Michael Graves

by Ian Volner

  The entire complex was alive with visual narrative. The swan statues “floated” on the waves painted on the facade; the dolphins, in Michael’s telling, were cast there during an imagined volcanic eruption that produced the “island” of the curved hotel volume, its tropical character attested by the images of banana leaves sprouting across the surface.12 Many of the figurative forms pointed to historical precedents—the triangular peak of the Dolphin a tribute to the visionary cenotaphs of the eighteenth-century draftsman Étienne-Louis Boullée, the hotel’s fishy statues recalling the ones at the base of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Fontana del Tritone in Rome. There were less-lofty sources as well: Lapidus claimed that the wallpaper of the Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, where the two architects stayed frequently during the design process, provided the inspiration for the banana leaves.13 All these motifs and more, right down to the patterns on the plates in the restaurants, were plotted with agonizing attention to detail. Even the sand in the hotel ashtrays was printed with the applicable animal.

  Flights of fancy were, of course, appropriate to the client—these being the people who brought America singing dandelions, affectionate Volkswagens, and Flower the talking skunk. But there was something incontrovertibly weird about a major American architect, an Ivy League professor no less, having a hand in such a breathtaking shrine to the unreal. “More big than beautiful,” as Paul Goldberger described it, the design’s artificiality combined jarringly with its extravagance, and its prodigious bulk lent a sinister cast to its wholesome whimsy.14 One local architect was reported to have described the experience of an overnight stay in the resort as “rather like spending the night with a friendly Venus flytrap.”15

  At least the narratives of the Swan and Dolphin were Michael’s own; for the Team Disney Building, completed in 1991, he was compelled (albeit willingly) to adopt the narrative of his client. The main building in his campus master plan was an unfussy classical pavilion in the style of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, another of Michael’s eighteenth-century heroes, topped by intersecting barrel vaults and fronted by a monumental arbor-sheltered approach. But when Eisner first viewed the scheme, it left him cold, and immediately he called his architect.

  “It looks like a bank!” he told Michael.

  “Let me give it some Disney flavor,” Michael answered.16

  The flavor, as it turned out, involved replacing the conventional pilasters in the second level and attic story with Disney characters—first Donald, Mickey, and the brand’s core characters, and then, at Eisner’s prompting, the titular gnomes from the 1937 classic Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. This was a bridge too far for some. “One wonders,” asked Ada Louise Huxtable, “who is having whom.” Disney, she contended, had folded Postmodernism back on itself, turning its accessible historicism into a corporate prop.17

  Michael was not the only one implicated in this Disneyfication of PoMo. In 1991 Eisner assembled an architectural dream team that included Graves, Robert A. M. Stern, Robert Venturi, and Stanley Tigerman, tasking them with carrying out Disney’s most sweeping development project to date: the Euro Disney park and resort outside Paris. Likening themselves to the combine of designer-planners who created the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, the Disney group’s individual and collective schemes steered well clear of Swan- and Dolphin-level quirk. (Michael’s Hotel New York, opened in 1992, was actually quite restrained.) But unlike the Chicago fairgrounds of old, Euro Disney did not spark a new wave of similarly fantastical architecture—if anything, it signaled that Postmodernism had breached a certain horizon. Only one architect involved with the park ever explicitly distanced himself from it, but significantly he was also the only one not classed among the Postmodernists. Looking back, Frank Gehry said, “I lost control.”18

  “THERE WAS A LINE in the sand, as far as we were concerned,” said Charles Jencks.19 Alongside James Stirling, Jencks decried the Disney work of Michael and others as a betrayal of Postmodernism’s promise, a dumbing down for the grade-school set—though if Michael’s Disney work seems childish, at least it can be said it was meant to be. As Eisner said to Michael, “I have two young sons, and when I’m looking at your designs, I’m thinking of them.”20

  “Appropriateness” was a central topos of Michael’s Postmodernism—related to, and part of the same continuum as, his dedication to accessibility, empathy, and communication. “Colin Rowe would see [appropriateness] as too flabby a concept,” Michael observed. “But I say, some solutions are appropriate, some are not.”21 This conviction had served him well at the very dawn of his Postmodernist phase, in 1983, when his office completed a library for the town of San Juan Capistrano [PLATE 38]. Practically no major public works had been built in the tiny mission town in Southern California since its late eighteenth-century founding, and the community had been understandably anxious at the introduction of a large new structure by a controversial East Coast architect. But Michael and the firm managed to strike just the right chord: adopting and adapting the region’s familiar Spanish Colonial style to their own Postmodernist language, they created a building that was both original and suitable to its context, and one that’s since become a much-loved local landmark.

  To Michael’s mind, an architecture of meaning would have to be a malleable architecture, one that could play on all stylistic and affective keys, from the supercilious to the silly. When critics mocked the Alessi 9093 as “kitschy,” he would counter (with questionable etymological accuracy) that “kitsch comes from the kitchen.”22 A teakettle with pretensions of intellectualism would be as inapposite as, say, a building for Mickey Mouse that aspired to seriousness.

  The limits of appropriateness, however, were being tested daily in the fight over the Whitney. Just before the turn of the new year of 1989, Michael’s office produced its third proposal for the museum expansion [PLATE 45]. This one extended an even bigger olive branch to the project’s assorted enemies, slicing away at the decorative details to leave only a blank, colonnaded facade (remarkably similar, as Robert A. M. Stern would note, to the work of Aldo Rossi), with the rooftop volume pared down to an oblong block and no interstitial cylinder intruding on Breuer’s south stairwell.23 Though the brownstones would still have to go, this was as far as the Graves team could possibly bend to accommodate both Breuer lovers and NIMBY-ish local residents. It was not enough.

  Three more years would go by before the Whitney, under a new director, would officially declare the project dead. In the end, it fell victim to the hue and cry of its opponents as well as to the winds of economic chance: the soaring American economy went into a brief nosedive in late 1989, and the already hesitant board members were now even less inclined to front the necessary funds. Michael had tried, with each proposal, to make his addition everything to everyone, and perhaps no other architect could have done more. “We should have done one scheme with the building behind the brownstones,” Michael would say later, but two other architects, Rem Koolhaas and Renzo Piano, would try just that in later years, with identical results.24 In 2015 the Whitney at last gave up altogether and moved downtown into a new, somewhat less obtuse box by Piano, leaving the Breuer building to be used as an annex by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  From the day the building committee came for lunch in Princeton to the day Tom Armstrong’s successor called a halt to the Graves addition in March 1992, the Whitney development had consumed more than a decade of Michael’s professional life. The letdown was immense, though how much so depends on one’s point of view. In Peter Eisenman’s opinion, “losing [the Whitney] hurt him psychologically,” throwing Michael off balance for years; to Karen Nichols, while she admitted that Michael “was rocked” by the experience, it seemed he moved on with relative ease.25 “Michael got interested in other things,” she said—a defense mechanism he’d employed before, and one facilitated by a design methodology that saw him most engaged in working out the initial parti, then moving on to the next project as quickly as possible.

  And there were stil
l so many next ones for Michael to move on to. The Whitney hadn’t been merely wasted effort: the relationship with trustee A. Alfred Taubman forged during the expansion fight would yield commissions later on, including a major one for the Detroit Institute of Arts. But what seemed to nag Michael about the loss of the museum expansion was the suspicion that he had been undone not by the particular failings of his design but by the fickleness of a few powerful figures in and around the institution who had decided they “wanted somebody more hip” and felt that Michael, and the architecture he represented, had lost their luster.26

  The Michael Graves of 1979 would have found it all but impossible to believe, but the greatest problem for the Michael Graves of 1989 was not too little work but too much. To his mind, at least, he had climbed to the pinnacle of the profession only to be brought low on the Upper East Side by the perception that he was too successful, too mainstream. This was an oversimplification: the failure of the other architects who followed him to devise an acceptable plan for the original Whitney is proof that the coolness factor was not decisive. But Michael’s status had slipped, and it had happened by his own hand. In an otherwise approving 1990 profile in the New York Times, Paul Goldberger would say of Michael that he often appeared “less like a man eager to broaden the arena of serious design than one willing to put his name on anything that could be sold.”27

  Shortly after the debut of the teakettle, Michael remembered turning to Linda Kinsey, a recent hire and now partner, telling her that the firm would “do this [product design] for five years, and if it doesn’t work, we’re done.”28 Those five years turned into many more, and by 1994 Michael had opened a shop in Princeton on Nassau Street, the Graves Design Studio Store, which featured homewares of the firm’s own creation, made on his firm’s behalf by dozens of fabricators: china sets for ceramics maker Swid Powell, numerous products from Alessi, a mantel clock, watches, jewelry, scarves…The list of products grew and grew, but the more it did, the more Michael and the practice were exposed to charges of being mercenaries, of turning their backs on the high seriousness of Modernist architecture in order to hawk PoMo tchotchkes to yuppie suburbanites.

  This was an unforeseen turnabout, and a cruel one in certain respects. Michael’s firm little suspected that its first faltering steps into the world of products would lead to an industrial design practice operating at nearly industrial scale. Until the 1980s almost every effort of “serious” design to appeal to Americans consumers had collapsed under its own weight, either due to price (not many Americans could afford a George Nelson sofa) or because popular taste was so widely divergent from that of the very Modernists so eager to cater to it (many Americans never wanted a George Nelson sofa). Indeed, in its latest incarnation—the one to which Michael had belonged prior to the late 1970s—the Modernist avant-garde had given up any pretense of catering to the people at all, or to their needs. “The transcendence of accommodation,” Charles Gwathmey had written, “is the difference between the art of architecture and building.”29

  Of course, Postmodernism had been reared from the cradle to have broader appeal. Beginning with Rowe’s anti-elitist rumblings—or further back, to the mass-media enthusiasms of England’s Independent Group—the critics of Modernist design had always prescribed a rapprochement with popular tastes. This only made Michael an even less likely vector for PoMo’s ascent in the marketplace: he had never shared Robert Venturi’s interest in Pop Art, or in the cynical, Warholian cheek that came with it. He had arrived at Postmodernism by a different channel, and his allegiances always remained to the communicative and to the classical. In spite of Postmodernism’s much-ballyhooed irony, its joyful celebration of the kitschy and the middlebrow, the man most responsible for commercializing it was nothing if not ingenuous. And now, for all the earnestness of his intent, and for all the risks he’d taken (the store on Nassau never really made money and closed after a few years), Michael felt he was being pilloried for trying to do what so many Modernists had tried and failed to do themselves.

  Not just the product work but the countless commercial building projects proceeding from the Graves office provided bait for the critics. From the Aventine—a gigantesque hotel and office complex in La Jolla, California—to a mixed-use office building a few blocks from the White House—destined to be the home of the International Finance Corporation—to master plans, mostly unexecuted, for commercial centers in Los Angeles, Brussels, Israel, and elsewhere, Michael continued to chase down every opportunity as though it would be his last. Steven Harris, who left the office in 1982, was not the last associate to depart exhausted by a boss who regularly “kept everyone up night after night for an AIA submission, redoing models, redoing everything,” as he recalled.30 The pace in the Princeton office did not slacken in the years that followed, as Michael was determined to keep ahead of the larger Postmodernist practices, no matter the cost.

  Not just commercial but institutional clients beckoned, and Michael was only too glad to have them. In 1989 the Newark Museum finally made good on its decades-old pledge, completing a 175,000-square-foot renovation based on a completely revised Graves scheme that included a new Postmodernist side entry: a somber, tomblike facade with a greenhouse roof. A year later the firm designed an elaborate sequel to its small 1982 addition to Emory University’s museum of art and archaeology, the stately, marble-clad Michael C. Carlos Museum. Most gratifying for Michael personally, he was asked to return to his undergraduate alma mater to design the Engineering Research Center for the College of Engineering at the University of Cincinnati; in another bid for appropriateness, the office’s design resembles a giant piston engine, with towering vent stacks breaking the roofline [PLATE 48]. Though lightened by ground-floor arches and the firm’s telltale polychromy, the building’s overall lugubriousness seems coincident with Michael’s lifelong abhorrence of engineering, dating back to when Erma Graves first laid down the law on his career prospects.

  Greater than all this, however, was the volume of work Michael Graves Architect was taking on in Japan. Beginning in the mid-1980s and accelerating rapidly over the next decade, the firm completed some fifteen office buildings and interiors, residential high-rises and mid-rises, a hotel [PLATE 49], a design school, and a municipal building, establishing a presence in the East Asian market well ahead of the twenty-first-century invasion of continental China by big-name Western architects. Informed once again by Rossi, the projects there—such as the Kasumi Research and Training Center in Tsukuba City—derived most of their visual interest from their dynamic massing, with discrete volumes in solid colors grouped into semiurban arrangements. Given a cultural climate where columns, cornices, and the other disjecta membra of the European tradition were largely irrelevant, Japan was a proving ground for a more universal Gravesian idiom, one that downplayed ornamental detail while leaning still more heavily on anthropomorphism and typological simplicity.

  Convenient vehicles for new design ideas and a valuable shelter from the early 1990s US recession, the office’s projects abroad (in addition to Japan, there were contemporaneous ones in northern Europe and Egypt) took shape largely out of the eye of the American design scene. Like a well-known American actor appearing in foreign television advertisements, they tended—especially given how little work many architects then had—to lend credence to the accusations of commercialism leveled by Goldberger and others. Still, Michael did include them in his three monographs published in the 1990s and early 2000s, and he presented them from time to time during stateside lectures. On one occasion in the mid-1990s, a number of architects were invited to Harvard to show work they’d done abroad; Michael presented his designs, then sat down next to Rem Koolhaas, the Rotterdam-based architect whose hyperactive rereading of the Modernist tradition had already won him a few major commissions as well as legions of fans. Koolhaas presented his work, and as he came back to his seat, he leaned over to Michael.

  “The number of projects you have in Japan,” Koolhaas said, in a heavy Dutch accent,
“is nauseating.”

  “I didn’t know whether to thank him, tell him off, or point him to the bathroom,” Michael recalled.31

  Compliment or critique? With Koolhaas, the remark could easily have been both. The acerbic Dutchman was, and is still, a deft hand at paradox, a talent that had helped elevate him in the 1990s to cultlike status in a field looking for a more piquant architecture for a more fractious age. Years later, when the Whitney picked Koolhaas to carry forward its doomed expansion plan, it came as confirmation that he was one of those “hip” architects who had set Michael back on his heels.

  By then, the 1988 Deconstructivist Architecture show at MoMA—featuring Koolhaas, among others; shepherded by Philip Johnson and co-curator Mark Wigley; helped along by Peter Eisenman—had come and gone. The exhibition “made it remorselessly clear,” wrote the scholar Nancy Levinson, “that the spotlight had swerved, leaving in the dark the decorated bulk of the Portland building.”32 The SOMs, the KPFs, and the other megafirms that had jumped onto the PoMo bandwagon would continue to build their jazzed-up skyscrapers for years yet; they only dug PoMo’s critical hole even deeper.

  Animadversions against Postmodernism from the academic side had reached an all-time high. In 1989 Mary McLeod wrote that the phrase “Postmodernism is the architecture of Reaganism” had already become a cliché in academic circles, albeit one with some merit.33 Without validating Decon’s accelerated strain of Modernism, McLeod traced a thread of reactionary politics in Postmodernism that ran straight from Colin Rowe through the building boom of the 1980s. “Collectively, Postmodern architects have exhibited a marked indifference to economic and social policy,” she pointed out: in its rejection of Modernist aesthetics, the movement had thrown out the socially progressive baby with the formal bathwater, allowing Postmodernism to be appropriated by a conservative political order and evacuated of its urbanist and pluralist values.34 As the 1980s turned to the ’90s, this left Postmodernism looking banal, co-opted, and passé.