by Ian Volner
Upon Michael in particular, the hammer fell with devastating force. McLeod herself had been a student of Michael’s; Peggy Deamer, also a product of Princeton, would say of his later work that it was “not nostalgia,” but “hallucination.”35 Alan Colquhoun, one of Michael’s earliest academic allies, would go on to denounce the “Mickey Mouse style he later adopted.”36 The pervasive sense that Michael’s work was all too congruent with the ideological climate of the 1980s had taken hold early: just after the opening of Portland, a television interviewer had sounded Frank Gehry on the building. “One might speculate that that kind of imagery is politically related to the Reagan Administration,” Gehry said, with a laugh. “I can imagine that. That we’re looking at a kind of a return to imperial architecture.”37
On formal grounds alone, the door was open for another architecture to reclaim the progressive mantle, and Gehry, Koolhaas, Daniel Libeskind, and the rest eventually walked through it. Their work, as McLeod understood from the start, was no more politically potent than Michael’s, but its lack of Greco-Roman pomp made it appear comparatively forward-looking, even if the future it foresaw was one of frenzied technological confusion. That vision, in fact, was part of what gave the new brace of anti-Postmodernists their verve—and unlike Michael’s work, the irregular geometries of Gehry, the swooping curves of Zaha Hadid, and the slashes and gashes of Libeskind could not be so easily vulgarized by bigger, more corporate practices. Their noisy novelty shouted down Michael’s Apollonian quietism, and their resistance to duplication made them seem (for the nonce, anyway) durably cool.
By the end of the Clinton years, Herbert Muschamp, who succeeded Paul Goldberger at the New York Times in 1992, would say of Michael:
Few architects today are less trendy than Mr. Graves. In the early 1980s, he was a trend beyond compare.… Today he is regarded by many as a stale trend: yesterday’s bag. And in these fast-paced times a stale trend is virtually ancient history.38
“I will never do anything that will please him,” Michael said of Muschamp.39 It was Muschamp, above all, who beat the drum in the popular press against Postmodernism, and it was Muschamp, above all, who led the swelling chorus of praise that greeted Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in northern Spain when it opened in 1997. Dubbed “the Miracle in Bilbao,” Gehry’s warped, sinuous creation was a masterful marriage of technology and expressionism, and it would be the watershed for everything that followed in the digital age. The “starchitect” was born.
THAT MICHAEL STAYED COMMITTED to his vision of an architecture of meaning, long after its meaning had shifted so dramatically, is the great puzzle of his later career. Philip Johnson, never one to be caught in last season’s clothes, had already shifted away from his Postmodernist work; by the early 2000s, SOM would do the same. Michael, had he followed suit, could have done so without the semblance of cynicism, given the depth of his practice: his work in the 1970s had been teeming in latencies, in unexplored potential. Why didn’t he mine it for something else?
There are any number of possible explanations, but key to them all is that Michael, correctly or not, came to believe that he had escaped Postmodernism—or that he was never part of it to begin with. Looking back in 1994, he said of his work, “I didn’t call it postmodern—none of us thought much of it as a name.”40 True, he had been happy enough to accept the label when Charles Jencks was feting him alongside Frank Lloyd Wright as one of America’s “Kings of Infinite Space” in a television documentary the critic produced in 1983.41 But after less than a decade, even Jencks no longer recognized his erstwhile hero as a proper Postmodernist; by then, wrote Jencks, the work “was the reverse of Postmodernism.”42 Far from being complex and contradictory, Michael’s later projects had become perfectly harmonious, their accessibility so absolute as to foreclose alternate readings.
The architect had not done this unthinkingly. By the 1990s Postmodernist disunity had ceased holding the same allure for Michael it once did. Instead, he preferred to speak of a parallel, non-Modernist unity, one that had been neglected by Modernists and Postmodernists alike. As the scholar (and later Princeton dean) Stan Allen wrote, Michael “mapped out an alternative genealogy for Modernism,”43 cobbled together from sources he’d been assimilating for years and constituting what the critic Reyner Banham might have called une architecture autre: an “other” architecture.
This “other” property Michael found in the stripped classicism of Gunnar Asplund and in the decorative daintiness of Josef Hoffmann and the Vienna Secession. He saw it in the work of C. F. Hansen, a nineteenth-century Danish classicist whom he’d begun to include in his lectures, and in the buildings of Jože Plečnik, a Slovenian architect whose buildings throughout Central Europe Michael had tracked down over the years. These “extraordinary architects…who the world doesn’t know,” as Michael called them, were complemented by the work of an artist the world (and Aldo Rossi) knew very well: the painter Giorgio de Chirico, whose haunting landscapes often included vaguely Renaissance structures adrift in unplaceable settings.44 The Italian Surrealist would be a major touchstone for Michael’s own paintings from the late 1980s onward.
Combining these several strands, Michael’s architectural language became more succinct and ascetic, a revolving wheel of hazily familiar typologies with reduced decorative touches. His buildings, as a consequence, also became more repetitive—but hidden in the repetitions, Michael’s late style sometimes afforded a glimpse at his dreamed-of otherness, nowhere more so than in the design for the Denver Public Library, the most exceptional project from Michael Graves Architect of the mid-1990s.
Completed just eighteen months before Gehry’s Bilbao museum, the library project emerged from a 1990 competition in which Michael’s office squared off against Robert A. M. Stern and the Denver architects Hoover Berg Desmond. The terms of the commission called for the out-of-town contestants to be paired with a local firm, and Michael teamed up with the Colorado-based studio of the designer Brian Klipp, meeting him for the first time only the night before their initial interview with the library commission. “He was always flying in from someplace,” recalled Klipp.45
As with Lapidus in Florida, Michael carried on an amiable and productive partnership with Klipp, relying on the Denverite’s knowledge of the city’s history and character. Occupying a downtown block on Broadway adjacent to Civic Center Park, the new library would be a 405,000-square-foot extension to an existing midcentury structure, a comely if commonplace Modernist volume that would receive an extensive interior renovation and become part of Michael’s overall massing scheme. The site of the addition had formerly been home to a dry-cleaning plant, and the construction team had to perform extensive soil remediation after solvent deposits were discovered during excavation. The area in general was considered rather unsavory, and for the municipal government the project involved some “soul searching,” as Klipp put it, a moment for Denver “to figure out what it was as a city.”46 The library would be the first in what has since become a suite of new institutional buildings in the district (including a new Denver Art Museum addition by Daniel Libeskind from 2006), and Michael’s proposal won over a local jury trying to find a cornerstone for this new cultural acropolis.
It’s not hard to see why. The completed library creates an urban scene ex novo, a cluster of volumes arrayed, like some of the Japanese projects, into a family group, but with its members crowded closer together and more dynamically interrelated in plan [PLATES 50 AND 51]. Seen from the south on West Thirteenth Avenue, a russet mass, “the Bar” as the architects called it, passes through the ensemble from the eastern and western fronts; it is braced by a blue block, which steps down to a symmetrical beige porch. Surrounding these volumes are a number of semi-engaged dependencies, most dramatically a green, gable-topped tower—nicknamed by the designers “the Pencil”—and a central cylinder—nicknamed “the Drum.” Capped by a flat plane in shining copper, the Drum sprouts sets of brachiated piers, also in copper, suggestive of the
woodwork trabeation of rustic barn lofts.
The piers were a form that was appearing more and more in Michael’s paintings at the time, and in some buildings as well, such as the porch of his 1996 Indianapolis Art Center for his hometown of Broad Ripple Village. All the elements of the library, in fact, were well-worn standards of the Graves repertoire: the insertion of the Drum into a rectilinear mass was a main feature of Team Disney, while the well-sharpened point of the Pencil turned up in several Japanese projects. But Denver was not just another spin through Michael’s patented album of forms.
The design excelled, thanks to a nervy act of insolence during its initial development. The original brief circulated by the clients stipulated that the building was to be limited to a single entrance facing Broadway. This made perfect sense: libraries are jealous protectors of their own books; the less porous they are, the safer their collections are likely to be. But at Michael’s insistence, the Graves-Klipp scheme included a second entrance on the western side, facing a pedestrian walkway that cuts through the block between the library and one of the older galleries of the Denver Art Museum. “We broke the rules,” noted Klipp, and the change might easily have lost them the commission. Instead, it became a rare moment in which Michael’s formal intention to project a communal, village-like image is borne out by the program, with the double entryways turning the high-ceilinged public lobby that connects them into a bustling indoor street.
The library had another quality as well, one even harder to come by in the firm’s work. Clad in cast and natural stone quarried in Germany, the building has an alternating patina of lighter and darker masonry, granting it a depth and tactility that stiffens the spine of its soft, pastel palette. Everywhere one looks, in the timbered rotunda in the Western History Room and in the copper strips on the Pencil pyramid exterior, unusual care was taken with materials, presenting them with fewer encumbrances of decorative detailing, allowing them, at last, to speak for themselves.
Though he mocked its toylike classicism as “Mr. Rogers meets McKim, Meade and White,” even Herbert Muschamp owned up to a certain regard for the Denver Library.47 The project was special for Michael: he made it the cover of his third monograph, an honor held in the previous two by Portland and Humana, and it helped snag him GQ’s Man of the Year for design in 1997. Michael was increasingly leaving the firm’s larger architectural projects to his retinue of partners—especially Karen Nichols, Tom Rowe, and Patrick Burke, all three of whom were elevated to the title of “principal” in 1998 when the firm changed its name to Michael Graves & Associates. But the founder stayed close to the library project during the design process, making minute changes to it throughout (as he was known to do). One of these nearly sabotaged the pleasing solidity of the Drum by doing it up in ornamental bands, a plot foiled by the objections of the client.48
The library’s popularity with locals and its reasonably warm critical reception confirmed for Michael that his modified Postmodernist language was still a viable medium for public architecture. And around the same time that he began work on Denver, he had finally completed another project that showed his late style’s potential to create a rich, sensuous environment for private life. After thirty years and countless thousands of dollars, he had finished the Warehouse.
Having polished off a few final tweaks to the kitchen wing, Michael could now entertain in style, celebrating the renovation by hosting a garden party for the National Governors Association in 1992. During the festivities, the wife of one of the governors approached the homeowner to compliment him on the building.
“How long has the house been finished?” she asked.
“About twenty minutes,” Michael said: the gravel in the driveway had been laid down just before the guests’ arrival.49
In its final state, the house represented the fullest flowering of Michael’s alternate-historical vision. Enclosing the graveled court on two sides to form a de Chirico–esque piazza, the exterior was a perfectly serene composition in burnt umber, the facade sparingly ornamented and interrupted only by a few projecting volumes, including the south-facing chimney breast. Inside, every detail had been fully regularized and classicized: the original exposed ductwork (representative of his style at the time of the Gunwyn Ventures office) had been obscured, marked now by black iron grilles, and the library fronting the eastern garden was made into a narrow forest of columns, painted to resemble Michael’s cherished bird’s-eye maple but in fact made of humble PVC pipes and MDF board. As in Sir John Soane’s Museum, many of the house’s adornments were fake—Michael’s Pierre-Paul Prud’hon painting was real, but his Nicolas Poussin was a convincing replica. All the Corots were actually by Michael Graves.50
He had bought the neighboring houses to the east and west of his own entry allée, using them as rental properties and occasionally lending them out to friends. Among the latter was Fran Lebowitz, who holed up in one of the homes for a year and a half starting around 1993, during an excruciatingly long renovation of her Manhattan apartment building. “My writing room faced Michael’s house,” she recalled, and looking into his in-home studio, she could see him at work “about twenty-one hours a day.”51 In one of her fitful efforts to shake off her epic case of writer’s block (“writer’s blockade,” as she once called it), Lebowitz had agreed to produce a children’s book and was working on it during her stay in Princeton. Considering Michael’s obviously packed schedule, it came as some surprise when Michael’s girlfriend at the time approached Lebowitz and told her that he was “very hurt” he hadn’t been asked to illustrate her book. She did ask, and he accepted.52 The result, 1994’s Mr. Chas and Lisa Sue Meet the Pandas, is the largest body of realist paintings Michael ever produced, as well as the only new book by Fran Lebowitz in more than three decades.
Several years later, her apartment building still being overhauled, Lebowitz asked if she could stay in the house again but found that it already had another tenant. Michael had installed his son there. Adam stayed on in Princeton for several years while working in a peripheral capacity at his father’s firm, the lengthiest period of personal contact between Michael and his second child. Sadly, this tentative rapprochement was no more effectual than previous ones. When Gail, after another lengthy stint in Cambridge, decided to move back to Indianapolis, it was thought best by all concerned that Adam go with her.
AFTER THAT, MICHAEL WAS once again alone, though rarely lonely. Besides friends and lovers, he had found a new passion: golf, which he took up in the mid-1990s and for which he demonstrated an ability not quite coequal to his enthusiasm, taking off early from work many days to hit the Springdale Golf Club in the company of one of his dogs. His associate Patrick Burke recalled him attending a client meeting on the range, and when the rest of the group headed to the clubhouse for drinks, Michael stayed behind to get in a few more swings. Hours passed before his clients and associates emerged to find him still slicing away, hitting balls into the twilight until it was too dark to see.53
Michael’s singleness of purpose was unquestionably another factor governing his choice not to alter the basic character of his practice in the 1990s. Stubbornness was his specialty, not merely a facet of his psyche but its basic substrate.
Peter Eisenman, who was in psychotherapy for several decades, related that at some point in the mid-1970s he encouraged Michael to have a preliminary session with his own analyst. Subsequently, Eisenman asked his doctor whether Michael would be continuing with treatment. The doctor indicated vaguely that he did not think it would be useful for Michael to do so.54 It was not, one infers, that the depths of the Gravesian mind were so impossible to plumb: rather, what would make Michael a hard nut to crack for even the most seasoned psychologist was his marked distaste for self-examination, a quality remarked upon by many people who knew him over the years: “There was a mystery to him,” as Mary McLeod put it; he didn’t “come out of his shell,” said Caroline Constant; “never introspective,” in Steven Harris’s view.55
And yet M
ichael’s inner drives were but poorly hidden, floating to the surface again and again in his work. The need to communicate, the desire to give his buildings and products a human aspect, the compulsion to always do more, make more, build bigger…It is not mere armchair pathologizing to connect these things to the boy with the cockeyed stare who felt himself so out of place no matter where he went, from the playing fields of Indianapolis to the halls of Harvard. Nor is it hard to see how architecture may have furnished a form of wish fulfillment for some of the ongoing struggles of his later life. It was Paul Goldberger who once observed (unaware, he later realized, of his own perspicacity) that Breuer’s Whitney, in its stone-faced obscurantism, was an “autistic” building.56 Michael’s pitched battle to speak to it was more than strictly architectural.
The cumulative disappointments of the post-Whitney years, as Michael’s critical standing took a heavy hit, did not sit well with his sensitivity, or with his stubbornness. Despite having won almost every major award the architecture world had to offer (the AIA Gold Medal, the Richard Driehaus Award, the Topaz Medallion, a pile of Progressive Architecture Awards), in later life Michael grumbled loudly about his failure to win architecture’s highest honor, the Pritzker Prize, which had gone to friends and competitors such as Richard Meier, Aldo Rossi, and Robert Venturi. His critiques of his contemporaries became increasingly pointed and ad hominem: Rem Koolhaas struck him as “a complete narcissist,” Daniel Libeskind as “angry.”57 Michael’s persistent social angst—the legacy of Bud Graves, Broad Ripple Village, and all the psychic cargo of his background—made his relative loss of status all the more upsetting, and his lifelong unease on matters of class found expression in his ever more resolute classicism.
