become the popularly accepted verdict on the urban prospect in America. Modernism, the story went, had failed, and though Michael had held out long enough, he now voted with the majority.
Modernism may have been reeling, but Postmodernism was still (as Jencks meant it to be) an avant-garde. It had no large buildings to support the claims of its boosters, no proof of its therapeutic benefits, and its only recognized products were a few small commissions from Venturi, Moore, and a couple of others. Michael’s Fargo-Moorhead Bridge seemed to augur great things to come, but it was no more than a pretty picture. In the halls of the professional establishment, Postmodernism seemed much ado about nothing.
In 1980 Michael was set to receive the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. During the ceremony, he was to be called to the podium by the renowned Gordon Bunshaft, the SOM principal whose Pepsi-Cola Building had been the site of Michael’s Rome interview. But just as the elder architect was dispensing the envelopes, he paused.