Michael Graves

by Ian Volner

  WHO COULD HAVE FORESEEN that Michael Graves—epicure, soft-voiced academic, lukewarm liberal—would turn into a fiery spokesman on behalf of some of America’s most vulnerable citizens? Much less one whose output, in the last decade of his life, put such a strong emphasis on function over form?

  For this was the great reversal in Michael’s last decade as a designer. Meaning—and the language of classicism, absorbed in Rome, that he used to convey it—had taken such primacy in Michael’s work for so long that it had crowded out the fundamental principle of utility. To Michael’s way of thinking, functionalism had been raised to a fetish by the Modernists, in a way that had made the built environment hostile to any human needs beyond the merely mechanical. Now, at the end of his life, Michael pulled off a surprise rapprochement with functionality: without losing its anthropoid profiles or its symbolism (or even, in the case of the hospital projects, its pastiche historicism), the firm’s work for the health-care market was as robustly functionalist as anything from the fever dreams of the early Modernists.

  Indeed, the poetics of Le Corbusier and the stern rigor of Mies had often given more the appearance than the substance of function. Not so the health-care designs from Michael Graves Design Group, which, if they failed at their functions, could cause serious harm. The work was not formalism-free, of course. Michael wouldn’t hear of that, and invariably his critiques of prototypes from the products workshop would take aim at the color of a finish, at the shape of a cabinet knob. Of the prevailing hideousness of the health-care environment (“Most of what exists now,” Michael would always say, “is just too depressing to even die in”), the designer remained an unwavering foe.21 But the dewy color schemes and the rounded contours had become part of a more comprehensive objective. “Accessibility” had taken on a whole new meaning.

  Closing the loop, in a sense, on Michael’s career-long commitment to connecting with ordinary people, the turn to health-care design advocacy, albeit precipitated by his personal crisis, was almost a natural one. His disability forced him to see things through different eyes. Dealing with objects at close range, his perceptive powers were now trained on details rather than facades and envelopes. His products still communicated, but their meaning now rang closer to how the critic Reyner Banham once defined beauty: “the promise of Function, made sensuously pleasing.”22 Far from blunting his critique of other design strategies, Michael’s new insights into functionality sharpened it.

  As often as not, that critique was aimed at his contemporaries. “Our nail clippers and tweezers”—created for the cosmetics brand Slice—“are for arthritic users, for octogenarians, for anybody that would have trouble with a more abstracted handle,” Michael noted. He contrasted this approach with that of well-known designers like Philippe Starck, with his ungainly, spiderlike orange squeezer for Alessi, or Frank Gehry, with his chairs made from flimsy cardboard or hard, rolled steel.23 The work of these figures and others evinced what Michael deemed “egotism,” an unseemly disregard for human service that stoked his already appreciable resentment. Characteristically, Michael’s empathy and Michael’s anger were two sides of the same coin.

  HIS FEISTY VITALITY made Michael’s death feel far more abrupt than one would expect an eighty-year-old paraplegic’s to be. In the last year of his life, he traveled to China; only a year before that, he had returned one last time for a special Notre Dame and University of Miami–sponsored trip to Rome, wheeling gamely through the hilly, bumpy streets he had come to know on that first night with Gail and Ted Musho. The visit was an occasion to toss aside his nurse’s usual dietary strictures, and Michael plowed into the hearty Italian fare. “It was so hard to say no when he wanted something,” recalled Minnie.24

  On the morning of March 12, 2015, Michael died of heart failure—not a direct consequence of either his illness or his appetite, though no doubt abetted by twelve years without proper exercise save for his stationary bike. His death took friends and family by surprise and left many hanging threads, in particular the Warehouse: Michael had intended to endow his home to Princeton as a perpetual trust, but it was declined by the university because of fears about maintenance costs. His archives, too, remained unconsolidated, though the majority of his original drawings and drafts are in safekeeping with the firm.

  Michael’s legacy, however, did not die intestate. The machinery of fame, its interlocking gears of public caprice and modern media, had made Michael a public figure in the 1980s and then later diminished his standing as the nature of celebrity changed and settled on other designers. A cautionary tale, one might say. But before his death, Michael could already see that his name would long outlive him.

  In 2014, on the fiftieth anniversary of his firm’s founding, the New Jersey art and design venue Grounds for Sculpture staged a full retrospective of Michael’s work, showcasing the exceptional breadth of his output as a maker of both buildings and products. The show dovetailed both with the thirtieth anniversary of the Alessi 9093 teakettle in 2015—relaunched with a special edition “Tea Rex” model, with a dragon in place of the conventional bird—as well as the announcement of a new initiative aimed at institutionalizing Michael’s legacy: the Michael Graves College at New Jersey’s Kean University, a program devoted to preserving Michael’s commitment to drawing and his belief in design as civic engagement. The school, where classes are now underway, is slated to have a satellite location in Wenzhou, China [PLATE 64], a five-hundred-acre campus whose master plan Michael Graves & Associates helped develop. Dean David Mohney, a former student of Michael’s, has described the school’s mission as “not at all a kind of stylistic question” of emulating Michael’s buildings but a question of honoring his “intellectual approach.”25 Stepping up where Princeton did not, Kean has also recently assumed ownership of the Warehouse and will preserve it as a center for study, meetings, and scholarly residencies.

  The debuts of both retrospective and school were extraordinarily timely. Ambivalent as Michael’s feelings had become toward the movement, Postmodernism returned in the second decade of the twenty-first century as a subject of serious academic research and professional interest. At a two-day symposium at New York’s CUNY Graduate Center in 2011, Michael found himself on stage with a coterie of his PoMo compatriots: his former students Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk—whose Congress for the New Urbanism had championed a return to traditional town planning—as well as Tom Wolfe, Charles Jencks, and Robert A. M. Stern. The event was packed, the conversation lively, and the issues discussed were not long confined to the lecture hall. In the years that followed, the preservationist community has begun to consider not whether but which Postmodernist monuments might deserve the legal protections of official landmark status, the same protections that have been accorded so many Modernist buildings over the last two decades. Among the structures at the heart of this debate has been Michael’s own Portland Building, whose fate is still undecided, but which appears likely to escape the scrap heap.26

  Beyond mere historical interest, Postmodernism survives in altered form long after its supposed expiration date. Though most of the firms behind today’s highest-profile projects would bristle at any suggestion of PoMo-era stylemongering, the past is always with us. In a bid for appropriateness, Jean Nouvel’s upcoming Louvre Abu Dhabi incorporates traditional Muslim motifs; for a splash of populist romance, SHoP Architects’ new Fifty-Seventh Street tower in Manhattan is an obvious nod to the beloved Gothic skyscrapers of old. (Robert A. M. Stern, it should be added, has never ceased practicing in a historically minded fashion and currently heads a massive office producing residential high-rises sometimes indistinguishable from their early twentieth-century counterparts.) This is to say nothing of the transparently historicist shopping centers and condominium towers that one can see in cities and towns all across the country—and if the city in question happens to be Austin, Tokyo, or any of dozens of others, some of the buildings one sees are by Michael Graves & Associates, still one of the foremost expone
nts of the PoMo vernacular.

  Michael’s firm, and in particular its ongoing health-care work, is still another of his durable achievements. Combining its two separate wings, the rebranded Michael Graves Architecture & Design continues to build, from Singapore to Lower Manhattan, and remains without question the biggest designer name in the medical sphere. In a conversation after his paralysis, the critic Paul Goldberger told him that his “greatest contribution” was his office and its drive to improve health-care design.27 Creating easy-to-use wheelchairs and tweezers was never likely to earn Michael a Pritzker. But that is the moral bequest he has left to his firm, and to the world.

  Together for the last time on stage, Michael and Peter Eisenman at the Architectural League of New York’s symposium “Michael Graves: Past as Prologue,” held at the New School in November 2014

  If none of this were enough to secure Michael’s place in the canon, his voice would still linger. Onstage with Peter Eisenman at an event at the New School in New York only four months before his death, he was at his most pithy and passionate, lighting into his competitors, and his old friend, with undiminished relish:

  MICHAEL: Nouvel, Zaha, Rem. They have their phones ringing all the time, people asking them, “Would you do this for us?”

  EISENMAN: Why?

  MICHAEL: To keep ahead of Frank! [Audience bursts into laughter] You and I are in a different parade.… Rem made a building. It has a tower, a horizontal tower, and then another on its side, comes back down to the ground, and there’s a tower on the ground. And nobody said, Why? What the fuck is that about? Where’s the door? What are you doing, man? Are you high? And the magazines publish it like it was heaven on earth.… I like my buildings to have a foot, a discernible door or more, and windows to look out of, thank you very much. And you, Peter, call it a populist architecture! Because I like the people.… Years ago I went to [Mies’s IIT] with a friend who taught me a lot. People get so excited about the floating steps at the school of architecture. Somebody will fall down them because they’re so treacherous. And somebody else will put up a railing on them someday, and they’ll be called populist.… We sit here talking about architecture, without the will to get on with it and to make life better for all of you [looking at audience]. All of you will be in walkers and canes and contraptions one day, in the next ten or twenty years.28

  It was an astounding performance. Nowadays, whenever certain architects congregate, the mood of mutual appreciation can be almost smothering. Michael’s diatribe was nettling, unsettling, and strangely refreshing.

  Over a career spanning five decades, Michael had seen how design had moved from the utopian aspirations of Modernism toward the corporatization of the International Style; how it evolved, through the intellectual crises of the 1960s, into the Postmodernist reaction; and then, charging ahead undaunted, how it had embarked into the post-Bilbao millennium, giddy with its own technological wizardry and big-budget glitz. At a crucial juncture in the 1980s, Michael himself had been a central figure in shepherding design into the hypermediated age of big-name branding—and now, in the unlikeliest turn of all, he had returned, like Charles Dickens’s Jacob Marley, shaking his chains and moaning with righteous indignation at a profession that he felt had lost its social soul.

  Marley, of course was trying to atone for his sins. Perhaps Michael was too. But the apparent contradiction of a PoMo pop icon railing about architecture as human service was not evidence of some near-deathbed conversion on his part. A contradiction, yes—but one that had always been intrinsic to the Postmodernism that Michael had practiced, with its simultaneous strivings toward accessibility and abstraction, monumental grandeur and everyday appropriateness, mass-market appeal and high-minded humanism. Forty years on, Michael was still wrestling with those issues, loudly and publicly.

  So is contemporary architecture, though rarely with half so much candor. The unreconciled impulses that drove Postmodernism have been inherited lock, stock, and anxiety-inducing barrel by contemporary design, which is even now navigating them anew—struggling, in our media-addled age, to move beyond the era of celebrity starchitects and toward an architecture that both connects and serves. Of Postmodernism’s many lessons for today’s architecture, the movement’s attempt, however flawed, to deal frankly with these problems must be reckoned the most pertinent of all. Once again, Michael Graves had simply seen what was right before everyone’s eyes.

  FEW HAD BETTER REASON to mourn Michael than the man who had labored so diligently to give him his twelve-year lease on life, Dr. Barth Green. He and Michael had grown close; one of Green’s colleagues in Miami sponsored yachting trips for victims of paralysis, and when Michael recovered from his surgery, Green had taken him sailing on Biscayne Bay. Sprayed with water, whipped by the wind, the incorrigible landlubber at last got a taste of the sea.

  Green gave Michael something else as well, though it’s unclear how well his patient understood it, or its implications. In the hours-long operation that Green had performed on Michael’s spinal column, he had seen, as no CAT scan ever could, precisely what Michael’s disease really looked like. From his lengthy observations, Green developed a theory—a couple, in fact, but one in particular that he favored. “It could have been optic myelitis,” he said. The degenerative nerve disorder tracks very closely with Michael’s pathology, and it begins, as the name implies, with an inflammation in one of the two main optical nerves.29

  The diagnosis is not official, and the coincidence would seem almost too cosmic—given the course of Michael’s life and career—to think that his eye might have been his undoing. Then again, Michael’s illness never did undo him, not completely. He had spent his last years doing pretty much as he’d done, for better or worse, for most of his life. Which was…whatever he felt like doing.

  The memorial service for Michael, held in spring of 2015 in Princeton’s Richardson Auditorium, was beautiful and moving, and went on far too long. “It was awful!” said Eisenman, with characteristic overstatement.30 (His own eulogy was not necessarily notable for its brevity.) It seemed that everyone had something to say about Michael—his son Michael Sebastian; his daughter, Sarah Stelfox; Karen Nichols; Patrick Burke; Richard Meier. Fran Lebowitz did not attend, though Michael would have understood. Grand emotional gatherings are not her bailiwick, and in any case this one qualified as an “out of town party.” Robert A. M. Stern was in the audience, along with Steven Harris, Caroline Constant, Mary McLeod, and Peter Waldman; Lucy and her children were there too. During the reception afterward, everyone milled around with Princetonians of assorted vintage, and when it was over, the crowd emerged to find that it was a fine April afternoon, the sky above a suitable shade of blue.

  Acknowledgments

  FOLLOWING MICHAEL GRAVES’S death, three parties ensured that the project we had begun in the last two years of his life saw the light of day.

  One was Michael’s family—above all his daughter, Sarah Stelfox, whose assistance and whose memories of her father have been invaluable.

  Another was Michael’s eponymous firm, in particular his longtime partner Karen Nichols and communication manager Sal Forgione. The former has been instrumental at every stage, from proposal to interviews to fact checking, and the latter saw to it that all the images and archival material I needed were put at my disposal.

  Last but certainly not least is the team at Princeton Architectural Press, where publisher Kevin Lippert and editors Jennifer Lippert, Nolan Boomer, and especially Sara Stemen have helped usher the manuscript into something at least halfway worthy of its subject.

  For my part, my commitment to seeing the project through—while never in doubt—has been constantly bolstered by my wonderful agent and dear friend Nicole Tourtelot. Along with fellow agent David Kuhn, it was she who first fixed on a Graves book as a promising idea, one very cold and miserable January day back in 2013.

  As per the footnotes, nearly sixty individuals consented to be interviewed by phone, email, or in person about Michael
Graves, all of them essential but too many to be listed here. I do, however, feel compelled to thank those who went the extra mile to help track down other interviewees or documents on my behalf: Peter Eisenman, Dean Bob Geddes, Mike Graves (genealogist, of Texas), Léon Krier, Mary McLeod, Jayne Merkel, Lois Rothert (formerly Hanselmann), and Robert A. M. Stern.

  In a similar vein, although the bibliography on the succeeding pages gives credit to most sources, four names that appear there merit special mention: the neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone; Nancy Nall, longtime chronicler of Fort Wayne history for the News-Sentinel; the architecture scholar Meredith Clausen of the University of Washington; and the Disney-ologist Chuck Mirarchi. Each of their respective studies—of lazy eye; the Snyderman House; the Portland Building; and the Swan and Dolphin Hotels—proved so definitive as to render almost every other written account practically superfluous.

  On a personal note, this book was a part of my life for nearly four years, with many lulls, detours, and cliffhangers along the way. I am eternally grateful to all those who have lent so much support—practical, emotional, often both—during this time, including but by no means limited to Éva Calon; Mr. and Mrs. Christopher Cox; Charles Curkin and the editors of Surface; Rachel Geller; Katie Gerfen and the staff at Architect; Rachel Gracey; Mr. and Mrs. Justin Jamail; Chris Knutsen and the editors of WSJ: The Wall Street Journal Magazine; Susan Grant Lewin and the staff of SGLA Public Relations; Michael Scott Paulson; Sophie Pinkham; Julian Rose and the staff at Artforum; Jenna Sauers; Abigail Shaw; Brian Spinks; Oli Stratford and the editors of Disegno; Mr. and Mrs. Jim Turner; Mr. and Mrs. Ian Volner Sr.; Matthew Volner; Mildred Weisz; Daniel Wenger and the editors of the New Yorker online; and Jennifer Wright.

  Finally, it bears repeating that none of this would have been possible without the candor and kindness of Michael Graves. He is much missed.