When I first met Michael Graves he was working from an office on Witherspoon Street in Princeton, in a kind of attic above a Chinese restaurant. It was 1982, and I’d flown to the States to interview the “New York Five,” find out where they’d each got to, ten years on. Eisenman/Graves/Gwathmey/Hejduk/Meier: their names were like a mantra. Everybody knew about the “white” architects; the lucky ones even owned a copy of Five Architects, the bible of their becoming. I’ve forgotten exactly what we talked about, though I distinctly recall spilling tea down my suit out of sheer nervousness five minutes before Graves entered the conference room. There was a long, possibly staged, interlude during the interview when he took a phone call from fellow-Fiver Peter Eisenman; they are still close buddies even if, by now, aesthetically, further apart than ever. I also recall the atmosphere of the office, the little painted collages that seemed to lurk on the tops of plan chests, the homely quality of the space, which was a true atelier, and quite unlike most architects’ offices I’d visited thus far.
Graves was in the ascendant. Already known for a number of neo-Corbusian domestic projects in the Princeton vicinity, and “paper projects” like the Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Bridge, he had leapt to attention with the Portland Building, completed in 1982. Its defiantly decorative elevations fired the opening shot in the Great Facade Wars, and the building (which played a cameo role in the movie Body of Evidence, 1992) was claimed as the harbinger of postmodernism in architecture. Eleven years later, he is a household name—a rare achievement for an architect anywhere—and the Graves portfolio encompasses buildings in America, Europe, and Japan, plus a wide array of designs from interior furnishings to items of personal adornment. Today, the entire operation (the architecture studio and the affiliated Graves Design) occupies an atmospheric building at 341 Nassau Street, Princeton’s leafy main artery, some fifteen minutes’ walk east of the Ivy League university campus where Graves has taught for over thirty years.
A designer’s own living and working spaces are usually indicative of their personality and design persuasion; in Graves’s case, his home and studio are open books of an intense aesthetic sensibility. Where Witherspoon Street was a cozy warren, 341 Nassau Street is a maze, with scuffed flights of wooden stairs and narrow passageways leading up, down, around, and through the many levels of this distinctly uncorporate headquarters. Cased models of recent architecture projects line the walls, prototypes are stacked in the bustling product-design studio, and—adding to the atmosphere of a creative menagerie—Graves’s dog is usually to be found padding the hallways. A small building across the street has recently been annexed as a “studio store” (taking cues from one of Graves’s best-known clients, the Walt Disney Company), and a branch office is maintained in New York.
Though separate domains, Graves’s office and his own home, just around the corner, form a kind of workplace/residence continuum which reminds one of a Palladian agricultural estate. Over the years, he has used his house as a practical laboratory for his own architectural development, much as Frank Lloyd Wright did in his studio-home in Oak Park, or as Frank Gehry has done in Santa Monica. Documented in Graves’s first Rizzoli monograph as the anonymous “Warehouse, Princeton,” but identified in the subsequent volume as the architect’s own residence, the house and its grounds have undergone gradual transformation from a simple L-shaped warehouse (built by Italian stonemasons who were imported to work on the university buildings) to what is by now a veritable stately home.
A demonstration not only of Graves’s taste in architecture and landscape, it is also a setting for his own domestic artifacts: light fittings, clocks, picture frames, bowls, chairs are resplendently arrayed in this ultimate show home, a walk-through catalogue of his aesthetic. One is reminded of the Ralph Lauren Polo store on Madison Avenue—a palazzo of consumption, decorated and trimmed with all sorts of authentic knickknacks—except that in this case, it really is a home—the dog hair on a rumpled white-covered armchair in one guest bedroom a rare lapse in perfection, testifying to actual use.
If a detective came to the Graves residence and wanted to know what kind of a man had lived there, I would point to just two sets of things. Not the neoclassical paintings, nor the piles of illustrated books on landscape and architecture, nor the fine library with tall shelves reaching toward a skylight, nor the Etruscan pots secreted in high niches like the cherished trophies of some latter-day Sir John Soane. No, I would choose the following clues: the collection of souvenir Tempiettos and the set of antique magnifying glasses. Here, condensed as if dream motifs, are architecture and optical illusion, the miniature and the magnified, the distortions of history and the play of scale. Graves’s chief preoccupations, in talismanic form.
The house, as it has gradually matured, is like a slow-evolving Polaroid of one man’s passion for classicism. It is the coming into focus of an Italy of the imagination—the place which Graves continues to paint in his “Archaic Landscapes,” whence he derives the crisscrossed tunics of his costume designs, the chiseled letterforms of his graphics, the heavy, medallion-like shapes of his recent jewelry.
It is obvious that the formative experience of Graves’s career was the time spent in Rome, from 1960 to 1962, as a Fellow of the American Academy. For a young man from the Midwest, who had never previously traveled to Europe, landing in Rome was an utter revelation. Until then he had had very little exposure to the history of architecture. “I had one history course in six years at Cincinnati, the last term of my senior year: the Greeks, the Romans to the Byzantines.” A course with Sigfried Giedion at Harvard on Swedish Town Planning sticks in his mind—“buildings that looked like keyholes.” But overall, “it was an anti-intellectual time, a doing time. We talked about architecture in terms of keeping the rain out. We had a very curious idea of what architecture was.” Arriving in Rome was bound to make a deep impression, and Graves spent his time drawing buildings by Francesco Borromini, selling his drawings to fund travel around the country. “I went everywhere. We’d get up and decide on an itinerary for the day, like, ‘Today we will see round churches with wall paintings.’ I can hardly believe how much time we had.”
While Rome was pivotal to his subsequent career, Graves also acknowledges some influences back home in America. He jokes that “I’m the one architect that didn’t work for anybody important, but I worked for wonderful people.” A short stint at the office of Walter Gropius (“about one and a half minutes, actually working for somebody third in command doing Baghdad University”) counted for less than the year he spent at the office of the multifaceted designer George Nelson, after taking his master’s degree at Harvard. Trained as an architect and a Rome Prize Fellow himself, Nelson was also a writer, photographer, graphic designer, furniture designer, and editor of Architectural Forum, then the most important design magazine in America.
The diversity of Nelson’s activities (which included film titles and product packaging alongside his better-known seating) seems to have been a lasting inspiration. It was during this period, just prior to his departure for Rome, that Graves became familiar with the work of Charles Eames and textile designer Alexander Girard, who were also working as design consultants for Herman Miller. Girard’s palette, influenced by the Native American culture of the Southwest, remained a powerful source for Graves’s own use of color.
The General Motors Tech Center, designed by the Saarinens, père et fils, was also an “extremely important” influence. Completed in 1956, in the heyday of pink Cadillacs and tail fins, the Detroit research campus of the giant auto manufacturer was a dramatic example of corporate modernism: an arrangement of spartan Miesian pavilions, enlivened by vibrant color on certain elevations which gave them what Graves calls “already an adjectival, decorative look.” He likens their simple colorful exuberance to the work of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán. “I remember going to the GM Tech Center when I was seventeen, when it had just opened—it was hard to see modern buildings growing up in a backwater like Cincinnati. I walked into the Information Center, and there was a blonde in a white dress sitting at a round white desk, and behind her, a staircase going up with no visible means of support except some very thin metal struts.” The totality of the mise-en-scène—what one might call the designed artifice—made a deep impression. “We did aspire to put ourselves into our buildings in that way.”
Graves has always cared deeply about his own surroundings, and talks with equally fond recollection of arranging his home in Cincinnati, his studio at the American Academy, or his apartment on Bank Street in New York. When he was a young married student in the six-year architecture program at Cincinnati in the 1950s —“In those days,” he recalls with a wry smile, “you had to get married to get laid”—many of his classmates were setting up households, and confronting the shortage of well-designed domestic artifacts. So they improvised, making their own furniture such as tables and TV cabinets (the device was then new). They went window-shopping at the local Good Design Store, which carried items approved by the Museum of Modern Art, and even drove up to the Herman Miller headquarters in Zeeland, Michigan, to buy Charles Eames furniture.
Consciously emulating Eames, whose artful photographs certainly contributed to the mystique of his designs, Graves made his own photographic compositions: Eames’s House of Cards placed on a table, plants hanging, the light falling just so. Early in his career, Graves was asked to show examples of interiors he had done, having been recommended for a commission to design a house. Lacking a portfolio of interior design work, he swiftly put together some forty still life photographs of his own house. He arranged flatware, plants, furniture, and the one Etruscan vase he then owned (bought in a flea market in Rome during his Fellowship years), shooting them “all very close-up because if you showed any more you’d see the background. It was all stage-setting.” He got the job.
If the range of choices was limited when Graves was a student, he finds the anonymity of much contemporary product design just as dismaying. “Whether you go to Pottery Barn, Conran’s, or Tiffany’s, it seems to me the level of personality is missing. The design has been watered down.” His admiration for Eames, Nelson, or earlier heroes, such as Josef Hoffmann of the Wiener Werkstätte, is based on a sense that “there’s somebody home. There’s talent, there’s some body in the work.” But the ideological distance between Graves’s design and the mainstream of contemporary product designers is striking. (He claims to have “no relation whatsoever” to the product design community. “It’s really just like architecture...it has its own little club.”)
His design ideas spring from an intensely personal vision, rather than seeking form through investigation of specific functional problems and resolving them by pushing the envelope of modern materials technology. Graves’s repertoire of materials is emphatically deluxe, often employing choice timbers or precious metals; even if mass-produced, his designs refer to crafts traditions rather than to mechanized production. One could say that his work is actually antimodernist in this respect, since it is not primarily concerned with designing good-quality generic items for everyman (the implicit goal of modern design), but with reclaiming the notion of the handmade object, the elegant appurtenance.
While other architects of his generation have also turned their hand to design—one thinks particularly of Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey, Robert Venturi, and Frank Gehry, all of whom have designed for Swid Powell, for example—few have developed as comprehensive a range of artifacts and furnishings. For Graves, architecture and interiors are a continuum. “I never thought of buildings as being distinct from their interiors,” he says. “That’s part of the Rome influence. A room is set up around furniture the way buildings are set up around landscape.” He cites a mentor, the veteran architectural theorist Colin Rowe, who asserts that it is easier to rearrange the furniture in a classical house than a modernist home, because the latter tends to require more set pieces to sustain a sense of intimacy.
Following the success of the Portland Building and the Humana Building in Louisville, Kentucky, Graves’s architectural work made a quantum leap. Suddenly his practice was commissioned to design skyscrapers, hotels, and multiuse developments on urban tracts, and projects poured in from Japan.
As the scale of his architectural projects has grown, his enthusiasm for designing small-scale artifacts seems only to have increased. Old hands at the office joke about having to stand around, waiting patiently for approval on modifications to some multimillion dollar skyscraper, while Graves is immersed in detailing a new vase or clock.
Looking at the vast array of Graves’s projects over the last decade, one can identify elements of a formal vocabulary that tend to crop up irrespective of the scale of the artifact. For example, the Lucca and Urbino wall sconces, manufactured by Baldinger, bear a strong family resemblance, in their cylindrical form girded by metal, to the Alessi press-filter coffee pot, a glass vessel held in a metal portcullis. This basic drum form appears again, at much vaster scale, in several building projects, be it the original design for the Whitney Museum (where a perforated cylinder was to have served as a columnar seam between the Marcel Breuer building and Graves’s addition, never realized) or the rotunda terminating the west end of the proposed 2121 Pennsylvania Avenue development.
Indeed, his product designs often have the look of miniaturized architecture: the birdhouse of 1987, explicitly, and the Alessi mantel clock of 1986 in bird’s-eye maple with ebonised wood columns. There’s a distinctly architectural presence even to the infamous Alessi kettle, the conehead for which Graves will remain known, long after the controversies over the Portland Building, the Whitney Extension, and the Disney Headquarters—with its giant Seven Dwarfs—have been forgotten.
Some of the most attractive designs are those to be worn or held, attuned to the proportions of the human hand, the pleasure of touch, the sensuousness of materials used close to the skin. When asked how he tackles the shift in scale from designing buildings to designing portable artifacts, Graves replies that “it’s more a question of tactility than a scale issue. When I was first thinking about the leather objects, I thought that the ones on the market felt awful, made of stuff one didn’t care about.” The series of desk books and personal documents in supple suede (by Spinneybeck) beg to be stroked, their gold embossed squares a finger-luring Braille. The watch for Cleto Munari and the flatware are dainty and almost feminine in their detailing; neither of them bear much kinship with trends in contemporary watch or cutlery design, and therein lies their charm, a willful antiquity.
High-rise commercial architecture in the 1980s essentially boiled down to designing the hat, boots, and overcoat—in other words, the penthouse suites, lobby (plus elevator cabs), and glazing/curtain walling. The floorplates of new skyscrapers were machines for maximizing rentable square feet, undifferentiated shelves (around a service core) on which to stack contract furniture and tenants, in arrangements devised by their own interior design consultants.
Declining to submit to this traditional division of labor, Graves has reclaimed these orphan spaces as legitimately within the architect’s sphere of attention. His diversification into architectural lighting and furnishings is a spin-off of his large commercial projects: the light fittings designed for the Humana Building appear, for example, in the Disney projects, customized with appropriate motifs, and elsewhere. Indeed, in the Disney hotels in Orlando, every surface comes under scrutiny, from the giant swans and dolphins on the roof to the oversize flower murals in the entrance lobby and the wallpaper along guestroom corridors, to the bedside lamps and cabinets. “It’s an enormous accomplishment to get your furniture, rugs, and lighting into a hotel room,” says Graves, explaining the economics of the lodging business, which make it hard to compete with manufacturers who can produce knockoffs of original designs. “If someone, say in South Carolina or Toronto, can find the way to make a cut-price version, you can’t beat them.” But with his hotel track record—he’s since completed the Hyatt Regency in Fukuoka, Japan, and is nearing completion of the RadissonBlu on the Astridplein in Antwerp—the Graves name has become a strategic marketing tool, a brand in its own right. “They want to use our furniture, to sell a Michael Graves room, not a Michael Graves-selected room.”
With the end of the Design Decade—the Reagan/Bush era of conspicuous consumption—a more contemplative mood has hit America. Architecture, as handmaiden to the real estate industry, has suffered severely in the global recession. With the downturn in construction, there has been a discernible shift in design consciousness toward neglected issues of infrastructure, the environment, and provision for the disadvantaged. In the thickets of theory, the debate has moved on even beyond deconstructivism, while that buzzword postmodernism is little heard and, as a movement, appears to have passed into history. For Graves, whose work was so closely identified with the aesthetic upheavals of the 1980s—indeed, whose buildings became the very beacons of debate in architecture—the cultural pendulum swing poses dilemmas in terms of critical assessment.
For a significant period in the early to mid-1980s, the Princeton School of Architecture was definitively Gravesian. (Many of his students spend time in his office after graduation, hence its affectionate nickname, “the finishing school.”) With the arrival of younger faculty in the past few years, the school’s ideological direction has changed, toward critical theory and gender issues. Graves’s once-dominant position on the faculty has therefore waned; one senses that this shift is disconcerting for him— the erstwhile Young Turk now finding himself a member of the Old Guard. But success as a built architect and accomplished product designer is perhaps inevitably at odds with a reputation as a radical.
To some, his focus on the formal and the visual—informed by his very particular synthesis of historical precedents— represents a reluctance to engage with issues currently high on the social agenda, and a retreat into a world of his own invention. To others, the consistency of Graves’s aesthetic investigations and his prolific output are what mark him, indisputably, as an artist. Even if the media searchlight has, for now, moved on, that imaginary world is no less fecund, the Graves Warehouse a place of continuing development, those “Archaic Landscapes” as fertile as ever.