Michael Graves Read online

  The moment in front of the steel bar in the Mies chapel was not unique. Wright’s distinctive style, his long horizontal volumes and original ornament, seemed somehow too “personal” to Michael, too much like an exercise in novelty; the same was so for the younger Saarinen’s idiosyncratic, expressionistic gestures. As Roush had learned, Mies’s somber reductivism left Michael cold, and even the warmer Breuer, whom Michael had come to know so well through Roush’s Breuer-esque house, didn’t strike him as a designer he himself wanted to emulate. The irony was that Michael, given the ease with which he could draw almost anything, could “do” Mies or Breuer without any prompting. Much of his work in Carl Strauss’s office consisted of just that, aping the masters in accord with Roush and Strauss’s in-house flavor of Modernism. But Michael didn’t particularly want to do Breuer, or Mies. Well on his way to becoming a modern architect, he hadn’t yet found a modern architecture of his own.19

  In the United States in the 1950s there were only so many options to choose from. As Michael put it, “All the people who were doing Modernist architecture”—people like Mies and his fellow German émigré Walter Gropius—“were gods.”20 Like the pioneers of the Old West, the pioneers of Modern design (so dubbed by the scholar Nikolaus Pevsner, in his groundbreaking 1936 book of that title) were shrouded in a mystique so compelling that, for many architects, it blotted out not only any pre-Modern forms of architecture but any future alternative. The architects and theorists Peter and Alison Smithson would refer to a period of “heroic” Modernism in Europe beginning in the 1920s, and on these shores that heroism was taken quite literally, an article of faith for a generation of American designers.21

  Many of Michael’s professors at Cincinnati had been products of Harvard, where they had studied under Gropius; most had since fallen under the spell of Mies, seduced as Roush was by the clarity and logic of his perfectly rectilinear structures, exemplified by the chapel at IIT. Beginning with the campus there, Mies had set himself up as the heir to the midwestern skyscraper tradition that included figures like Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan, and Mies’s native-born acolytes had coalesced into a new “Chicago School” whose influence extended well beyond the Midwest. “My work,” Mies would say, “has so much influence because of its reasonableness,” and this unfailingly reasonable branch of Modernism, with its symmetrical forms, hard-edged materiality, and monumental plazas, had flourished in America following the Second World War, a foundational component in the stylistic amalgam commonly known as the International Style.22

  All across the country, the International Style was cropping up in office towers, public buildings, and apartment complexes. Its postwar ascendancy was the product of manifold circumstances: the mechanization of the national economy, government policy, mass demand for housing, the vagaries of changing tastes. But alongside these was an almost spiritual element, a rejection of the colonnaded, marble-hewn past as being in some way tainted: “The abandonment of classical architecture,” the historian David Watkin would write, was predicated in part “on the assumption that it was irrevocably associated with Nazism.”23 Paul Philippe Cret, no less than Albert Speer, was now politically suspect, and the old must make way for the new. With the triumph of Modernism not yet a decade old, the consequences of this ideological condition for the American city were already beginning to be felt. But they were only imperfectly understood, and hardly more so by the young Indianan still trying to grasp what Modernism was.

  And so Michael proceeded, for the time being at least, more or less on faith alone, following the Modernists who were as yet the only architects whose work he truly knew. “There was no criticism of them,” Michael would say. “All the younger architects just said, ‘This is what we’re supposed to do.’”24

  IN LATE MARCH 1955 an item appeared in the Indianapolis Star, announcing “a late summer wedding…being planned by Gail Devine and Michael E. Graves.”25

  After four years as a couple, the two were married in Broad Ripple Village, and when they returned to Cincinnati, they began living together for the first time in the Swifton Village Apartments in the Bond Hill neighborhood. It was a singularly drab Modernist complex, inhabited mostly by students—or rather uninhabited by them. The newlyweds had few neighbors due to the new building’s high vacancy rate, which drove it to bankruptcy shortly after they moved out. (It was promptly snapped up by a developer from New York and given to his son to manage, the first real job held by a twenty-five-year-old Donald Trump.)26 Poor enough that they couldn’t afford to buy a couch or a dining room table, the couple made their own from parts they bought from the lumberyard, the first Graves furniture ever designed.

  Alone at last, Michael and Gail were in a sense the most intimate of strangers: a longtime couple who had not yet figured out what life together would really mean and whose marriage had been to some degree another instance of doing what they were “supposed to do.” But they were then, and for a long time after, very happy. Looking back, Michael said, “She was marvelous.”27

  Michael and Gail on their wedding day, March 27, 1955

  AS IN HIGH SCHOOL, Michael and Gail joined a fraternity and sorority, respectively, and for the remainder of their time at the University of Cincinnati enjoyed a fairly typical college experience. Michael’s increased devotion to his studies, begun in high school, had continued in his undergraduate years: for his first project, he stayed up all night to produce a proposal for a new kiosk at the college gate, rendering it in watercolor (his first time working in that medium) and coming away with an A-plus.

  After that, he claimed, his grades were never lower—except once. Facing a surveying exam the same day that a sketching problem was due, his roommate persuaded Michael to complete his drawings for him, in return for which the roommate promised to teach Michael all he needed to know to ace the hated technical test. This Strangers on a Train approach backfired—Michael’s hastily drawn sketches earned his roommate an A-plus, but Michael failed the exam.28

  The real action, however, was still happening in the half of each year spent in Carl Strauss’s office. Helped along by Roush, Michael continued to make great strides, taking on increasing responsibilities. In early 1958, while Roush was hard at work on a house for a local doctor, Donald Jacobs, in the Western Hills division, Michael had his first chance to add something of his own. As Jayne Merkel relates:

  The entry procession, across the footbridge, wasn’t quite right. There was an empty place to the left of the front door. So Graves made a tall stele-like abstract sculpture to fill it. The two architects [Roush and Michael] stayed up all night one night completing it and placing it in the space while their wives slept in the car.29

  Strauss and Roush’s Jacobs house, featuring Michael’s courtyard sculpture

  The sculpture, long since removed by subsequent occupants, was a most intriguing objet d’art: a tower in concrete standing about five feet high, it comprised five individual boxes with alternating apertures stacked one atop the other, suggesting perhaps some of the rectilinear formal logic of the house itself—a signpost for visitors, advising them of what was inside.30 It betrayed the fairly clear influence of the Japanese designer and sculptor Isamu Noguchi, as well as that of the artist Henry Moore, both of them very much the sort of artists Roush approved of. Michael’s skills as a copyist were put to good use elsewhere in the house as well: empty areas on the living room and bedroom walls were filled with colorful paintings (both of which still exist) in the then-current Abstract Expressionist style. Michael could “do” Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning too.

  The painters of the New York School were among the first artists whom Michael consciously imitated (other than his early efforts at aping Walt Disney). Early on, his personal take on Ab Ex was careful and controlled, his canvases almost pixelated in closely matched swatches of red and orange. Derivative as they were, these abstract works showed little of the painterly impasto or the depth of Pollock’s sprawling masterworks; then again, the texture of the real
thing was mostly unknown to Michael at the time, as very few such paintings could be seen around Cincinnati. Never much of a museumgoer, Michael derived most of his early knowledge of art from books and magazines, which would remain his preferred means of looking at and learning about art for most of his life.31

  Along with the Jacobs house paintings, another artifact of Michael’s college years survives, at least partially. His undergraduate thesis at the University of Cincinnati was a design project, conventional enough for its time, though with a provocative tweak. After six years at the school, Michael had been thoroughly inculcated in Miesian Modernism. But rather than simply rehearse that position in his thesis, he took an unexpected detour, developing a proposal that was simple enough yet spiked with some rather original thinking. In it, he dared to incorporate two things somewhat outside his training.

  The first was social responsibility. The title of the thesis was “The Amenable Shelter.” Subtitled “A Shelter to Expand with the Physical and Economic Growth of the Inhabitant,” it proposed the use of prefabricated hut-like homes, each comprising a pitched pyramidal roof hoisted atop thick pillars, which could be assembled easily on a simple six-square plan around courtyard voids [PLATE 1]. The approach, Michael contended, would allow families to construct new units as circumstances required, at low cost and without sacrificing communal outdoor spaces. A community of such homes would have the added advantage of appearing not as a hodgepodge of accretions but as a consistent landscape. Michael wrote (with characteristic poor spelling), “Pre-designed buildings give unity to whole communities. There is only chaous [sic] without unity.” The whole idea ran very much against the Miesian grain, as the elder architect never much cared for prefabrication, and most of his followers were actively uninterested in such reformist do-goodism as experimental housing for the poor.

  The other, no less extraordinary facet of “The Amenable Shelter” was its reliance on something toward which Modernists of almost all descriptions were profoundly ambivalent—history. By way of precedent, in order to demonstrate the feasibility and urban cohesion of his scheme, the documents that accompanied Michael’s models of the Amenable Shelter included photographs of an unusual housing type, the trulli houses of Alberobello, Italy, some distance south of the ancient city of Bari in the Itria Valley.32 “‘The important thing is how little the differences are,’” reads one of Michael’s captions: the quotation marks suggest a scholarly source, but the stilted grammar (and the fairly scant research in the accompanying text) reveal it as Michael’s own interpretation of the elegant pragmatism of these primitive precursors to his modular scheme.

  Dating to at least the fifteenth century, but with roots in the Apulia region stretching back to prehistoric times, the trullo is a type of yurt composed of locally available stone, chipped into flat, irregular bricks and piled into a round drum at the base that tapers into a conical top. In Alberobello, hundreds of gray-and-white trulli stand one beside the other, an entire city of rocky cairns like the hive of some ancient inhuman species. The houses were little known in the United States until the publication, in 1964, of Architecture without Architects, a book by the famously eccentric theorist Bernard Rudofsky based on an exhibition he curated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show and the book, which included photos and text captions on the trulli, were daring, offbeat explorations of the building traditions of pretechnological societies, indigenous communities, even the animal world. A former woman’s footwear designer and occasional nudist, Rudofsky was throwing a tiny monkey wrench into the grand works of Modernism and its hegemonic, technocratic stranglehold on architecture.

  But that was several years in the future. Michael’s art-historical education at the University of Cincinnati was ample, but not so wide-ranging that the trulli were likely to have come up in the classroom. Roush would seem a probable vector of introduction, given his time spent abroad; it is also possible that Michael first saw them in a fashion spread in Harper’s Bazaar that appeared in 1955, since he acquired his thesis images from the photographer Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who had shot the magazine editorial with the model Evelyn Tripp.33 But however the houses came to Michael’s attention, his use of them seems more than just a convenient device for explaining his Amenable Shelter concept. It betokens an early interest, anticipating Rudofsky’s, in some ill-defined otherness, beyond the conventions of the Modernism he’d been taught. At the time, of course, the subject might simply have struck Michael as a pleasantly irreverent digression, capping six years of survey exams and Miesian steel with a scholarly idyll among the weird hillside houses, none of which he had any reason to believe he would ever actually see.

  MICHAEL FINISHED UP at the university as a trained architect, a married man, and a Democrat. “Before that time I hadn’t paid any attention,” he said, but the incipient civil rights struggle and the “hippieish” Ray Roush made him take notice.34

  His horizons expanding rapidly, he began to look ahead to the next step, which for the first time was not a thing laid out in advance by someone else’s expectations. When he had entered school, Cincinnati seemed as if it would be education enough; Michael was shocked when his friend and fellow classmate Robert Frasca picked up and left for the University of Michigan, looking for a more progressive undergraduate program. Michael’s original plan had been to earn his bachelor’s degree and then take up work in a practice in Indianapolis immediately upon graduation. But now he was thinking bigger.

  Postgraduate education was by no means compulsory for American architects at midcentury. Architecture graduate schools were mostly reserved for those who wanted a career in academia or who wanted to establish their own offices, and their students were either wealthy, trained at Eastern colleges, trained overseas, or some combination of the above. Michael was none of these things.

  Carl Strauss, however, had attended Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD), and it helped give him the edge he needed to build a practice of his own rather than work in someone else’s office. Michael was determined to do the same, and so, packing once more into the car with Roush and Lucille, the seasoned architecture tourists set out for what would be Michael and Gail’s first journey beyond the Appalachian Range, heading East for interviews at a couple of big-name schools.

  “We went to Harvard and Yale together, and I watched [Roush] on a jury,” Michael recalled. “We went to Penn together. We didn’t go to Princeton.”35 Following in Strauss’s footsteps, his top choice was GSD—not because the program particularly suited his architectural tastes, which hadn’t yet really developed. “It was the draw of big names,” Gail recalled.36

  Accepted into the program, Michael enrolled, and in the fall of 1958 he and Gail made ready to move to Massachusetts. They had acquired a car of their own, a sporty Austin-Healey barely big enough for two people sitting side by side, much less the furniture and clothes they had acquired to fill up their Swifton Village apartment. “Ray and his wife pulled a trailer filled with our furniture, and we drove in tandem to Cambridge,” Gail recalled. When they arrived at their new home at 82 Charles Street in Boston (Cambridge itself was far beyond their means), Roush and Lucille helped them unpack and put the furniture in place, in accord as always with Roush’s sense of interior decor.

  After that, Gail remembered, “we all drove north for some camping and relaxation,” and then they said goodbye.

  OWING TO HIS six-year-long spell as an undergraduate, Michael was allowed by GSD to compress the usually eight-term master of architecture program into a single year. His longer-than-usual college experience also meant that Michael was older than most of the new students at GSD, save for those who had not failed their fitness exams and had been conscripted into the military. Many of the students in his own year were products of Cambridge itself, having gone through Harvard’s own undergraduate program, and several shared a scrap of advice with their new classmate, a message that distilled (at least in Michael’s memory) to a simple warning:

  “This is bullshit.”<
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  In his adult career, Michael never bore Cincinnati any ill will, even coming back decades later to design a building for his alma mater. He felt nothing but gratitude for Carl Strauss and an immense affection for Ray Roush. But for GSD, and for Harvard in general, he carried a flame of contempt so bright and so assiduously maintained over the years that it must have been a source of authentic pleasure.37

  At the University of Cincinnati, though some of his teachers had been products of GSD, theirs had been a different GSD—back when Walter Gropius was at the helm. Gropius had helped develop a curriculum based on the collaborative ideal that he had first advanced in Germany after the First World War, during his days as director of the famous Bauhaus in Dessau. Ground zero for the Modern movement in Central Europe and beyond, the incubator that hatched not just designers such as Breuer and Mies but painters such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky, the Bauhaus’s inventive pedagogical system had been the model for GSD when it was established in 1936 as a union of the formerly discrete schools of architecture, landscape architecture, and city planning. The following year, Gropius himself—along with his friend Breuer—was brought in to head up the architecture side, working under the leadership of founding dean Joseph Hudnut.38

  But Hudnut, Breuer, and Gropius were all long gone by the time Michael arrived in Cambridge. Dean Josep Lluís Sert was now in charge. Barcelonan by birth, living in exile in the United States since the end of the Spanish Civil War, Sert was a true believer in a specific genre of architectural Modernism, and he imposed his preferences upon faculty and students alike with a force that belied his remarkably short stature. Behind his back, Michael and his friends referred to him as “the Teeny-Weeny Deany.”39