Michael Graves

by Ian Volner

  Not just his stomach (better adapted, it might be said, to Indy than to Italy), but Michael’s constitution in general was always finicky. In particular he was prey to sinus infections, minor but persistent. None of this would slow him down, however, as he barreled headlong into the prime of his life.

  SINCE THE EARLY 1970s, Michael had been an occasional visitor to Los Angeles. The UCLA School of Architecture and Urban Design had been the venue for the onstage matchup between the Whites and the Grays in 1974, and Michael had been coming back to lecture ever since. He had not made many connections in the local architecture community—had failed, really, to take stock among the architects of the West Coast of an emerging third tendency—and though he had enjoyed teaching at UCLA, he spurned an offer to succeed Charles Moore as head of the school, reportedly saying that he “couldn’t teach at a school whose library is smaller than mine.”39

  The most meaningful relationship he developed in California was a personal one. Kitty Hawks was the daughter of Howard Hawks—the acclaimed Hollywood director of such films as Scarface and The Big Sleep—and his second wife, the glamorous socialite Slim Keith, known (with Babe Paley) as one of the thinly veiled subjects of Truman Capote’s unfinished novel Answered Prayers. Michael and Kitty met in or around 1980, while she was enrolled in the UCLA program, their introduction effected during a lunch that was, as Charles Jencks recalled, a “setup” orchestrated by him.40 They swiftly became seriously involved, and she agreed to come back East with Michael and take up residence in the Warehouse. “It was more of an intellectual exercise than a place of physical comfort,” she remarked. “Which sort of sums up Michael.”41

  Spanning some five years, Michael and Kitty’s relationship was founded on their shared passion for architecture and culture. Kitty subsequently launched a successful interior design practice, and in their time together, the two traveled frequently to attend building openings and lectures, becoming, in a discreet way, an early-1980s power couple. Kitty was quickly integrated into Michael’s professional set, making friends with Meier and Eisenman; she, in turn, insinuated Michael into the Los Angeles design scene, introducing him to Eric Owen Moss and another architect a few years older than Michael, Frank O. Gehry, in those days still favoring his middle initial.

  Courtesy of Kitty, Michael also came into contact with a few people outside his usual social ken, among them the actress Candice Bergen and her good friend the writer and satirist Fran Lebowitz. For reasons that neither of them could quite account for, Michael and Lebowitz—the mild-mannered midwestern aesthete and the chain-smoking Jewish wit—hit it off, and soon they and Kitty had formed a small clique, spending weekends together at the Shelter Island house that Bergen shared with her husband, the film director Louis Malle. An unlikely admixture of Hollywood, Manhattan, and the Ivy League, Michael’s new milieu was typical of a decade that saw him moving in very rarefied circles indeed.

  He designed stage sets for the Joffrey Ballet [PLATE 36], a trophy for GQ magazine’s annual award, a shopping bag for Bloomingdale’s. He designed the Clos Pegase Winery in California’s Napa Valley, a carriage house renovation in Manhattan for a Vanderbilt heir, and a sweeping master plan (unrealized) for a resort complex in Galveston, Texas, comprising twelve towers and dozens of smaller condominiums arrayed in a terrace like the eighteenth-century Royal Crescent in Bath, England.

  He was invited to the Ronald Reagan White House on the occasion of a royal visit from Queen Elizabeth II, and he and Kitty—who was acquainted with the Reagans through her mother—were conducted into the Blue Room after dinner for a private interview with the First Lady. Welcoming them in, Nancy Reagan showed them the official presidential collection of china, stemware, and flatware, and told Michael she thought that one of the Alessi Piazza services would make a beautiful addition. Since the Reagans couldn’t accept the gift personally, it would have to be donated by Alessi through official diplomatic channels, and Michael said he would ask Alberto Alessi himself. When he did so, however, his client made his feelings on the subject very plain. “Tell Mrs. Reagan,” he said in Italian, “fuck you.”42

  Michael by the kitchen door of the Warehouse, 1981

  Michael related this story at lectures for several years (usually capping it off with the traditional Italian arm gesture) until he began receiving angry letters from Republican audience members. One person who didn’t object, when she heard the anecdote years later, was Nancy Reagan. “She had a sense of humor,” Michael remembered, though he still voted against her husband twice.43

  He created original drawings for a special illustrated edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby—spare vignettes in pencil of Gatsby’s mansion and motorcars—and a special installation for the gallerist Leo Castelli—a pair of archaic follies—and he took on a commission from the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg [PLATE 39], whose career was then caught in a temporary trough.44 Von Furstenberg was looking to relaunch her collection with a new storefront diagonal to Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel. Her instructions to Michael, written out on a single three-by-five note card, were among Michael’s all-time favorite briefs, less a programmatic laundry list than an emotional wish list.

  “Make it a little shrine to Venus,” she told him. “Make it a place where a woman can walk in and dream and fantasize, and for a man who wants to indulge her.”45

  The firm obliged with a gracious, muted interior and a facade topped by the figure of a gold-leaf-covered loving cup, still visible from the street long after the designer (whose career shortly picked up again) moved to larger quarters.

  Riding the lecture circuit, Michael made regular hops over to England—where he created a room for Charles Jencks’s private home [PLATE 40]—as well as to France and Italy. He also began a years-long string of visits to Japan, whose real estate market was then, like America’s, in full boom. While there he befriended the fashion designer Issey Miyake, known for his loose-fitting but meticulously crafted garb for men and women.

  Miyake invited Michael to one of his Paris fashion shows, an over-the-top spectacle featuring enormous swimming pools into which the wedding dress–clad models jumped following their stroll down the catwalk. Later, the architect attended a dinner—small, colorful plates of nouvelle cuisine—as Miyake’s guest and was delighted to find himself seated beside a lovely young woman who turned out to be his host’s fabric specialist.

  In the middle of the dinner, Miyake walked over to Michael’s dinner companion and presented her with a small box: “A thank-you present,” he said. Inside was a model car, a red Mercedes convertible.

  “Why is he giving me a toy car?” asked the fabric specialist.

  “He’s isn’t,” Michael explained. “He’s giving you a car.”46

  There were moments like these when the spirit of the times seemed to coalesce around him, and Michael savored them. But there were other moments—and they accounted for the majority—when Michael was all but inured to everything save for his work.

  Looking back, he said, “The ’60s, the ’70s, the ’80s, they all bleed into each other. I’m not a good one to say, ‘The ’80s were like this.’”47 The same years that witnessed the rise of Michael’s “figurative architecture,” as he called it in his first full monograph, also witnessed a return to figuration in contemporary art (as in the portraiture of Robert Longo and Julian Schnabel) and a renewed interest in classical counterpoint in music (as in the compositions of Philip Glass) and in formal traditions in poetry (as in the historical gamesmanship of Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery).48 Yet none of this much interested Michael, who continued to practice a Postmodernism of one. “The people who interested me,” he would say, “were the people who could say, ‘Build a building for me.’”49

  SUCH PEOPLE WERE now beating a path to his door. One week in the summer of 1981, Michael’s staff was told to drop everything and spruce up the office in preparation for a most important meeting. Steven Harris, Karen Nichols, and Julie Hanselmann—the Hanselmanns’ youngest da
ughter, who had come to work and study with Michael in Princeton—repainted all the floors, put in new millwork, and even installed a temporary fountain in the office lobby. “Everything had to be spick-and-span,” recalled Hanselmann.50 The Whitney Museum of American Art was coming to call.

  The venerable storehouse for American art had long outgrown its home, the clunky yet endearing stack of granite-faced concrete on Madison Avenue designed by Marcel Breuer in 1966. Circulation problems were rife in the aging structure; only a small percentage of the permanent collection could be displayed; and the Whitney was losing ground to its Midtown competitor, MoMA, which was undertaking a bold new capital improvement under the direction of Cesar Pelli. Searching to build their way out (or up), the Whitney trustees and Director Thomas N. Armstrong III were conducting interviews with a handful of firms over the course of six months, and Michael Graves Architect (as well as Gwathmey Siegel and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown) had made the short list.

  The preliminary sit-down with the Whitney group had taken place at the Warehouse; Nichols had thrown together a lunch of pasta primavera (no garlic, of course), and the whole affair had come off without a hitch. Now the would-be clients were returning for seconds. The museum’s most illustrious, most influential board member, the billionaire shopping-mall developer A. Alfred Taubman, flew in to the meeting from Detroit via Princeton’s municipal airport. The scrappy Graves team greeted him and his colleagues with homemade muffins.51

  “Michael understood how important it was,” recalled Hanselmann.52 To date Michael’s only executed museum work was the less-than-satisfactory Union County Nature and Science Museum, and though he still had a relationship with the Newark Museum, his successive proposals had led to only one realized project, a small installation for the children’s art workshop. Newark would turn to the firm for more substantive work in the following years—but Newark was not the Whitney. This was a chance for Michael to leave his imprimatur on the New York streetscape and on one of the city’s and the country’s most venerated cultural institutions.

  No specific scheme had to be put before the Whitney board, no definite plan sketched out. The trustees simply wanted to test the waters with their prospective designer. Michael was his usual, expansive self, zeroing in on the museum’s dilemma—its addition had to show deference both to the Modernist Breuer and to the older buildings surrounding it, and while it had acquired the neighboring row houses, it would still be difficult to accommodate the museum’s spatial needs on-site. As he considered the problem, his associates put on a brave show of professionalism: when the Whitney asked who could negotiate a contract, Nichols confidently declared that she would take it in hand, despite having no idea whatsoever how to do it.53

  In October the Whitney made its decision. As Armstrong told the press,

  We didn’t go to an architect of Breuer’s generation, nor to one who had done building designs in New York. We wanted an architect who would try to make the building as important a contribution to architecture as Breuer made with the old. It’s very exciting, because we don’t know what the solution will be.”54

  Their architects didn’t know what the solution would be, either. Michael and the team had won the commission, but it would be nearly four years before they had something to present to the public. That was according to schedule, of course, as the Whitney understood it would take them at least that long to come up with a plan that worked. It would, in fact, take them much longer than that.

  INSTITUTIONAL COMMISSIONS OFTEN move slowly; private ones, however, can race forward at a bracing clip, provided the client is properly motivated. Michael had had very few such clients, and even when he did (the Snydermans, the Crooks, himself at the Warehouse), his projects seemed to run up against unforeseen obstacles with a frequency that made him feel snakebit. Somewhere, there had to be people with both the will and the wallet to make a building that lived up to the promise of his drawings.

  It was perhaps only a matter of time before Michael, aswim in the much larger client pool of 1980s, met people like Wendell Cherry and David A. Jones, a pair of businessmen from Louisville, Kentucky.

  “Wendell,” recalled Jones, “was more like a brother.” Cherry and Jones had gone into business together as Extendicare Inc. in 1961, opening a single Louisville nursing home. Within a decade they were the largest operators of such facilities in the nation, and by the late 1970s they had moved forcefully into the hospital marketplace while taking on a new name: Humana. Growing at the pace of a hospital a month, the company was a juggernaut, and in need of a new Louisville corporate headquarters commensurate with its growing stature in the industry.55

  The two executives decided with characteristic brio to get the very best to build it for them, requesting proposals from a few select designers—starting with Philip Johnson. They wanted “a symbol for the company,” Jones told Johnson. The architect was tempted, but his workload, to say nothing of his self-esteem, made him disinclined to compete with other designers. Instead, Johnson told them, “There’s a young architect named Graves.” He suggested they bring Michael into the fold.56

  Intending to stay close to home, Humana had bought a site at the corner of West Main Street just across South Fifth from its existing offices in the First National Bank Tower, a forty-story skyscraper designed by Wallace K. Harrison and his partner, Max Abramovitz (Michael’s onetime dinner companion in Bologna). The design saw the famously adaptable duo working in a Miesian vein, their building a solid black shaft whose debt to the German Baumeister was underscored by another structure on the other side of Main: the American Life Building, an actual Mies project completed just after his death in 1969. The mid-rise pavilion, set back from the street on a plaza-decked plinth, was not Mies’s finest work, and the two standoffish structures had done nothing to reverse—and might possibly have exacerbated—a long decline in the area that made Humana’s decision to stay a fairly courageous one. Whiskey Row, as the strip was called, was then a corridor of mostly semidefunct bourbon distilleries, and many of its stately brick buildings either were unoccupied or had been demolished.

  The latter fate had befallen the previous occupant of Humana’s new lot, which abutted a still-standing specimen and a Beaux Arts–ish former bank. Accordingly, Michael’s design for the $60 million project began by examining this mixed-up contextual combination—flush with two historical structures to the south and west, diagonal to a Mies building, and directly opposite a Mies knockoff. Given his long-standing antipathy for the severe, hard-edged Modernism he’d learned at Cincinnati, it would have been easy enough for Michael to have simply made his Humana design an exuberant riposte to Mies, an affirmation of the old against the new. Instead, he sought a way to mediate among all of the competing architectural forces at hand: a tower serious enough to stand shoulder to shoulder with Harrison and Abramovitz’s, as open to the public as Mies’s plaza, and with the texture and classical touches of the historical cast-iron mercantile buildings.

  He was facing off against a mixed bag of different solutions. Chicago’s Helmut Jahn proposed a glittering, multifaceted ensemble of triangular glass; London-based Norman Foster suggested a round turret with a diamond-grid facade, set off by a slender steel spire. The two other competitors, Ulrich Franzen and Cesar Pelli, put forward a kind of PoMo Lite, one design horseshoe-shaped with a circular oculus at the top, and the other octagonal and capped by a reflective roof. “Wendell and I sat down and wrote out a list of four of the five,” recalled Jones. Out of the other’s view, each partner jotted down their preferred proposals from most to least favored and then compared lists. Some of their selections were different, but not the first. “We both agreed on Michael,” said Jones.57

  “They had the money,” Michael recalled, “and it wasn’t fifty dollars per square foot.”58 Michael knew his clients would see the $60 million project through. After the competition had been won, he altered the building’s facade arrangements, changing the south front to give it a curved central bay
so that it would not appear to turn its back on the city; the change would also allow for a series of employee break rooms located behind the elevator core. But for the next two and a half years he largely kept his distance from goings-on in Louisville, wrapped up as he was in the firm’s other doings.

  His associate Peter Hague Neilson, who joined the firm just as Humana was getting underway, recalled that “Michael was never interested in construction,” although his Kentucky clients were never far from his mind.59 One afternoon, on a visit to the Whitney for talks with the trustees, Michael sprinted across the street to an antiques shop and spotted a Josef Hoffmann fruit bowl. Knowing Cherry was a collector, Michael recommended he buy it; Cherry said he’d consider it.60

  Later, Michael would make his presence felt in the selection of the stone—thirty-two thousand pieces in all—that covered the facade and the street-level loggia—pink granite from Finland, red from India, gray from Spain.61 When the cladding had been applied, Michael at last came to Louisville and took a look at the contractor’s work. He told Cherry and Jones they weren’t getting their money’s worth. “They took a lot of stone down,” Michael said, “and did it again.”62

  Opening night in 1985 was kicked off with a gala dinner, and Michael and Kitty were there at a table with Fran Lebowitz and Candice Bergen, whom they’d invited down as their guests. It was a glittering event, with the mayor and the governor in attendance, and toward the end of the evening Cherry motioned to Michael, saying he had something he wanted to give him. Michael knew what it was—the Hoffmann fruit bowl. “You couldn’t have done a better building for us,” his client told him.