Michael Graves

by Ian Volner

  Wendell Cherry died in 1991, but David A. Jones still recalls his partner’s philosophy when it came to business. “It was the confidence of total ignorance,” said Jones. “We learned early that when you don’t know anything about something, hire someone who does.”63 By letting their architect take the lead, the partners helped bring about what was arguably the most accomplished project of Michael’s career [PLATE 42].

  Rather than just a corrective to Miesian Modernism, Humana was Michael’s attempt to answer for the failings of Portland. Absent the restrictions of a government budget and government stakeholders, he had free rein to create a building that came much closer to his original concept, perhaps closer than anything else he ever designed. Portland had shown that Postmodernist buildings could be built, but Humana proved that they could be built well.

  Whether it was the more influential of the two is less certain. In elevation, the twenty-seven-story Humana was more irregular, more active than almost any of the countless Postmodernist towers that followed it: its contextual gestures included an eighth-story projecting cornice (a nod to the scale of the old distilleries), a glass central bay in the northern facade (a reference to the glassy tower across the street), and a lofty loggia at sidewalk level, backed up by a cascading water feature (a public amenity like Mies’s plaza, though more spectacular by far). More than that, it had the aediculae that had been excised from Portland, not grouped together but separately dangling from each facade. On the northern front, holding up the bowed exedra of the upper-level terrace, it sported a red steel truss similar in appearance to the box frame of the Fourteenth Street Bridge just up the Ohio River. Standing on the windswept twenty-fifth-floor balcony, one could look through the multi-framed window of the terrace’s projecting glass pavilion and see the real bridge in the distance.

  Philip Johnson had warned Michael early and often that he should “stop drawing and start building.”64 Humana showed that Michael had taken those words to heart: its rich materials gave it a heft and a presence none of his previous projects had had, while its interior sequencing, moving from a low-ceilinged foyer to a high-vaulted lobby to a central rotunda, suggested that Michael’s elevation mania hadn’t sapped his ability to shape interior spaces [PLATE 41]. The project won plaudits from the architectural press, with Paul Goldberger proclaiming it “in every way Mr. Graves’s finest building, a tower that proves his ability not only to work at large scale, but to create interior and exterior details as well wrought as those of any architect now practicing.”65 After its excoriation of Portland, Time would name Humana one of the ten best buildings of the 1980s.66

  Not everyone was convinced. “Probably no other contemporary office high-rise in the United States presents a more strangely disorganized collection of elements,” wrote the Chicago Tribune’s Paul Gapp.67 In an informal poll conducted by the Louisville Courier-Journal, local readers were split almost exactly in half between admirers and detractors.68 Academic opinion ran slightly in Michael’s favor (the architectural theorist Karsten Harries said the project “strengthened [Graves’s] claim to being our most interesting architect,” while Vincent Scully endorsed its “visually rich, solid, sculptural” design).69 But mostly what Humana received from the academic community was silence. Neither the high-minded exegeses that had followed the houses of the 1970s nor the clamor that attended Portland were anywhere to be found.

  That Michael’s largest, most expensive project to date should attract so little scholarly interest may seem surprising. Then again, this was a corporate project, not a private home or a public building, and by the time of its completion there were many such towers on the rise as PoMo fever swept over the American development community. Postmodernism was no longer a philosophical exercise, but big business.

  AT HOME MICHAEL’S RELATIVE AFFLUENCE at last allowed him to press forward with renovations to the Warehouse, which were carried out over four years beginning in the middle 1980s.70 The exterior was covered in fresh stucco, and the north wing transformed according to his earlier scheme, minus the proposed darkroom and with a door to the garden covered by a trellis and topped by a semi-elliptical Diocletian window. The main entrance, now formed into a rotunda, was topped with a light well; from the second floor, the well was cordoned off by a columned, open-topped tempietto, with a skylight in the ceiling above. The revised plan now put a far stronger focus on poche—the walls made thicker and indented with niches and recesses, such that each room had a different spatial character and a different quality of light. It was an atmosphere that owed much, by Michael’s own admission, to the London home of the Regency-era architect Sir John Soane.

  Like Soane’s, Michael’s house was now almost a small museum of art and antiquities, larded with curios and baubles picked up in New York and abroad. His collection, begun with a five-dollar Etruscan vase he’d bought in Rome in 1960, swelled to include classical pottery and inkwells shaped like the Roman Temple of Vesta (“I could never resist buying one when I saw it,” he said), as well as baroque candlesticks and engravings by Gunnar Asplund and ever more pieces of nineteenth-century German Biedermeier: “On one trip to Munich, I went to six Biedermeier antique shops,” he recalled.71 It was an expensive habit that nonetheless would have been more costly a mere decade later, as Biedermeier came back into fashion and prices soared.

  All this luxury Michael now had to himself, as he and Kitty Hawks had parted ways, and she had moved out of the Warehouse. The split was even more cordial than either of Michael’s divorces—a welcome circumstance, since it meant that he could continue his love affair with Kitty’s best friend: her blue merle Australian Shepherd, Earl, whom she’d brought from California and who had become a fixture in the house as well as in Michael’s office. Now relocated to the eastern end of Nassau Street, Michael Graves Architect was converted into a high-class kennel, with Michael bringing first Earl and then his own dog. His employees followed suit en masse.

  Another relationship that survived Hawks’s departure was Michael and Fran Lebowitz’s, whose friendship ultimately outlasted the one between Lebowitz and Hawks; the latter imploded during a party at Kitty’s Westchester house when the hostess asked Lebowitz to step outside to smoke. (“They were inviting me,” said Lebowitz, the shock of it still fresh despite the passage of years. “Besides,” she added, “I hate going to parties out of town.”)72 The ensuing “knock-down, drag-out fight,” as Michael described it, did nothing to diminish his affection for the lovable if curmudgeonly writer, and the only cloud that ever hung over their amity was the presence of Michael’s pets. “Fran,” recalled Hawks, “would rather leave the country than spend time with a dog.”73

  Dogs were to be Michael’s constant companions for many years, the only—or almost only—regular cohabitants of the Warehouse compound. Girlfriends there would occasionally be, “François” having returned to action, but for the moment, at least, no family or close friends were part of Michael’s ménage. His and Gail’s children were getting to be young adults, Sarah a student at Colby College in Maine, Adam a boarder at the Landmark School in Beverly, Massachusetts.74 The program there was geared toward students with learning disabilities, and Adam’s enrollment was acknowledgment of a condition that had been evident to his parents for several years. Even when Adam was still small, Michael had noticed that his son was different. “I wanted to play ball with him,” he recalled, “but he had his own agenda.”75

  The more crowded agenda, however, was Michael’s, and ball-playing with Adam would never quite be at the top of it. Fatherhood had always hung awkwardly on Michael’s shoulders, and his son’s social anxiety made the role that much more difficult to fill. With Sarah, at least he had been able to do things like teach her to paint; together the two had created a Morandi still life so convincing that Michael’s associate Peter Waldman mistook it for the real thing.76 With Adam, such attempts to bridge the distance between father and son would be sporadic at best, a function not just of his son’s condition but of Michael’s own wel
l-documented tendency toward isolation. As his fame grew, he fell out of touch with many old friends, including his former mentor Ray Roush, to whom he rarely spoke during the several decades leading up to Roush’s death in 2002 from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.77

  MEANWHILE, AS HUMANA OPENED in Louisville and the Alessi teakettle hit stores worldwide, Michael and his associates were rushing to finalize their Whitney design. “We met all the time with the building committee,” Michael said. “Trips to get to know the trustees. Tom Armstrong put me out there.”78

  In May 1985 Michael presented his proposal to the board and to the public [PLATE 43]. To meet the client’s implicit mandate to preserve Breuer’s iconic museum while incorporating it into a larger complex, Michael used one of his go-to artistic devices: the diptych. A second volume, comparable in breadth and similarly jagged and telescoping along one edge, would be situated on the south corner of the same Madison Avenue block, its facade inscribed with a triangle that would mimic the Cyclops-like aperture on the Breuer building. Between the two would be a third, cylindrical structure, housing a new staircase and acting as a visual pivot between the old building and the new, while an enormous crown, receding tier by tier to end in a rooftop stoa, would unite the assemblage into a single mass.

  The plan managed to do what had seemed almost impossible, shoehorning 31,600 feet of additional exhibition and office space (plus a 250-seat theater, a library, and a study center) into a sliver of street frontage while leaving the Breuer almost entirely intact. But “intact” was not quite “untouched.” Breuer’s southern stairwell was to be demolished to make way for the central hinge structure, while the symmetrized facade and setback forms above undid the deliberately top-heavy, off-kilter character of Breuer’s creation. Worse, the scheme did nothing to allay the concerns of those who’d always objected that Breuer’s building was out of place—concerns exacerbated by the new scheme’s proposed demolition of the neighboring brownstones.

  Attacks from both Modernist and non-Modernist factions commenced almost instantly. Within months of the plan’s debut, an Ad Hoc Committee to Save the Whitney had filed a petition—cosigned by the architects I. M. Pei and Edward Larrabee Barnes—complaining that the Graves addition would “totally destroy the architectural integrity” of Breuer’s design. Local groups were determined to fight the proposal tooth and nail before the city’s Landmarks Commission, claiming that the loss of the brownstones would do lasting damage to the Upper East Side Historic District. In a rare concurrence of opinion, critics of every stripe, from the right-wing Hilton Kramer (“combines an appalling poverty of architectural thought with a maximum of ornamental ostentation”) to the left-wing Michael Sorkin (“Hands off the Whitney, Graves!”) turned out to protest the proposal.79 The uproar, Michael told a reporter, made “Portland seem like a picnic.”80

  Not that the plan was totally friendless: Philip Johnson got behind the proposal, blasting the signatories of the petition as “modern-architecture holdouts who still yearn for the days of old.”81 No less a figure than Vincent Scully—who had overcome an early dislike for Michael and had even written an essay for his first full-length monograph—insisted that the addition would finally weave Breuer’s building “into the larger pattern of urban order.”82 Approving letters were penned by both Ulrich Franzen, Michael’s Humana competitor, and Alex Cooper, Jaquelin Robertson’s sometime partner, while in the press Paul Goldberger declared himself (provisionally, at least) a supporter.83 Martin Filler did the same, though he qualified his endorsement by noting a fundamental incongruity in the project’s DNA. “It would be hard,” he wrote, “to name a contemporary architect whose aesthetic is more opposed to Breuer’s than Michael Graves.”84

  That much Michael had understood from the first. Trying to integrate the stubbornly noncommunicative Breuer into his own architectural vocabulary posed, as he said at the time, “a particular challenge.” To do so he had used forms that were more abstract and less overtly classical than most of his projects of the period. But by dint of sheer size, the addition still reduced the original building to a bit player in a new and very different ensemble. A change so extreme was bound to ruffle a large number of very prominent feathers, especially given the endemic fussiness of the museum’s assorted stakeholders—Modern architects, Upper East Siders, and art lovers, to name but a few.

  The last two of those groups were represented in force on the museum’s board, and several trustees voiced their anxiety about the scheme. “Everyone agrees an expansion is necessary,” said the billionaire trustee Leonard A. Lauder, “but does it have to be that large?”85 Facing a lukewarm client and a rising volume of red tape, Michael was stuck once again in the same fix he had finally escaped with Humana—the expansion, as he put it later, “just wasn’t going to be anybody’s child.”86 Before it could reach the Landmarks Commission review, and unbeknownst to the various parties baying for the proposal’s blood, the building committee elected to remand the scheme to Princeton, charging the designers with making it more palatable to the museum’s competing constituencies.

  DURING L’AFFAIRE WHITNEY and through all the very public travails and triumphs of the 1980s, Michael concocted a curious game plan for managing his office and its public profile. By contemporary standards it seems almost unthinkable, and even for its time it surprised many of his friends and colleagues, who looked on with envy at what appeared to be the well-oiled machine of Michael Graves Architect.

  “How big is your marketing department?” other architects would ask.

  “I don’t have one,” he would reply.

  The Gravesy train, such as it was, ran primarily on elbow grease—and fame. Michael had learned how to delegate authority to trusted deputies, especially on the fine points of construction that had always bored him, and from twenty-five employees in 1983 the firm ballooned to more than fifty in just three short years, squeezed together in every corner of the new office on Nassau and Harrison.87 Such para-architectural matters as public relations and the writing of proposals were mostly carried on in-house by trusted associates such as Karen Nichols, who could rely on a steady stream of magazine editors and prospective clients panting for the attention of America’s hottest architect. Michael, in turn, grabbed at every opportunity: though his cash crunch of the ’70s was over, Michael “never felt we had enough money,” Nichols recalled.88 His acquisitive streak might not have helped matters, but the compulsion to do everything and be everywhere at once was simply part of his makeup. Projects for private clients, for a music center back in Cincinnati, more plans for the Newark Museum…Michael designed, and Michael taught, and when he was doing neither he pushed the firm toward every prize and project competition he could. His notoriety took care of the rest.

  This strategy, or lack of it, was not without hazard. The firm now found itself surrounded by larger offices that could produce architecture superficially like its own but at much greater speed and with far greater technical proficiency. In 1985 Michael entered a competition for another high-profile commission in Manhattan, a huge commercial development to replace the outdated New York Coliseum on Columbus Circle. In the run-up to Humana, he had come up against other practices pushing a Postmodern agenda, but this time around there were even more of them: Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo submitted a Rockefeller Center–esque skyscraper; a Futurist-Deco pastiche was drawn up by Cesar Pelli; and a straight-up 1920s tower group, just like the twinned Deco spires that spike Central Park West, was submitted by none other than the great behemoth of American Modernism, Skidmore Owings & Merrill.89

  SOM had gone Postmodern, and along with them had gone other Modernists of formerly sterling reputation such as Kevin Roche, Helmut Jahn, and I. M. Pei. Also in the mix were newer, larger offices in New York such as Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) and Polshek Partnership, and all of them were gunning for the same projects Michael was—and often winning them, as SOM did the Columbus Circle commission.90 The maddening thing for Michael was that he had brought this on himself:
in 1980 he had participated in a roundtable at Manhattan’s Harvard Club alongside Robert A. M. Stern and others, where he had stood before SOM’s principals and attempted to educate his International Style–loving peers about Postmodernism.91 His listeners had learned all too well, and taking a page from the chameleon-like Philip Johnson, they had now changed their stripes. Johnson himself was a major competitor for Michael, the only Postmodernist of equal or greater standing and a seemingly magnetic force for well-to-do clients. He still played godfather to his Postmodern progeny, but he was careful to reserve the choicest commissions for his own delectation and that of his then-partner, John Burgee, with whom he was designing buildings at a torrid pace.

  Considering Michael’s catch-as-catch-can take on job getting, it was only by chance that Johnson failed to gain the upper hand when a plush prospect came their way one evening at Lincoln Center in early 1985. Michael was still dating Kitty Hawks at the time, and the two flagged down Johnson and his companion, David Whitney, after a concert. As they stood talking, another man joined them: Michael Eisner, the recently appointed CEO of the Walt Disney Corporation. So long as he was in New York and standing in front of two of the country’s foremost designers, Eisner availed himself of the opportunity to tell them about a new office center, the Team Disney Headquarters, that he was planning to build in Burbank, California.

  Describing the project in depth, Eisner was clearly paying court to the senior architect. But Johnson, newly turned eighty, was not quite certain who Eisner was, and could not hear the Disney executive over the postconcert din. To all of Eisner’s remarks, the much-feted “dean of American architecture” could muster no response more compelling than “What?”92

  At last Johnson and Whitney gave up and politely withdrew, wandering off to get a Perrier—“a lucky break for me, I guess,” said Michael. Months later Michael Graves Architect entered talks with Disney to draft a master plan for the entertainment leviathan’s new corporate campus.