Michael Graves

by Ian Volner

  After that, there was nothing. This lack of work is not in any sense unusual: in architecture years, a thirty-year-old is still a babe in arms, and most designers cannot hope to see their first realized project until they’ve crossed the meridian of forty. There was a special urgency for Michael, however, as pressure closed in from several sides.

  On the one hand, while he struggled, his friend Richard Meier already had not one but two buildings under his belt. The first had been designed back in 1961, a vacation residence on the seaside at Fire Island, New York, for the illustrator Saul Lambert. A simple wooden rectangle constructed in the space of barely two weeks, it was a chic if unoriginal exercise in hardware-store Mies—but whatever it was, it was a commission. Only two years later, Carolyn and Jerome Meier, Richard’s parents, hired their son to build them a new house in Essex Fells, New Jersey, steps from his childhood home. This, too, Meier designed in a limited vocabulary of planar volumes, offset by a single rounded turret that added a little Corbusian plasticity to the ensemble.

  Richard Meier’s Lambert House, Fire Island, New York, 1962

  Charles Gwathmey’s house and studio for his parents, Amagansett, New York, 1965

  Another acquaintance of Michael’s, four years his junior, was also fast out of the gate. Charles Gwathmey (Charlie to his friends) was a Yale graduate and a young associate in the office of Edward Larrabee Barnes. “A muscle man,” as Michael recalled him, Gwathmey was an avid weight lifter, as well as a bon vivant to rival even the lusty Meier. On a green apron of land next to the sea in Amagansett, Long Island, Gwathmey had built a house for his parents, just as Meier had for his, and it was remarkable: almost more Corb than Corb. The house’s careful arrangement of curved and flat surfaces created what the architect called a “perceptual dynamic of corner versus facade,” like a piece of sculpture meant to be viewed in the round.22

  Michael had met Gwathmey and knew about the house. He also knew that Gwathmey was the son of the painter Robert Gwathmey, whose collage-like images of the rural South had made him a favorite among left-leaning art lovers since the 1930s. Gwathmey’s parents had the taste and the means to support their son’s career, just as Meier’s parents had—Michael would refer to Meier’s project in Essex Fells as “a rich man’s house.” Michael had no so such parental support. Quite the opposite.23

  Though he avoided discussing it himself, Michael was all too mindful of Erma’s ongoing skepticism regarding his creative proclivities. Despite Harvard, despite the Rome Prize, despite the job at Princeton, his mother did not, by most accounts, view her son as having yet gotten himself a real job.24 In the years since both of her sons had left Indianapolis, Erma’s eldest had been forging ahead in the business world, while Michael was—to Erma’s mind—still drawing pictures of houses. When times were especially tough, it was Tom, not Erma, who helped keep Michael afloat as an architect. “He supported me,” Michael said, sometimes with cash.25

  Michael’s accepting his brother’s generosity could only have confirmed Erma’s feeling that he had not made himself of use. But Michael wasn’t in a position to refuse charity. By 1964 he and Gail had still another reason to worry about their balance at the bank: the birth of their daughter, Sarah. Michael had always had it in mind to be a father—the delay, which had lasted for five years of marriage, turned out to be the result of a minor medical issue. Now that parenthood was upon them, the couple would be even harder pressed for funds.

  Michael’s starting salary at Princeton was $7,000 a year—more than he’d made at Nelson’s office, but far from lavish. He received a modest promotion to assistant professor in 1963, with a marginal increase in pay, but it put only a small dent in the couple’s penury.26 Gail had taken to making Michael’s clothes for him, including a brown velvet Nehru jacket that went as low as his knees. The Beatles look “was very fashionable,” Michael noted, “but then, to wear that coat in Princeton was something else! I wasn’t in New York. So I didn’t wear it very much.”27 In later years, fine clothes (along with cars, and furniture, and much else) would be among Michael’s major indulgences, but for now they were off the table. So was New York, for the most part, which was not becoming the base of operations he thought it would be when he first came to Princeton.

  “WHO IS THIS PERSON ‘Eisenman Graves’?”

  The question, put to a colleague while strolling near Cannon Green, came from Professor Arthur Szathmary, a distinguished—if occasionally befuddled—Princeton philosopher who’d been at the university for decades.28 His conflation of the two upstarts at the architecture school could be forgiven, of course, in view of how quickly Michael and Eisenman had made themselves an indivisible and unavoidable presence on campus.

  Not content with the support of Dean McLaughlin, the duo had established personal ties with Princeton University president Robert F. Goheen. Appointed in 1957 at the astonishing age of thirty-seven, Goheen had set himself up as a one-man task force to drag his dowdy institution into the twentieth century. He recognized an intellectual ally in the persons of Eisenman and Graves.

  “He got us a hundred thousand from Ford,” recalled Eisenman. “It was a lot of money in 1964.”29 Indeed, it was almost $800,000 in 2017 terms—and with it Eisenman and Michael expanded into para-academic activities, using Princeton as a home base. Principally they created an innovative subprogram, somewhere between a working group and a debate society, composed of various architect friends from New York and beyond. They called it CASE: the Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment.

  “The group served as an answer,” wrote the historian Suzanne Frank, “to the complaint from England that architecture in the US was uncritical and lacked a forum for ideas.”30 CASE was founded on the notion that Modernism had reached a critical impasse—the same impetus behind Team X—but CASE’s muse was Colin Rowe, an active participant in its early meetings in Princeton as well as from his new perch in Ithaca, New York. Richard Meier was also on board, along with John Hejduk, then a professor at New York’s Cooper Union. Other participants joined up from the University of Pennsylvania and MIT, as did the British critic and historian Kenneth Frampton, who began teaching at Princeton in 1965.

  The organization’s diverse initiatives are difficult to summarize, as its core and peripheral members engaged over the life of the group in an array of panels and symposia, public programs, teach-ins, exhibitions, and the distribution of published materials—though not, as Eisenman had originally hoped, a magazine. CASE was, in a sense, everything and nothing; by 1968 Eisenman would declare it “a rather ugly child, ill-formed and without direction.”31 Despite Michael’s serving at numerous levels on its committees and subcommittees, CASE was always too nebulous an entity (and too dominated from the start by the entrepreneurial Eisenman) to further his personal interests and talents.

  CASE did, however, have a lasting impact on the direction of American architecture. And in at least two particulars, it had a lasting impact on Michael.

  The first stemmed from a speculative project developed by Michael and Eisenman, working with a circle of associates in the basement of the new Princeton School of Architecture. Intended as a response to CASE’s focus on city planning, it was entitled the Jersey Corridor Project, a vision for a new kind of metropolis twenty miles long and only a mile wide between Philadelphia and New York [PLATES 9 AND 10]. In plan, it comprised “two parallel strips,” as the critic Karrie Jacobs would describe it, “running like a ribbon through an otherwise pristine natural landscape”: on the one side stood housing and commercial accommodations, on the other, industrial plants, and in between them, a long band of parkland and recreational facilities.32 Most important was what flowed beneath the twin ranks of buildings: freeways, railways, and other transit infrastructure. Embedded within the mass of the city, these allowed residents direct access to their homes, thereby mitigating the suburban sprawl that resulted from conventional highways, which (in the young architects’ view) was at the root of America’s growing social
disarray.

  Caroline Constant was a young architect whose husband was studying at Princeton, and in 1965 she found herself pulled into the preparatory work for the Jersey Corridor scheme. “They couldn’t read Corb because he hadn’t been translated into English yet,” she recalled. Acting as factotum, she helped Eisenman and Michael fill out their grasp of urban theory with the requisite Modernist bibliography.33 The “linear city” concept had long been in the bloodstream of architecture, with roots stretching back to nineteenth-century Spain, and as the Princeton duo readied themselves to present their idea to their fellow CASE members, they drew on a large body of scholarship and enlisted the help of others, including Constant and a young Englishman, Anthony Vidler, who completed many of the final drawings himself.

  It was a visionary, blue-sky idea, one that practically out-CIAMed CIAM, and it seems strangely at variance with CASE’s supposedly critical mission. Unsurprisingly, its technocratic grandeur did not earn it a warm reception at the group’s second major symposium at MIT in 1966. By then, however, the project had already yielded a tangible benefit to its creators.

  Arthur Drexler, director of the Department of Architecture and Design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, had paid a call on the cellar dwellers at Princeton during the Jersey Corridor’s development and liked what he saw. “He said he didn’t know young architects were working on urban projects like this,” recalled Eisenman.34 The Jersey Corridor was already slated to appear in a show organized under the auspices of the Architectural League of New York (curated by a young Yale-trained architect, Robert A. M. Stern), but Drexler, excited by the proposal’s scope and scale, took up Eisenman’s suggestion to stage something bigger, a full exhibition at MoMA featuring similarly outsize proposals for reinventing the city. Eisenman, as ever, would take the lead in developing the show, bringing in teams (many of them CASE connected) from other universities to complement a new plan from the Princeton contingent, which naturally would include Michael.

  In an additional stroke of good fortune, LIFE magazine ran a banner issue in December 1965 under the portentous headline “The U.S. City: Its Greatness Is at Stake.”35 In an impressive full two-page spread, there was the Jersey Corridor, alongside stories on renewal schemes in Chicago and New York (and the odd advertisement for Armour-brand hot dogs). If CASE had done nothing else for Michael, it would at least have put his work in the pages of one of the nation’s most popular weeklies and given him a berth in the most important museum for the promotion of new architecture in America.

  THE JERSEY CORRIDOR PROJECT and the 1967 MoMA New City show represented a high point in the attempt to salvage modern design not through retreat but through advance, at least as it touched Michael’s career. That the suggested means of doing so were rather improbable (not to say megalomaniacal) was not lost on those involved in the effort. As Caroline Constant put it, when she first signed on for the Jersey Corridor project, “I thought all of them”—Michael, Vidler, Eisenman—“were brilliant. And then I thought they were maybe full of shit.”36

  The second major consequence of Michael’s involvement with CASE was completely contradictory to the results of the Jersey Corridor project. For while a brash Modernist plan got Michael into MoMA, it was the borderline anti-Modernism of some of CASE’s contributors that got into Michael.

  Among the attendees at the CASE inaugural summit in Princeton in November 1964 was Robert Venturi, an architect and University of Pennsylvania professor who had worked for Louis Kahn and had been at the American Academy in Rome just four years ahead of Michael. During the proceedings, Venturi acted as the resident wet towel: as MIT’s Stanford Anderson recalled, at the end of the three-day session everyone else was looking forward to the next meeting, while the Philadelphian “rhetorically enquired whether participation would lead to architectural commissions, and then demurred.”37 Thereafter, Venturi distanced himself from CASE, skeptical as to how the “forum for ideas” could have any relevance to architecture as it was then being practiced or to the American city as it was being built—or, as the case often was, demolished.

  Doubts about Modernist theory and planning formed the keynote of another major speech at the first CASE confab, delivered by Vincent Scully. The Yale academic had almost single-handedly discovered the history of American architecture as an object of serious research, and though an avid proponent of Modernist design, he voiced misgivings about some of the movement’s foundational assumptions, regretting “the general devaluation of the past” and pleading for an emphasis on the “anti-Utopian” and “past-present continuity.”38 Only a year prior, Scully had decried the destruction of New York’s Penn Station and its replacement with a lame Modernist successor. Here he paraded the banner of the newborn preservationist movement before a group of practicing modern architects.

  A mounting sense of caution came from another quarter as well: Colin Rowe. “Complaining of the messianic complex of architects,” Anderson recalled, Rowe suggested that designers do not, as a rule, possess all the answers. The presumption of historical innocence that had always shielded Modernism—the belief that because it was not of the past, its buildings were an antidote to the ills of the past, Nazism among them—could no longer, in Rowe’s view, be taken for granted. While at Cambridge, Rowe had imbibed the writings of the philosopher Karl Popper, and his message to CASE echoed the Austrian-born thinker’s antiauthoritarian sentiments. “The public,” Rowe said, “should offer opposition.”39

  No one at that first CASE meeting seems to have judged any of this chatter to be terribly transgressive. No gauntlets had been thrown, no dies cast. What was important was that they, and Michael, had heard it.

  IN THE SAME YEAR that Sarah was born, Gail and Michael moved again, this time to an apartment at 10 Bank Street, just across the road from campus.40 In 1967 they were joined there by another occupant: their son, Adam. Gail had embraced life in Princeton to an extent that she had not done in Cambridge, making friends of her own in addition to those, like Eisenman’s wife, Elizabeth, who had entered their circle through Michael’s work.

  To all appearances, the Graves household was a fairly stable one. Michael flourished under his wife’s care—visibly, becoming quite heavy for a period in the mid- to late 1960s.41 Still, looking back, he was to maintain that Gail’s being “shy” remained a point of difference between them. This tends to downplay Michael’s own capacity for diffidence, and if any distance had grown between them following the arrival of their children, the cause was more likely Michael’s compulsive attention to his work, which became more and more pronounced. His new studio was directly opposite the Bank Street apartment, and in the small hours of the morning Gail could look out the window and see him still at the drafting table.

  He had formally launched his practice, Michael Graves Architect, after receiving his official registration in 1964, and was ramping up work on competitions and speculative projects such as the Princeton portion of the New City show—another far-fetched megastructural proposal, this time for the waterfront of Upper Manhattan. The exhibition was well received, a feather in the cap of the whole Princeton team, but there was no money in it, and it attracted no clients. Michael was working just to find work—submitting competition entries, some in collaboration with Eisenman, for commissions in California; Washington, DC; and elsewhere, and the hunt consumed time that otherwise might have gone to his personal relationships.42 He remained, as he had for years, in sporadic touch with Ray Roush and a couple of his old Broad Ripple Village friends, but his Princeton associates were his only regular company.

  In that arena, the MoMA show ultimately had a perverse effect. Robert McLaughlin had retired in 1965, replaced by a new dean (the first to hold the title), Robert Geddes, a more forceful character and more in line with Goheen’s new direction for the university. Geddes and Eisenman had squabbled over the membership of the Princeton New City team: Geddes felt he should appoint it, while Eisenman felt that the choice had been entrusted to him by Arthur Drexl
er. “He wants us, not you,” Eisenman told Geddes. Eisenman got his way. After that, Eisenman recalled, “I can count the number of days I had at Princeton.”43

  By the time the MoMA show opened in January 1967, the Princeton School of Architecture had declined to offer Eisenman a tenured position. It offered it to someone else instead—Michael. Dean Geddes, in looking back, was to say that it had mostly been a bureaucratic snafu, and a regrettable one, only one tenured position being available that year.44 Regardless, the disappointment was a bitter one for Eisenman, since (as he recounted decades later) he had largely written Michael’s tenure application for him. He expected the friend for whom he’d done so much to step up and object, if not reject the offer out of hand. It was not to be. As Eisenman described it:

  I said hey, you gotta go tell ’em! And he didn’t. We lived with that as a datum for our being friends, and I think a lot of Michael’s anxiety came from that early moral misstep he knew he had taken. I tried as much as possible to stay out of the way of reminding him, but there was this debt.

  Eisenman Graves was dead.

  Or so it seemed. In the end, Eisenman did not suffer unduly as a result of his peremptory dismissal from Princeton. Almost immediately he founded what he described at the time as “a halfway house, between academe and the profession.”45 Known as the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS), it was a successor outfit of sorts to CASE, but of far greater reach and, in due course, influence. Eisenman was also underway with a small residential commission—in Princeton, no less, bringing him back within Michael’s orbit and allowing their friendship, though strained, to carry on. Michael kept up with the goings-on at the IAUS and preserved his nominal affiliation with the now semi-orphaned CASE; the latter would bear fruit for him a third and final time in the form of another small MoMA function, though that would not come until 1969.