by Ian Volner
WHEN IT WAS, he could never remember. The mid-1980s, perhaps, or later. Possibly earlier…
Speeding along the autostrada in northern Italy, Michael was en route to join the architect Aldo Rossi for dinner at a restaurant in Milan. Somewhere in the flatlands outside the city, he saw something so arresting at an intersection of two country roads that he peeled off and stopped the car. It was a small building, an electrical station, not more than fifteen feet on a side and about four stories high, with a “funny little roof,” as he remembered it, and openings for a window and a door. Alone in the rustic landscape of Lombardy, the building was neither imposing nor prepossessing, but it nonetheless had, in Michael’s judgment, “the most exquisite proportions you can imagine.”93
At dinner that night, as Rossi munched on a steak-size serving of portobello mushroom, Michael told him about the crude, shack-like pile he’d seen in the countryside. The words were barely out of his mouth before Rossi smiled gently.
“Isn’t it great?” he said. He knew exactly the building Michael meant, and he too had often lingered there at the crossroads.
In a by-now-familiar pattern, Rossi was another figure with whom Michael was on personable but not personal terms, their careers running in parallel in the wake of their introduction at the 1973 Triennale. (If anything, Rossi was the more strident anti-Modernist; he once declared, “I cannot be Postmodern, as I have never been Modern.”)94 It is hard to say whose influence predominated over whom. Michael’s Postmodernist language was much indebted to Rossi’s, while Rossi’s subsequent success—he would also work for Disney—saw him mining a vein of Gravesian populism. “They influenced each other. Or ruined each other, you could say,” quipped Mary McLeod.95
Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena, Italy, 1971
Even at his most commercial, however, Rossi always sought in his work an elusive quality encapsulated in some ways by that little power station in the country. Whether one chooses, following Le Corbusier, to call it the “masterly play” of masses in light; or “frozen music,” as Goethe once described architecture; or by any other name—the uncanny, the ineffable—it is, simply put, the magnetic affective sway upon the mind of abstract forms in space. In Rossi’s masterwork, the San Cataldo Cemetery at Modena (that “island-like city of the dead,” as the scholar Reinhold Martin once called it), the looming geometries of his ossuary and its surrounding pavilions exude a pervasive melancholy that makes the whole ensemble somehow more than the sum of its parts.96 For the Postmodernists, always yearning for a past beyond recall, Rossi’s project had been an early touchstone. But as their movement gained traction, the surrealism and mystery of Modena were falling by the wayside in favor of other values: values like communicability or (as Peter Eisenman had termed it) accessibility.
The lightning-fast spread of Postmodernism seemed proof enough that the style was accessible to people—and that, for Michael, was enough. Drawing on the classical tradition he’d absorbed in Rome, imbuing it with his own artistic sensibility, he felt he’d finally found a design language that had the meaning and the empathic capacity he’d been looking for. In 1980, just starting out on his PoMo path, he told an interviewer:
I felt, reading reactions to my buildings in the ’60s, that I was not just losing readers; I felt they were not reading into my abstractions what I expected.… The problem to overcome, if one is willing, is to play into an abstract language, necessary in any art form—to have some purposeful ambiguity—but to not run the risk of being so abstract as to lose the reader. There has to be some balance.97
Michael’s fully gelled Postmodern style was far more figurative, more literal in its ornamentation and flatter in its pictorial facade-ism, than any of his transitional work of the 1970s. Yet he had not lost purchase on that “purposeful ambiguity,” or on the emotional content it portended. The sensation he felt on beholding that small building in Italy—not so different, perhaps, from the one that had overtaken him as a boy at the Indianapolis stockyards—was evident everywhere in his drawings and paintings, those “seductive presences,” as Paul Goldberger once described them.98 Where Michael differed from Rossi was in his faith that only figuration could weave those feelings into narratives that would make them palpable—make them understandable, the way he’d wanted to understand his father’s old office building—with the language of classicism acting as the prime figurative agent. Portland, with its garlanded tale of civic pride and public spirit, had opened the door; Humana, with its aediculae and cornices telling a story of the city and the river, the past and the present, had brought him closer. Now, with so many products and buildings in the offing, the possibilities seemed limitless.
As for that other architect, Léon Krier, whose classical images were so close but whose radical ideas were so far from his own—Michael did have one fateful encounter with him in the early 1980s. At Jaquelin Robertson’s invitation, Michael participated in a series of conversations at the University of Virginia School of Architecture (of which Robertson was now dean), taking place in November 1982 and published three years later under the title The Charlottesville Tapes. During a presentation by the architect Tadao Ando, Krier called on his deep reserves of moral outrage, thundering against the windowless, bare-bones concrete house that the Japanese designer had put before his colleagues. As the transcript records it, the minimal-Modernist project then received a spirited defense from an unlikely quarter: Michael.
LÉON KRIER: This has nothing to do with architecture. It is a miserable hole.
MICHAEL GRAVES: [Ando] obviously doesn’t think it is a miserable hole.
LÉON KRIER: It is not a matter of what he thinks. Architecture has a tradition of thousands of years, and we are the inheritors of it.
MICHAEL GRAVES: Well, he is just an architect, as you are, and we are all members of this society; we do not separate ourselves from that society…99
In Krier’s view, Michael was simply admonishing him to give up his vaunted principles for the sake of professional expediency. “He was saying, ‘Leo, you have to get into the real world! You have to get into the real world and build shit,’” recalled Krier. “It was like he said you have to degrade yourself…and if I didn’t, in that way I will not be ‘in the real.’”100
An exaggeration, perhaps, but not a total mischaracterization of Michael’s argument. Seldom cynical, Michael was nonetheless entirely unmoved by Krier’s idealism. So far as he was concerned, pragmatism and accessibility went hand in hand, and one couldn’t very well claim to care about “the masses” while hiding from them in the groves of academe.
SO BOUNDLESS WAS his scope of action in the 1980s that although Michael knew there were more things in design’s heaven and earth than PoMo, there was little reason for him to give them much thought. Among the attendees at the Charlottesville meeting was one of Eisenman’s IAUS associates, the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. In 1978 he had published a hilariously seditious book called Delirious New York, but he had yet only one real project to his name and seemed to Michael tangled in theoretical coils he might never undo. Another Charlottesville attendee, Frank Gehry, had built more, but his only major public commission—the Loyola Law School in downtown Los Angeles—seemed to be a tip of the hat to Michael himself, all primitive forms and collapsed columns. His more adventurous work, like his own house in Santa Monica, was considered beyond the popular pale. “Gehry was terrific,” recalled the critic Martin Filler. “But we all thought, ‘We like it, but the public won’t.’”101
Perhaps the only inkling that there might be something transcending the White-Gray dichotomy came in 1983, when Michael lost a promising commission for a new arts center on the campus of Ohio State University. The one who’d bested him: Peter Eisenman, in what would become his first (and one of his very few) institutional projects. Eisenman had turned away from the linguistics of Noam Chomsky and toward the even more recondite conjectures of Jacques Derrida, and his design for what would come to be called the Wexner Center for the Arts
was a web of unresolved structural matrices and purposely conflicting plans. No longer just thumping his Corbusian bible, Eisenman was using the voguish deconstructionist branch of literary theory to strike out into terra incognita, while proving that he and others like him could succeed in the worldly sphere of the building business. After winning Wexner he told an interviewer, “There are two or three reasons we’re excited about this. One of course is that it was nice to beat Michael Graves.”102 A flicker of a smile played across his face.
Still, the balance of professional power remained tilted decisively in Michael’s favor. When a major New York department store wanted to know what “next year’s colors” would be, it was Michael they called; when People magazine wanted someone to weigh in on “the race to challenge ‘glass boxes,’” Michael was the architect they trusted to explain it all to millions of Americans idling in supermarket lines.103 Between Disney, Whitney, and Alessi, Michael Graves Architect had momentum to spare, and the whole world was watching.
VIII
THE HOUSE, THE TOMB, AND THE TEAKETTLE
A PICTURE OF MICHAEL GRAVES in his office on Nassau Street, one hand atop a stack of drawings, the other resting casually on his hip.
For me, the things that endure are those that blend the traditions we all know with the spirit of new invention. The familiarity of the past at ease with the freshness of the present.
When the people at Dexter showed me their shoes, I said “Perfect, this is just what I mean about combining the classic and the contemporary.…’
Which just goes to prove what I’ve been saying for years. There is nothing more important than starting with a good foundation.
The Maine-based Dexter Shoes had been running an ad campaign featuring eminent Americans—the ballplayer Ted Williams, the yacht designer David Tedrick—and when the company asked Michael to join its stable of prominent pitchmen, he signed up without hesitation. When the advertisement ran in the New York Times in late 1987, “there was a lot of grief from my peers,” he said.1 It was the first such promotional gimmick he had ever appeared in. It would not be the last.
He would go on to plump for Absolut Vodka, for Millstone Coffee, for the digital design company Autodesk. His own clients loved to put him front and center: for Alessi he donned an ankle-length overcoat and opened it, flasher-like, to reveal the teakettle as well as the flatware and ceramics he had also designed for the brand. For his 1993 project in Miami Beach, the developers had him appear on a giant billboard by the side of the highway, lying flat with the beach behind.
Michael was good for business, and business was good for Michael. Subsequent exhibitions at Max Protetch Gallery fared well [PLATE 37]; at one point Neiman Marcus sold prints of the Fargo-Moorhead Bridge. Prices for Michael’s drawings had grown so high that some of his students, it was rumored, were squirreling away his doodles from their deskside crits, hoping to make a tidy sum off their illustrious prof.2
The 1993 highway billboard for 1500 Ocean Drive, the Graves condominium project in Miami Beach
STATUS AND SALES FIGURES, however, would be of no help to Michael in the ongoing Whitney Museum fight, now stretching into its third year.
In 1987 Michael Graves Architect revealed its new and improved scheme for the Whitney, its outward appearance only slightly altered from the first [PLATE 44]. Somewhat less decorative, but with a quarter the square footage and with a shorter crown, it actually had more exhibition space than the first proposal, having slashed auxiliary functions like office and retail spaces. The revised version still used the diptych to carry its narrative water, setting the Marcel Breuer building and its new counterpart into a dialectical frame that emphasized both their differences and their similarities. The correlation was even more explicit this time, as the pyramidal fenestration on the new wing turned into a trapezoid of identical dimensions to Breuer’s, only upright instead of sideways, as though it had been helped to its feet.
Michael had defended the diptych in expressly artistic terms, comparing it to Botticelli’s Annunciation, in which the Virgin Mary and Archangel Gabriel face each other on either side of a column. The project’s critics, however, detected a different painterly strategy at work, and not a welcome one. The composition, wrote Victoria Geibel in Metropolis, “registers as much discord as Picasso’s fragmented female in the 1939 painting Woman with a Blue Hat.”3 Michael’s Cubist affinities had been muffled in his later Postmodern work, which tended to favor classical resolution over modern tension. Deprived by the presence of the Breuer of the chance to make a perfectly symmetrical whole, his collagist impulses returned, and no matter how toned down the new building might be, the overall crazy-quilt effect was distressing to lovers of the older building’s muscular unity.
While the pile-on continued from Breuer partisans, the Whitney did eke out a small victory over the historical preservationists, as Community Board 8 sided with the museum on the question of demolishing the five adjacent brownstones. It was a good omen for how the Landmarks Commission might rule. Yet once again, the museum’s building committee got cold feet, yanking Michael’s second scheme and requesting a third, still more unobtrusive proposal. Under what must have been horrendous pressure, he agreed and took up his axe one final time.
Be they ever so prickly, the Whitney trustees were still Michael’s prize clients, and he held on to the project for dear life. “It was such a great opportunity,” he said. “Such an important institution, given its mandate on American art.”4
Exasperating though the museum project was, Michael Graves Architect did not want for consolations: a high-rise in Atlanta, commissions from Steuben Glass, an academic building for the University of Virginia. As the 1980s roared on, the firm expanded from twenty-five, to sixty-five, then one hundred and twenty employees, drawn as usual from promising Princeton grads. “I had a greater ear with the students because I had a practice,” Michael said. His divided loyalties to both working and teaching could be taxing at times, but his runaway success also reinforced his standing at Princeton.5
School ties had been frayed only slightly by the 1983 completion of Gordon Wu Hall, a dining facility in the very heart of the university campus designed by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. The Pennsylvanian had at least equal claim to being a Princetonian (he’d studied there under Jean Labatut), and the university had a long-standing prohibition against hiring its own professors to design buildings. Yet Michael’s pride was bruised.
Unsurprisingly, the two most outstanding contemporaries in American Postmodernism (setting aside the elder Johnson) were not exactly simpatico. Half-hearted attempts at interoffice comity had been attempted, with mingled results: in 1980 the Philadelphians had been invited to Princeton for a day of cookouts, croquet, and softball, and though the younger associates got on well enough, Venturi and Scott Brown remained stationed with bemused indifference in the middle of the field for the duration, reading the newspaper. “Venturi thought he was the real thing, and everyone else was cosmetics,” as Peter Eisenman put it.6 For his part, Michael ranked Colin Rowe far above the author of Complexity and Contradiction—though even Michael was prepared to concede that his Postmodernism had been partly predicated on an aesthetic-minded construal of Venturi’s thinking. “Bob Venturi makes you understand you can flatten these kind of symbols, and sometimes they’re more powerful,” Michael once said. “So that’s what I did.”7
When the two faced off for a much bigger commission, however, it was Michael’s aestheticism that carried the day. Michael Eisner’s still-unfinished Burbank project was no one-off: Disney was on a building spree, and the wheels were in motion to erect a rambling hospitality complex at their Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida. In 1986 Eisner approached the Graves and Venturi offices and suggested that they tackle the eighty-seven-acre complex as a team—a suggestion that struck Michael as implausible.
“Isn’t that like putting Steven Spielberg and George Lucas together?” he asked.
“Remember,” answered
Eisner, “I did that.” The result had been the Indiana Jones franchise.8
Venturi, however, was having none of it and insisted on a competition. Thanks to Michael’s prior relationship with Eisner, the Graves team had the edge going in and beat out Venturi’s plan after a few changes to the structures to “lighten up them up,” per Eisner’s request.9 The Disney exec kept a close watch over the high-stakes project throughout its development. “Every move,” as Michael put it, “was packed full with dollars,” and Eisner “knew he’d get called on the carpet whatever we did.”10 The project was no less critical for Michael Graves Architect: the urban-scale design could show what the firm could do when given room to run.
Eisner had already inked a deal with construction giant Tishman, but when the Graves team showed its initial proposal to CEO John Tishman, the builder balked. The design, he claimed, was “outrageous and impossible,” the buildings making “no sense practically or economically.” Tishman demanded to use his preferred architect, Alan Lapidus, a Florida-based designer who had also participated in the initial competition with Venturi—and also lost. But Lapidus (the son of Morris Lapidus, famed for his Miami Beach resorts) had extensive experience building hotels, and both Michaels concurred that a little expertise might come in handy. The Lapidus and Graves teams agreed to collaborate.11
Tempered by his colleague’s emendations, Michael’s final design was still almost as dumbfounding as the one that had stymied Tishman. Opened in 1990, the Swan and Dolphin Hotels [PLATES 46 AND 47] featured nearly 2,500 guest rooms, multiple conference and business spaces, ballrooms, themed restaurants, and a convention center of 1.4 million square feet. Staggering in scale, the Graves solution opted not to break down the whole into digestible pieces, relying instead on two simple envelopes: a 257-foot pyramid for the Dolphin, and for the Swan a single vault-like arch. As easily legible as these formal outlines were, they were not half as eye-catching as the decorative fixtures applied to each, with statues of 47-foot-high swans and 56-foot-high dolphins affixed to the roofs of the corresponding structures. (It was whispered that they were actually fixed to the wrong structures, and that the names of the hotels had to be changed accordingly. The architects have always denied this.)
