Michael Graves

by Ian Volner

  IT IS UNFORTUNATE that the Parthenon drawing has not survived, nor the painting of the papier-mâché tiger. What little of Michael’s juvenilia still exists comprises several sheaves of childhood drawings—most of them of popular cartoon characters, with a particular focus (remarkably, in light of his subsequent career) on Mickey Mouse. Together with a few letters to his brother, the ribbon from Purdue, and random ephemera from later decades, these were consigned to a box squirreled away on the Warehouse compound and forgotten until well after Michael’s death. The lack of sentimentality was symptomatic: to Michael, the past was the past. It was not a place he revisited often.

  From a sheaf of Michael’s childhood drawings: a picture of things to come. Drawn on the back of a piece of Graves Commission Co. stationery—the letterhead is visible in the background.

  In the annals of architectural upbringings, such willed oblivion is almost de rigueur. Beginning in 1917, Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris “carefully applied the eraser,” as the scholar J. K. Birksted put it, “to his first thirty formative years”—leaving behind a small town in Switzerland, taking French citizenship, and rechristening himself Le Corbusier.57 A similar transformation was effected by Aachen-born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies, who adopted his mother’s maiden name with a false Dutch nobiliary particle and passed himself off in cosmopolitan Berlin as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

  It has not always been thus. Closer to Michael—both geographically and culturally—Frank Lloyd Wright never turned against his midwestern roots, elevating the lush landscape of his native Wisconsin to a romantic ideal. But this too constituted a form of erasure. Casting himself as a plainsman philosopher-king, Wright rewrote a personal story that had long seemed, to him at least, dangerously prosaic. His middle name at birth was Lincoln, not Lloyd; he dropped the former and its association with his Eastern-born father, taking on the latter for its connection to his mother’s Welsh family and their more appealing, pseudo-Druidical heritage.58 Looking at Wright through the lens of Sigmund Freud, the historian Vincent Scully once wrote that the architect had disposed of his paternity to “sally forth as an Oedipus unrivaled, conqueror of the city.”59 In Michael’s case, however, psychobiography of this kind is not so easily applied. The child and the man share their customary relation, but the bond between them was snapped much later, and in a different spirit than it had been with Wright, Mies, or Le Corbusier.

  Even as he readied himself for college, Michael displayed none of the markings of a young man on the make, eager to re-create himself anew as far from home as he could get. The miracle of Michael’s growing up is that he never hated his childhood, never hated Indianapolis, and for a long time after leaving continued to assume that he would one day return there to stay. He never even hated his father; or if he had hated him, he’d given it up long before settling into his twilight years in Princeton.

  In part, young Mike Graves never shared his father’s anger, because young Mike Graves never knew that life could be very different than it was. That would only come later, as he got out of Indianapolis and out into the world—though when he did, he too would be prey to a gnawing class anxiety not so dissimilar from Bud’s. There were things, Michael would feel, that had been unfairly denied him, things that Bud had regarded with spite because he—or, more accurately, Max—had lost them. A sense of refinement, the grandeur of the past, the world of culture and the arts: Michael would try to reclaim these through the power of his exceptional eye, even if the beauty of the result was sometimes marred by the all-too-visible effort.

  But he would always remain Erma’s son more than Bud’s. Michael was never ruled by his jealousies (although it was sometimes a close call). And because he loved his mother and wanted her to be proud of him, and because he did not hate his father and wanted to prove there was nothing to be afraid of in that bigger world—because of this, and a durable fondness for the quiet suburban streets of Broad Ripple Village and the even-keeled, unassuming people who lived there—there was always a little bit of Indianapolis in whatever Michael Graves did as a designer. He was always playing to the hometown crowd.

  “In the end,” said his old friend Peter Eisenman, “Michael just wanted to be the captain of the Broad Ripple High School football team.”60

  III

  THE BOOK AND THE DOORWAY

  NOT ALL THE GRADUATES of Broad Ripple High School in that spring of 1952 would be headed straight to college the next fall—not even all of those who had applied and been accepted. Under the rules of the nation’s Selective Service System, some college-bound men would be exempt from the ongoing military draft. But others, fully 40 percent that year, would be headed to Korea, where the United States and its allies were engaged in a protracted stalemate after nearly two years of war.1

  Qualifying for an educational deferment meant placing in a certain percentile on a specially devised aptitude test, and even with the recent improvement in his grades Michael was no shoo-in. As it happened, he never had to be: he reported to his nearest processing station, received his physical examination, and shortly thereafter was informed that he’d been deemed 4-F—physically unfit for combat by reason of poor vision. Once again, and not for the last time, Michael’s life was changed by his bad eye.2

  Spared the rigors of army life (which were not likely to have suited him), Michael made ready to leave for Cincinnati. He would spend his first year alone and the subsequent years with Gail, living in rather straightened circumstances, leaving almost everything behind in Indianapolis save for their friendships with Jay and Lois and a few others. For Michael, the departure was to be permanent, though he hardly imagined it so at the time.

  It was not, as escapes go, a particularly daring one. A scant one hundred miles separates Indianola Avenue from the Clifton Heights neighborhood where he now settled, and there was and remains a great deal in common between the metropolis on the White River and the other on the Ohio. At midcentury, Cincinnati was only slightly larger and slightly older than Indianapolis, more industrial but no less sober- and business-minded, and if it seemed to Michael and Gail a touch more exciting than their hometown, it was largely because of the busy cultural life centered on the city’s big, bustling college.

  Not that Michael would have much spare time to enjoy it. The University of Cincinnati’s architecture program was a demanding one: fashioned, at the time, after a cooperative model, it entailed a part-time apprenticeship that saw students attending classes for two months, then working in a professional design studio for two, repeating the pattern until graduation. This gave them practical experience, but it meant long hours, and it extended the typical term of study by half.3 For six years, the young couple would live out a provisional adulthood, Michael trotting off to the office many mornings while Gail studied at home—though not, at least for the first two years, in the same home.4 After her matriculation, the couple maintained separate apartments, enacting a kind of pantomime of the American domestic dream.

  The office to which Michael headed those mornings was itself a bit of midcentury Americana, a species of architectural practice that has almost entirely died out in the decades since. Many years later, a late-life encomium to the architect Carl Strauss appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer: “Week after week, you can find his name in the Sunday paper, somewhere deep in tiny type, buried in the bowels of classified advertising under ‘Houses for Sale.’”5 A staple of the local development scene for fifty-five years—“Cincinnati’s best-known architect,” as the paper called him—Strauss ran a studio that was small but never wanted for work, designed upward of one hundred houses for the city’s great and only slightly less great, and occupied a comfortable niche that seemed perfectly suited to his refined, aristocratic bearing. He was among the last of his breed: a true gentleman-architect.

  “He looked like Alan Ladd,” Michael recalled.6 Strauss’s matinee-idol looks were complemented by a taste for the finer things, for clothes and furniture, and having attained his municipal celebrity shortly after the war he
apparently saw little reason to overexert himself. Michael would recall how, if a building was under construction, Strauss would stop by the worksite in the morning, then drop into the office around noon to answer letters and make phone calls. He would look over the drafting boards of his young associates—seven of them at the firm’s height in the 1950s and early ’60s—and then, at around the four o’clock hour, would take his hat from beside the door and bid them all adieu, as he stepped out to attend the theater or a social function.

  His firm specialized in houses of what has been called the “good-life Modernism” variety—a soft, domesticated amalgam of styles, familiar from a thousand midcentury women’s magazines and once devastatingly summed up by the critic Peter Blake as “the holy trinity of fieldstone, flagstone and the kidney shape.”7 High-end counterparts to the period’s middle-class ranch house, Strauss’s homes featured elegantly glassed-in living rooms in steel frames faced in wood siding, with upper-level dining rooms that cantilevered out over the lower floors to command views of the surrounding landscape. The designs were always accomplished, if rarely daring, and although Strauss’s kindness and personal charm won him the affection of his newest assistant, Michael was not much impressed by his employer’s ability as a designer. And not without reason: Strauss himself was not responsible for some of the office’s finest work.

  That role fell to his most senior associate, a man named Ray Roush. More than anyone else during Michael’s years in Cincinnati, it was Roush who taught him how to be an architect.

  FOURTEEN YEARS MICHAEL’S SENIOR, Raymond E. Roush Jr. was also a product of the University of Cincinnati, a native Ohioan raised in nearby Manchester. During the Second World War he’d worked at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force as a model maker, mapping in exquisite detail the terrain of the continent over which British and American troops were about to advance. After VE Day, he’d remained in Europe to tour the continent he’d just helped conquer, winding up with a year in Paris at the École des Beaux Arts.8 His personal exposure to the latest developments in European architecture, combined with his well-honed sense of precision, made him a perfect foil to the older, airier Strauss. It also made him, for Michael, the ideal architectural role model.

  Ray Roush’s Breuer-esque house in suburban Cincinnati, built in 1951

  “Ray was enamored of Marcel Breuer, and he built himself a Breuer house,” remembered Michael. “That was the first piece of modern architecture I knew—I lived in it, slept in it. My world was so tied to Ray Roush.”9 Not only the first Modernist building Michael had seen up close, but the first architect’s house he’d ever been in, Roush’s home in Anderson Township, just southeast of the city, was a summa on his design thinking: a flowing sequence of indoor and outdoor spaces sheltered under a flat wooden roof, with exposed brick, wooden panels, and brass fixtures within. The Hungarian-born Breuer had started his career at the German Bauhaus school before moving to the States and modulating toward a more personal (and arguably more personable) style, and Roush’s design nodded toward Breuer’s binuclear floor plan, with the public and private spaces separated by a central corridor.10

  Roush’s range of experience, and his devotion to his work, outstripped anything Michael had known. Jayne Merkel, a Cincinnatian herself and years later the architecture critic of the Cincinnati Enquirer, recalled Roush as a retiring, unprepossessing man with a “hippieish” streak, happy to live in his wooded retreat and focus on work while leaving the glad-handing to Strauss.11 One of the partners’ shared projects was a house for a local industrialist, C. Lawson Reed Jr.—an adventurous patron of Cincinnati architecture, who had seen Mies’s original Barcelona Pavilion in 1929—and Roush would return every five years or so to see that the Reed residence was kept up to his personal standards.12 Roush had little patience for mediocrity, and almost instantly he recognized that Michael was anything but mediocre. “He knew,” Merkel said, “that he had this talent.”13

  But there was more to the burgeoning friendship than just mutual professional admiration. Roush and his wife, Lucille, had no children—“just cats,” Michael recalled.14 Ever since the episode with the Episcopal priest back in Broad Ripple Village, Michael had been casting around for a father figure. The reclusive designer soon took on that role for his young protégé.

  Roush imparted to Michael all he knew, far more than the rudimentary skills his high school had given him. “He taught me everything about detailing a building,” Michael recalled, “how to keep the rain out, how to lay foundations.”15 In the small, two-room office of Carl A. Strauss & Associates, Michael learned how the actual business of architecture was conducted, how a project moved from inception to completion. All this Roush spelled out for him, both at work and during long evenings they’d spend together with Lucille, Gail, and the cats.

  And Roush did more. Always anxious to stay current on the newest products of Modernism in America, he and Lucille would drive for hours to cities around the central United States, and soon Gail and Michael were accompanying them. One such stop was Columbus, Indiana, a sleepy town that had lately begun to emerge as an unlikely hub of modern design after a local benefactor, J. Irwin Miller, volunteered to pay the architects’ fees for any building going up in town, provided the designer was approved by him. The itinerary of the foursome from Cincinnati included buildings by Eliel Saarinen and Saarinen’s son Eero, and landscapes by Dan Kiley, all major figures and all completely unknown to Michael. The trip was a memorable one for Gail too.

  “One of the buildings they wanted to see was the Miller House,” she recalled—the residence the younger Saarinen had created for the city’s modern Augustus. “We got there and it was just finished, with all the new furnishings inside, but no one was living there yet. We walked around, peeking in windows, taking photos, and either Michael or Ray tried a door and found it unlocked. So we sneaked inside, snapping photos frantically.”16

  Decades later, Michael met one of the Millers and related the story of his youthful archi-trespassing. The family member was not amused.

  That journey was one of many. Together Roush and Michael drove to Chicago to see the newest masterwork from the only architect Roush admired even more than Breuer—Mies. The German designer had been living in the States since just before the war and in 1952 had just finished another piece of his first major American commission, the campus plan for the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). A stark, bare box of brick and steel faced with glass doors, the Robert F. Carr Memorial Chapel of St. Savior was fast becoming a pilgrimage site for architecture fans from around the country, and Roush and Michael were among the first to pay their respects.

  The Robert F. Carr Memorial Chapel, 1952, the centerpiece of Mies’s campus design for the Illinois Institute of Technology

  As the two visitors entered and looked around, they saw before them at the end of the unadorned interior a narrow, square tube of brilliant chrome, about three-quarters of an inch thick, that separated the altar from the main space. The beauty of that one exquisite element—all the symbolic weight it carried in such a simple detail—sent Roush into raptures.

  But Michael was flummoxed. Why, he thought, am I supposed to get all excited about this piece of metal?

  In the hushed, dimly lit interior of the Carr Chapel, Roush and Michael fell into their first, and practically only, serious argument.17

  DESIGN TOURISM PROVED habit forming, and Michael was soon making trips both with and without Roush. Cincinnati had few Modernist buildings of its own, but the city turned out to be excellently situated for excursions to other towns that did.

  He recalled going with a University of Cincinnati classmate to Detroit to meet Eero Saarinen in person. It had been, Michael was to say, a “spur-of-the-moment” decision, and they were dropping in unannounced—bad planning, it turned out, since after they’d driven for hours, the Finnish-born master greeted them cordially and instantly passed them off to a junior associate. They enjoyed their visit, however, and got a good lo
ok around courtesy of the studio hand, a young Argentine whose name Michael instantly forgot. It took many years for him to realize that his tour guide that afternoon was Cesar Pelli, in later life a major architect (and frequent competitor of Michael’s).

  On still another excursion, Michael returned with Gail to Chicago to get a gander at more buildings there. Gail enjoyed looking at architecture, but this was not truly her passion, and, sensing this, Michael promised that one day of their visit would be her day, to do whatever she wanted.

  “I thought a bit,” Gail recalled, “and said I’d like to drive north of Chicago and stop at some beach along the way—a day walking along the beach.”

  The next afternoon the couple duly headed up the coast of Lake Michigan, and when Gail spied what looked like a perfect spot she suggested they pull over. Michael said he thought they could do better and kept driving. Again and again, Gail kept pointing out plausible bits of beach, and again and again Michael kept urging them onward. Finally, far in the distance, Gail made out the outline of a looming brick tower.

  They hadn’t gone to the beach. They had gone to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax Headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin.

  “Needless to say,” Gail said, “I did not get out of the car when we got there.”18

  THANKS TO RAY ROUSH, Michael had caught the architecture bug, and the case had advanced far beyond the stage of sketching buildings out of books. But there was still a notable disconnect, a gap, between Michael and all the new buildings he was coming to know.