Michael Graves

by Ian Volner

  Development, in fact, was slowing all across America, as the economic downturn of the 1970s dragged on. What had been a general uptick in the volume of work coming into the office turned into another dry spell, and Crooks remained for some time one of Michael’s few still-active commissions. He produced countless sketches and resketches of it, imagining different configurations of the exterior patina and different perspectives of its interior spaces, where the approaches to its tomblike fireplace, set in the middle of the living room, terminated all the multifaceted confusion of the design in a single, monumental vision.

  DAYS AFTER ARRIVING in Princeton from MIT in 1977, newly minted firm associate Karen Nichols (then Karen Wheeler) went with Michael to see the just-finished Claghorn House as it was being set for a shoot by the architectural photographer Yukio Futagawa. As they walked through the house, Michael showed Nichols how the design had come together—how it functioned as a Cubist assemblage, how its quotidian materials resonated with ideas of place and entry, of the private and the public spheres.

  Nichols, like Harris before her, didn’t get it.

  Finally, Michael took her by the shoulders and stood her square in front of the terrace, aiming her directly at the latticed facade of the terrace wall. “Can’t you see it?” he said.

  “See what?”

  “There’s a picture plane!”

  He then proceeded to show her how the puzzle fit together: how the diagonal cutaway of the lattice shaped the space before it; how the lattice blended with the big post-and-beam structure to create the appearance of a trellis; how the trellis, the horizontal courses, and the doorjamb all framed the kitchen, pointing the way toward the entrance. It was all perfectly clear, Michael insisted, once you looked at it the right way, as a frontal tableau.

  All at once, it clicked. “Before that,” recalled Nichols, “I had understood it in three dimensions.”30

  Consonant with the vertical focus of the Asplund Problem, Michael’s design process during these years began to place more and more emphasis on elevations. In good Corbusian fashion, he had usually begun with the plan—a more than adequate template for his painterly skills, Corb himself having proved their compositional potential.31 But as Michael wrote at the time:

  Plan is seen as a conceptual tool, a two-dimensional diagram or notational device with limited capacity to express the perceptual elements.… Plans are experienced only in perspective as opposed to the vertical surfaces of a building which are perceived in a frontal manner.32

  No one, in other words, can appreciate the artistic merit of a plan except insofar as the elevation bears it out. Floors are mute. Walls can speak.

  With elevations taking center stage, Michael began to rely heavily on largeformat yellow tracing paper to render them. Painting, which he continued to do off and on, was never used as a medium for developing specific designs, though his artistic work always took place in parallel with his architectural activity. (“I use the same formal ensemble of objects in my paintings that I use in my architecture,” he put it.)33 Likewise his habit of creating what he termed “referential sketches”: scribbled in small notebooks, sometimes on loose pieces of paper, often in the margins of larger drawings or even next to student work, these were strictly mental musings, intended as his visual “diary,” as he described it.34 They would serve as background material for “preparatory” and finally “definitive” drawings, where facade treatments could be worked out at length in the open space of the large yellow sheets, to be handed off later to his associates for detailing and coloring and then returned to him.

  Such would remain the standard procedure at Michael Graves Architect for decades. But during this pivotal stage in his career—the moment, it might be said, when Michael Graves became Michael Graves—there was a special importance to his private sketching and painting.

  A set of maroon-bound sketchbooks, kept by Michael over an approximately seven-year time frame starting in 1975, affords a unique glimpse into his design approach as it was then evolving. Different versions and views of both the Schulman and Crooks fireplaces turn up in these pages, alongside countless other “referential” caprices floating through his architectural subconscious: churches and landscapes, some recalled from his time in Europe; drawings of John Hejduk’s “Wall House” proposals; images culled from books of architectural history, including a phantasmagorical temple by the eighteenth-century Frenchman Jean-Jacques Lequeu [PLATE 25]; and a remarkable quantity of interior fixtures, sconces, chairs, and other details, some of them ones he was considering for purchase whenever (or if ever) he had the money. Of his day-to-day life he sketched nothing, except once—a tiny, exquisite portrait, marked “ESLG,” which he dashed off on a visit to Indianapolis. It is the only known picture he ever drew of his mother, Erma, and one of very few images he ever created of any family member.35

  Erma Sanderson Lowe Graves, sketched by Michael just prior to his mother’s death

  While many of these casual sketches show their subjects in conventional perspective, the more finished, inked-in drawings in the notebooks show that frontality and elevation were still foremost in Michael’s mind. The more artistic his intent, the flatter the object became: one compositional trope is the imposition of disjointed figurative elements upon what are presumably pieces of landscape, at times pictured on an upright frame as though projected on a human body. In some cases the landscapes appear to be inscribed with snaking structural forms, forms reflected back again in the figuration—a compounding of elevation and plan, implying that the two might be interchangeable. This he had already begun to demonstrate in architectural form with Crooks, “a built chunk of landscape,” as his Princeton colleague Alan Chimacoff called it.36 A building’s relation to its site, its spatial development, its whole parti could be performed, Michael was suggesting, by a single wall.

  Or by several walls, of several buildings, standing together. Michael was always interested in a building’s appearance in context, the way it played off against either existing structures or others of his own design. But this was part and parcel of the same pictorial logic. One need only look at Giorgio Morandi’s bottles and jars or the arrangements of tables and chairs in Henri Matisse’s interior scenes to see the artists who were then most important in Michael’s imagination. Matisse and the ever-present Pablo Picasso were standard fare in his Princeton classes, and both painters informed his compositional investigations: the illusion of depth in their work often collapsed into the patterning on the picture plane. Writing of Picasso, the historian Rosalind Krauss—whom Michael knew and admired greatly—noted: “A sense of the flat and opaque plane was made to qualify every other experience the painting might offer.”37

  This artistic insight had been acting on Michael’s mind for some time, and his architectural production had always had a compressive quality, even in more spatially dense works like Hanselmann and the dizzying Snyderman.38 But what he had discovered at Claghorn was that basic functional accommodations were better handled by a plain box. That left him free to make his exteriors more like two-dimensional projections: a convenient solution, since that was more or less how he’d always seen buildings to begin with.

  Here the matter of Michael’s ocular defect is impossible to ignore. “I thought for years that he didn’t see the way other people did,” said Karen Nichols, who went on to spend the next four decades (and counting) with the firm.39 As she witnessed at Claghorn in the very beginning, Michael could discern continuities—between, for example, a structure that sat in front of a wall and the wall itself—that were all but invisible even to trained architects. Frustrated, and more eager than ever to make himself understood, Michael’s response was to make his work even flatter, eliminating the likelihood of misinterpretation by doing in two dimensions what he had nominally done in three. To his mind and, more importantly, to his eye, nothing would be lost in this translation. Just as his strabismus collapsed spatial arrangements into planar ones, he could sense a dynamism in planar surfaces tha
t most viewers would experience only in perceiving and moving through space. Of course, what made Michael able to see things other people couldn’t also made him unable to see things other people could.

  OBSERVING MICHAEL THAT DAY at Claghorn, Nichols was getting a closer look at a man whom she’d first met a year earlier during a trip down from Cambridge. In the intervening months, she noticed that an alarming change had come over her new employer. “I never saw such a transformation,” she recalled.

  After eight years together, Lucy and Michael had separated, their relationship succumbing to the passions and volatility that had birthed it. It had been, all in all, an unconventional marriage, and both parties had some cause for resentment, though the balance of bitterness seems to have held them both to a tenuous entente that made the divorce at least as civil as Michael and Gail’s had been. Still, in its immediate aftermath, Michael was gutted: “a basket case,” Nichols called him.40 He had embarked on one of his periodic crash diets, and he looked drawn and tired.

  His troubles continued. Bud had died in October 1975; given the distance between father and son, his passing had not much affected Michael, at least outwardly. But two years later, and only months after Michael had sketched the touching portrait of her in his notebook, Erma died as well. The anguish of losing the individual who had always been the one constant in his life could only have been redoubled by his feeling that he, for all his accomplishments, had not yet proved himself to his mother—had not yet shown that his work had real meaning to real people, the end to which all his present efforts were being directed.

  To be nearer their father, Gail had brought the children back to Princeton, and he now saw them every other weekend; he also remained close to his stepchildren, making for a mixed but merry brood that he would sometimes load into his car for architectural tours to places like Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. (On the way to Virginia, the four kids held up a sign in the rear windshield: HELP WE’RE BEING KIDNAPPED.)41 Nonetheless, at forty-three, Michael was now an orphan, twice divorced, with little architectural work to sustain him or his office.

  Pigeonholed, as he described it, into the role of the “Cubist Kitchen King,” he felt himself stuck doing different versions of the same small, less-than-remunerative home-improvement project.42 When Nichols came on board, she was informed by Michael and Caroline Constant that, for the time being, the firm could not afford to pay her. The year 1977 looks, in retrospect, like Michael’s annus horribilis. Yet it was also, paradoxically, an annus mirabilis.

  ITS SEWERS FLOWING FREELY once more, the municipality of Princeton had lifted its building moratorium in 1974, allowing Michael to move ahead with renovations to the Warehouse. Three years later he moved out of Princeton Community Village and into the small central portion of the 1926 structure that had been cleared of debris and improved according to Michael’s plan. The delay had been, as he put it, “a reprieve,” allowing him time to work up a thorough, integrated scheme for turning the rotting hulk into the home of an architect, the way Ray Roush’s home had been to him.43

  As Roush’s house had been a proving ground for his architectural ideas, Michael wanted the Warehouse to show what was possible in the new language he was then inventing. It wasn’t going to be easy: the Warehouse was shaped like an L, with a thick northern wing and a longer western addition jutting southward toward the street. Michael first set up house in the latter section, where the previous owner—“the guy sat there and drank all day long,” Michael recalled—had kept his office; the rest of the conversion would have to wait until funds were available to fix it.44 For the next decade-plus, this meant he would share a roof with an empty, rather creepy bunker. “It looked very tattered and everything was peeling and damp,” he said later. “But I didn’t let it worry me.”45

  Dashing gleefully through the house on their first visit there, Sarah and Adam and their stepsisters had divvied up the rooms, deciding who would sleep where. In reality there was scarcely room for anyone save for Michael: when he moved in, the rehabilitated section consisted of a space with a secondhand stove that he used as a kitchen, a modest sitting room, and an upstairs bath and bedroom with a television and some of his books. “I was living like a student,” he recalled. His colleague Alan Chimacoff, who had given him the stove, recalled the place as being so dusty that after his first visit he was seized with an asthma attack.46

  Michael’s master plan, however, was already in motion. The door in front of the kitchen served as the main entrance, but he proposed to remove it to the northern wing, just off the corner of the L, leading into a small foyer with a dining room to the left and living room to the right. On the second floor, accessed via the living-room staircase, he would situate the master bedroom, along with a private studio and a photographic darkroom. The interior scheme for all this was astonishing: a constantly metamorphosing grid, shaped from windows and tiles and glass blocks and punctuated by rounded columnar supports, was to give the rooms and connecting hallways a sense of continuity and rhythm [PLATE 27]. (The early renderings also show neoclassical statuary, antique furniture, and much else that Michael couldn’t possibly afford at the time.)

  In the first version of the house’s renovation, a portion of this grid system was realized, the downstairs and upstairs bath (as well as the early solarium next to the kitchen) taking up the theme and giving the house a splash of Art Deco flair, accentuated by Michael’s then-unfashionable 1930s furniture. Shifting gridded apertures were also added to the exterior: the Warehouse’s stucco surface, covering a structure of bricks backed by hollow clay tile, was cut with glass-block openings on the eastern flank and to either side of the kitchen door. The house even had a whiff of the scalar and historical vertigo that Crooks might have had, a few windows being blocked with blind squares, and a patch of painted-on masonry—like that found on the rusticated lower floors of Renaissance palaces—gracing the front of the south-facing wall.

  Soon the upstairs guest rooms were ready for the kids, and Michael was able to welcome a few select visitors. He was now a bachelor, and there are perhaps less enviable situations for an unmarried man than to be living in a large, very romantic former industrial building, refashioned after his own design, surrounded by charming odds and ends of furniture gathered from rural flea markets around New Jersey. He had a twenty-dollar cupboard and a half-wrecked Biedermeier breakfast table, the first piece of what would become a substantial collection. He would hear of a rug for sale in a nearby town and drive over to see if it would work in the narrow hallways—shades again of Villa Snellman—that ran between the upstairs rooms. “When you’re doing your own house,” he said, “you don’t know what you want. I didn’t know if I wanted a Persian rug or a Modern rug.”47 As his tastes continued to change, the Warehouse would be Michael’s personal design laboratory.

  ESSENTIALLY CAMPING OUT in his own home for the first several years, Michael didn’t often entertain large groups. But on one memorable occasion in late 1977 he assembled a gaggle of students and a few academic heavyweights—among them Alan Colquhoun, Kenneth Frampton, and Colin Rowe—for an after-hours get-together. That evening, the newly renovated Warehouse became the scene of a minor architectural scandal.48

  Rowe had always been known as a heavy drinker, and on the night in question he had been running off to the kitchen in regular spurts to pour together ad hoc cocktails from whatever bottles were sitting out. He fell into a belligerent, goading sort of mood, which took as its object the usually mannerly Colquhoun. “Rowe was punching his arm in a semifriendly way,” recalled Frampton. “He had this game of calling people ‘buddy boy.’”49 There is some disagreement about what followed, but one way or the other it ended with someone—Rowe most likely—being pushed back into Michael’s fireguard. Michael very discreetly buttonholed Frampton and asked him to escort Rowe back to his hotel. The two Englishmen got no farther than the sidewalk before Rowe executed a clumsy somersault and landed on the asphalt.

  “God,” he said to Frampton. �
��Isn’t this a bore?”

  “The row with Rowe,” as Michael described it, was “half personal,” mostly the result of mixing dissimilar characters and dissimilar alcohols. But it was also, Michael noted, “half architectural,” a view bolstered by Frampton; in the latter’s account, the argument had begun over Colquhoun’s critiques of student work, which often revolved around the political and social intent of their projects. This was what had raised Rowe’s hackles, leading to the fireplace fiasco.50

  It was symptomatic of Rowe’s position at the time. The doubts about the political agency of architecture that Rowe had expressed at CASE 1 had only grown deeper over the preceding decade, and in his newest book, Collage City (portions of the manuscript were already in circulation, though it was not published until 1978), Rowe deliberately set fire to a few of his Modernist boats. Setting aside the presumed moral authority of the Modern movement, he was now advancing a new role for the architect in shaping urban space—a more liberal, eclectic one that made room for history and diversity in both form and spirit. In particular he was sympathetic toward the “residue of classical decorum,” as the book labeled it, taking it as an emblem of tradition still plastic enough to be applicable in the twentieth century.51

  The Grays had long drawn strength from Rowe; they could now claim him almost as one of their own. But more so than previous expressions of their ideas, Rowe’s appeal in Collage City chimed with Michael’s emerging views. Art historical in its frame of reference, its very title alluding to one of Michael’s preferred artistic techniques, the book seemed to grant personal benison to everything Michael had been trying to do for the last five years and more. Rowe had long had Michael’s admiration. Now he had his ear.