by Ian Volner
Because this time, the criticism did not send Michael back to the drawing board. In his preparatory drawings for Portland, he had rolled together his love of the classical, his belief in the empathic power of anthropomorphic forms, and his artistic infatuation with pictorial surface. If the result had fallen short, he would get it right next time, and his subsequent work would be a matter of fine-tuning, not abandoning, the rhetoric of Portland. And he could now afford to do that on a grander scale than he’d ever imagined: he now had a foot in the door as a designer of large-scale buildings, and for all its critics the Portland project had won him at least as many admirers, not a few of them quite influential.
Whatever people thought about Michael Graves, they were definitely thinking about him. He recalled reading an unscientific poll in 1982 that asked average Americans which three architects they knew by name. First place went, predictably, to Frank Lloyd Wright; third went to I. M. Pei, the Chinese American architect who had recently completed an extension to the National Gallery in Washington, DC. In between them was Michael Graves.18
ARCHITECTURE WAGS WOULD begin to joke about “the Gravesy train.”19
Michael’s sudden celebrity touched off a flood of commissions that stunned seasoned architecture watchers. In part it was a happy coincidence: in 1983, after nearly a decade of episodic recessions, the national economy roared back to life, most especially (thanks to the regulatory and tax rollbacks of the Reagan administration) the real estate sector, which swiftly went into overdrive. Michael had chosen a good time to become famous, and in a decade that loved to buy, there were more things for an architect to sell than ever before.
That said, the seeds of Michael’s commercial success had been planted earlier. Hustling to keep the roof over his associates’ heads back in Princeton (sometimes for reasons unrelated to finance: they were booted out of one office for playing loud music), Michael had learned early how to package his architectural enthusiasms for public consumption.20 In 1979 his architectural drawings had been the subject of a major exhibition at Max Protetch Gallery in Manhattan, the first solo show at what would become the design world’s primary beachhead in the surging 1980s art market. Protetch had seized on an emerging vogue for architectural drawings then taking hold in New York, a by-product of MoMA’s spectacular The Architecture of the École des Beaux Arts exhibition in 1975, as well as a 1977 show on architectural renderings at the Architectural League of New York, which featured Michael’s own work. His colorful drawings, on his hallmark yellow paper, had more than a whiff of Beaux Arts glamour about them, and the Protetch show was a smashing success, stirring up some much-needed media buzz for Michael’s practice (and a little cash in the bargain). The lesson—that there were more ways to reach his audience than just building buildings—was one Michael had not failed to learn.
Nor was that his only early foray into the popular marketplace. Among Fargo-Moorhead’s most ardent admirers was the critic Martin Filler, who was on the staff of Progressive Architecture at the time the bridge proposal won the magazine’s self-titled award. In his role as the publication’s interior design editor, Filler was contacted in 1978 by the former CEO of the Knoll furniture company, Bobby Cadwallader, who was planning to launch a new high-end interiors firm. Cadwallader was looking for an architect to create the showrooms for his incipient contract furniture brand, and with his swashbuckling if abrasive attitude (Filler remembered him once hurling a choice epithet at Julian Niccolini, the Italian co-owner of Manhattan’s Four Seasons restaurant), the businessman, Filler thought, might be amenable to trying his luck on an untested young designer with a daring new aesthetic. “I just said, ‘Michael,’” recalled Filler.21
An amalgam of Cleveland-based Hauserman Inc. and a recently acquired Canadian subsidiary, Cadwallader’s new venture would be called Sunar-Hauserman Inc., and it had set its sights on besting the major manufacturers such as Knoll that had been dominating the furniture trade for years.22 Sunar-Hauserman’s business plan called for a quick rollout, with as many as five locations (originally titled either Sunar or Hauserman) to open across the country in the space of about three years. When Cadwallader approached Michael regarding the showroom commission, he jumped at the chance, recognizing it as an opportunity to expand his office’s reach.
“We’ve never had so much fun devising plans,” said Michael.23 Solidifying their axial, symmetrical approach to space making, the firm designed interiors—beginning in 1979, with a temporary space in Manhattan—that were a snapshot of Postmodernism in its infancy [PLATE 32]. In the several installations that followed, each room was a brightly lit, chamber-like theater. The hallways were devised as long colonnaded enfilades ending in trompe l’oeil murals; the original New York space featured the company’s fabrics slung like wisteria over makeshift pergolas made from large paper tubes painted pale terracotta. The budget was small, but Michael and his associates were accustomed to working on a shoestring, and they understood quickly that the showrooms had struck a chord. On first seeing them, the company’s marketing director exclaimed to Michael, “Finally I have something to write about! Not just black, white, and gray.”24
Most of the articles on display in the showrooms were by recognized figures with years of experience designing furniture. But in his negotiations with Cadwallader, Michael had consented to design the showrooms on the condition that Sunar would allow him to create furniture as well. Cadwallader consented, and, pleased by the showrooms’ reception, he commissioned Michael to create a small line of seating for the brand: maple-clad, thickly upholstered chairs, boxier renditions of the lounges that Michael had been collecting of late. The Graves team had designed a few small fixtures for private projects, including a series of rugs, lamps, and tables for the Plocek House, as well as rugs for the V’soske brand in 1979. The Sunar chairs, however, represented the team’s first outing in the rough-and-tumble arena of commercial furniture design.
It was something Michael had long dreamed of. Among the unintentional side effects of the Modernist hegemony in architecture was that furniture design had been partially deleted from the remit of architects. With large corporate firms like Gordon Bunshaft’s SOM busily peopling the landscape with glass towers, the furniture that filled those towers was left to companies such as Knoll, working with designers specializing in Modernist interiors—such as George Nelson, Michael’s former boss. This ran counter to the model of practice advanced by the founders of Modernism itself: as Michael noted, “Corb, Eames, Saarinen, Wright—all of them did furniture, and their own interiors for their buildings.”25 The Bauhaus in particular had posited the objective of “total architecture,” in Gropius’s phrase, whereby design and industry would work hand in hand to create the ideal environment for modern life.26 Postmodernist though he now was, Michael was drawn to that Modernist model, and he used Sunar as his entrée.
Michael Graves Architect’s contribution to the “Strada Novissima” at the 1980 Venice Biennale of Architecture
The chair sold poorly, but the showrooms touched off a minor media bonanza. In 1981 Michael was named Designer of the Year by Interiors magazine, which devoted a two-page spread to his proposal for a “prototypical PoMo apartment,” replete with rugs and tables and chairs along the same lines as his Sunar work. None of the pictured products went into production, but the story provided further evidence that Postmodernism was speedily gaining the heights of the American design scene.
In Europe, meanwhile, its ascent was no less vertiginous—or controversial. Practitioners like O. M. Ungers in Germany and James Stirling in the United Kingdom had helped it proliferate across the Continent, against steady political and architectural headwinds. In particular in Italy, which had clawed its way back from postwar ruin by remaking itself as a producer of ultramodern consumer products, the break with Modernist principles represented a nervy and possibly risky disruption.
That wasn’t stopping Italian designers. La presenza del passato (The Presence of the Past) was the theme of the 1980 In
ternational Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the first and still most celebrated edition of what has since become the most important architecture show in the world. Curated by Paolo Portoghesi, its highlight was the Strada Novissima, an imaginary street composed of fake fronts, each designed by a different architect. Portoghesi, an architect and historian known for mixing his métiers, worked alongside an advisory board that included Michael’s critical champion Charles Jencks, and together they assembled a who’s who of Postmodernism’s leading figures, among them Robert Venturi, Stanley Tigerman, Léon Krier, Aldo Rossi—and Michael, who put together a minimal ensemble from his new kit of parts: twin columns supporting a curved pediment with a Roman lattice window above.
Also present at the fair was the innovative design collective Alchimia and its most outstanding figure, Ettore Sottsass. His name had already become synonymous with the flamboyant Postmodernist style in Italy, and before the year was out Sottsass broke with Alchimia to establish a new collaborative outfit, Memphis, with the goal of making furniture that could harness the burgeoning PoMo zeitgeist—and, he hoped, cash in on it. In Michael’s work, he saw a way to do just that.
The Milan-based Sottsass and his Memphis Group invited the Graves team to join their new stable of designers; in 1981 their first collection would debut during Milan’s gargantuan Salone del Mobile, and the line for the opening-night party stretched around the block.27 Michael’s main contribution, along with a bed of comparable character, was a dressing table [PLATE 33]. Faced in bird’s-eye maple, studded with Christmas-style bulbs, and offset with globe lamps and chrome details, it combined Art Deco glam with an elegance that recalled the work of the Viennese designer Josef Hoffmann (a Graves favorite, one whose influence would become more and more essential).
The vanity was everything Michael’s buildings were, only more so—a vertical hodgepodge of mixed geometries, completely frontal in attitude, reflecting the symmetry and order of the human body. It was even more effective, in some senses, than his buildings, since its smaller size made it easier to understand in a picture. At a time when garish music videos, colorful advertisements, and glossy magazine covers were shaping public taste as never before, Michael’s pictorial mastery helped make his Postmodernist products the image of the movement.
SIMILARLY SMITTEN WITH what he’d seen of Michael’s work in Venice was Sottsass’s former Alchimia partner, Alessandro Mendini, who had recently been engaged on a unique commercial project. Mendini had been drafted by Italian kitchenware magnate Alberto Alessi to assemble a list of architects for a pilot program imagined as an irreverent mash-up—in true Postmodernist fashion—of urbanism and consumerism. A product line to be called Tea and Coffee Piazza, the project would challenge architects to use the space of a simple coffee tray to create a sort of idealized town in miniature, with creamer, sugar bowl, coffeepot, and teapot standing in for city buildings. From the Venice Biennale, Venturi, Rossi, Tigerman, and Graves were all brought on board, and their limited-edition services were brought to market over the next three years. Mendini felt that Michael would bring “a little oxygenation,” recalled Alessi, “new inspiration, new ways of expression.” Keen to add some pizzazz to his august family brand, Alessi never intended these “oxygenating” designs for mass production, seeing them only as promotional objets d’art for the serious collector and setting a price point of around $12,000.28
Little surprise, then, that many of the sets remain unsold even thirty-plus years later. But Michael’s Piazza did relatively well, with forty of them doing actual duty at buyers’ breakfast tables (or at least sitting behind vitrines in museums). Four roughly cubic volumes, identically clad in faintly columnar metal fluting and accented with festive turquoise balls, the traytop village is a stylistic mix of Josef Hoffmann and Deco, with a little anthropomorphism thrown in for good measure. Alessi liked what he saw, and at Mendini’s and Sottsass’s urging, he decided to bring Michael back—alone, save for Rossi, among the Piazza collaborators—for a bigger commission.
In the spring of 1984, the product maker gave him a short, seemingly undemanding brief. The company then had one teakettle in its catalog, an industrial-looking bronze and chrome model by the German designer Richard Sapper. Alessi wanted to see what Michael could do, given the same parameters—namely, his design would have to be reasonably cheap to produce, boil water as fast or faster than anything on the market, and make a distinctive whistle when it steamed, just as Sapper’s did.
And then, Michael remembered, Alessi added one more stipulation.
“Make it American,” he said.29
“I remember,” said Alessi years later, “when I opened the first pack sent by Michael’s office with the rough prototype of his kettle. We were very surprised by what we were handling in our hands.”30
What Alessi beheld was a rounded pyramid in stainless steel, with a handle projecting in a three-quarters circle from one side and a conical spout popping jauntily from the other. These three basic geometries were complemented by three decorative details: a blue polyamide handle cover, a black knob atop the lid, and a red bird over the spout, attached by a hinge. The initial impression was more than a little absurd. The geometries were so broad, the handle cover so fat, the bird so cartoonish, that it seemed as though each element had been fashioned independently of the others.
Which, in a sense, they were—except that they combined to make a series of cogent statements about what a teakettle is meant to do. “If I make a handle blue,” Michael said, “I’m suggesting subliminally that it’s cool, not hot. If I make the bird red, I’m also saying it’s hot: don’t touch it.”31 In architectural terms, the Alessi 9093 kettle was an instance of Ledoux’s architecture parlante applied to a commercially available household item [PLATES 34 AND 35].
Setting eyes on it for the first time, Ettore Sottsass was astounded. “You must have a great courage as a designer to design something like this,” he told Alessi. It was not, perhaps, meant as a compliment.32
But Alessi believed the design was salable, and his faith was not misplaced. The 9093 teakettle by Michael Graves landed in stores in Europe and the United States in 1985 and was expected to be on the shelf for two to three years. The team behind it realized they had a phenomenon on their hands when it was still selling briskly five years later; shortly after 1990 it passed the one million sales mark. Originally pegged at $65—at a time when teakettles were sold for less than half that—demand nonetheless held up even as the Alessi company incrementally raised the price. Today, retailing at $190, the 9093 is still in production and well on its way to two million total units, selling about seventy thousand a year. Alberto Alessi’s only regret was asking Michael to make the bird spout removable. “It’s the most stolen part,” he said. “People pass by the shelves, and they grab it.”33
NEW FIRM ASSOCIATE (later partner) Donald Strum joined the Graves office in 1983, and he watched as the Alessi commission progressed from Michael’s early sketches, originally with a squared-off handle, through rough models hacked out of wood, until the day the first complete prototype arrived at the office. “Michael was circling around the room looking at the teakettle from all different angles and vantage points,” Strum recalled. One of Michael’s Biedermeier pieces, a large wall mirror, was hung nearby, and Strum watched as Michael looked at the kettle’s reflection, seeing it pictured in the ornate, tarnished frame.
The moment felt charged, and the room was silent. At last Strum turned to Michael. “The office is getting commission after commission,” he said, “and here you are, staring at your first industrialized product. What are you thinking at this very moment?”
Michael’s response said it all. In a hoarse whisper, he exclaimed: “Motherfucker.”34
A little fist pumping was warranted. The firm was riding high, as Postmodernism continued to make headlines. In 1981 the muckraker-novelist Tom Wolfe published From Bauhaus to Our House, a windy jeremiad on what the white-suited Southerner deemed the baleful
blandness of Modernism. Why, he wondered, had the American people wished upon themselves an architecture that spoke of nothing? “They look up at the barefaced buildings they have bought,” he wrote, “and they can’t figure it out themselves.”35 It was the very case the Grays had been making for more than a decade, but coming from the great tribune of America’s counter-counterculture, it galvanized public sentiment. The book did not, notably, offer much endorsement for the Postmodernist alternative, but then Michael, who knew Wolfe from Philip Johnson’s tony club evenings, didn’t much endorse him, either. “I have a problem with people who dress—like that,” he once said.36
Michael often had a problem with how people dressed and was known to offer unsolicited advice on the subject. (Robert A. M. Stern remembered him once casting a jaundiced eye over a Polo tweed suit being worn by Charles Gwathmey, declaring simply, “Too much Ralph.”)37 Now, with the wind at his back professionally, Michael could at last afford to live up to his sartorial standards. In his Armani jackets, patterned silk scarves, and lightly colored shirts open as far as a seemly second button, he was a dedicated follower of fashion, with a trim figure maintained not through exercise—even if he’d been disposed, his work schedule wouldn’t have allowed it—but through his occasionally severe dieting, a regimen made easier by a deathly aversion to garlic, onions, and spices of any kind. On a visit to London to meet his Postmodernist compatriot Charles Jencks, Michael was greeted by his hosts with a traditional English meal of onion-packed steak and kidney pie. “He was going to die,” recalled Karen Nichols.38
