by Ian Volner
24 KN notes.
25 MGGTL.
26 RM 2/29/16.
27 LH 3/22/16.
28 SS 3/8/16.
29 Peter Eisenman, “The Graves of Modernism,” Oppositions 12 (Spring 1978): 26.
30 GG email.
31 MG 4/29/13.
32 Brian Ambroziak, Michael Graves: Images of a Grand Tour (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), 2.
33 MG 8/29/13.
34 MG 4/29/13.
35 PE 2/25/16.
36 MG 4/29/13.
V · THE GARDEN AND THE MACHINES
1 SS email.
2 F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 41.
3 Sabra Follet Meservey began her studies in April 1961. Princeton Alumni News, April 29, 1961, 8.
4 PE 2/25/16.
5 Robert Hillier interview 9/13/16.
6 PE 2/25/16.
7 Ibid.
8 Rowe was Eisenman’s mentor—though his official thesis adviser was Leslie Martin.
9 Colin Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 122, 123.
10 Peter Smithson, Conversations with Students (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005), 19.
11 MG 8/22/13.
12 PW 11/16/16; MG 4/29/13. The official record does not list a name for the course Michael taught that semester, and he is not formally recognized as the instructor for his 204 studio until the fall of 1963. Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library archivist emails.
13 MG 4/29/13.
14 JHD 6/15/16.
15 PE 2/25/16.
16 PW 11/16/16. Among Waldman’s colleagues in that first Graves class was Tod Williams, now the architect—in partnership with his wife, Billie Tsien—of many prominent buildings, including the upcoming Obama presidential library.
17 SH 5/20/16.
18 MG 2/17/15.
19 Michael Graves, “What Is the Status of Work on Form Today?” NY: Architecture New York, nos. 7–8 (1994): 61.
20 MG 4/29/13.
21 Ibid.
22 Quoted in Beth Dunlop, A House for My Mother: Architects Build for Their Families (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 31.
23 MG 4/29/13.
24 SH 5/20/16; MG 8/22/13.
25 MG 8/22/13.
26 Letter to Michael Graves from University Secretary Alexander Leitch, April 19, 1963, courtesy of Sarah Stelfox.
27 MG 8/22/13.
28 PE 2/25/16. In a bizarre coincidence, Professor Szathmary’s brother wrote the original theme music to Get Smart, Michael’s scholarly anthem back in Rome.
29 Ibid.
30 Suzanne Frank, IAUS, the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies: An Insider’s Memoir (Bloomington, IN: AuthorsHouse, 2011), 19.
31 Quoted in Stanford O. Anderson, “CASE and MIT: Engagement,” in A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the “Techno-Social” Moment, ed. Arindam Dutta (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 648.
32 Karrie Jacobs, “Linear City,” Dwell, June 10, 2010, 112.
33 CC 5/16/16.
34 PE 2/25/16.
35 LIFE, “The U.S. City: Its Greatness Is at Stake,” December 24, 1965.
36 CC 5/16/16.
37 Anderson, “CASE and MIT: Engagement,” 588.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 587.
40 SS email.
41 AC 11/18/16. Chimacoff first met Michael briefly during a Cornell jury in this period; contemporary photos confirm that he had grown bulky.
42 Muriel Emanuel, Contemporary Architects (London: Macmillan, 1980), 304. Michael typically excluded his early competition proposals from his own monographs.
43 PE 2/25/16.
44 BG 11/11/16.
45 Quoted in Frank, IAUS, the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 4.
46 PC 12/27/16.
47 LR 3/22/16.
48 JHD 6/15/16.
49 LR 3/22/16. This was not the end of the “village” solution. As Lois explained, “He just stacked the two small buildings, and added a third ‘building’ between the first two.” Bumping the parents’ bedroom to the upper story of the main volume, Michael removed Lois’s studio to an adjacent unit, connecting the two by way of a raised viaduct accessed via a stairway that acted as the main entry.
50 Ibid.
51 JHD 6/15/16.
52 LR 3/22/16.
53 Julie Hanselmann Davies, Michael Graves: Hanselmann House, Snyderman House: Residential Masterpieces 4, ed. Yukio Futagawa (Tokyo: ADA Edita, 2013), 6.
54 Barbara Klinkhammer, “After Purism: Le Corbusier and Color,” Preservation Education and Research 4 (2011): 115.
55 Hanselmann Davies, Michael Graves: Hanselmann House, Snyderman House, 7.
56 LR 3/22/16.
57 MG 4/29/13.
58 CC 5/16/16.
59 “Calendar,” Princeton Alumni Weekly 68, October 10, 1967, 17.
60 KF 6/16/16.
61 BG 11/11/16; PW 11/16/16. Johnson and Michael had almost certainly been introduced by this point, though it’s not clear whether Michael had yet been invited—as Robert A. M. Stern and other young architects often were—to call on Johnson at his Glass House compound in Connecticut.
62 PW 11/16/16.
63 Peggy Deamer, “Michael Graves: Bodybuilder?,” in Thinking the Present: Recent American Architecture, ed. K. Michael Hays and Carol Burns (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1990), 7.
64 MG 8/22/13.
65 MG 5/16/13.
66 SS 1/21/16.
67 Ibid.
68 MG 8/22/13.
69 Ibid.
70 JHD 6/15/16.
71 LR 3/22/16.
72 These quotes come from Nancy Nall (full name Nancy Nall Derringer), “The Snyderman House” (2002), archived on her website at http://nancynall.com/2011/08/15/the-snyderman-house/. Nall is a former Fort Wayne News-Sentinel columnist.
73 Alan Colquhoun, “From Bricolage to Myth, or How to Put Humpty-Dumpty Together Again,” in Architecture Theory since 1968, ed. Michael Hayes (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 342.
74 Suzanne Stephens, “Living in a Work of Art,” Progressive Architecture 59 (March 1978): 84.
75 Martin Filler, “Michael Graves: Before and After,” Art in America 68 (September 1980): 104.
76 JHD 6/15/16.
77 Quoted in Nall, “The Snyderman House.”
78 Ibid.
79 PE 2/25/16.
80 Frank, IAUS, the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 51.
81 MG 4/29/13.
82 Ibid.
83 PE 2/25/16.
84 Eisenman recalls that the production quality of the first edition was so poor that a second, paperback one was shortly released, with as many as five hundred copies printed.
85 Colin Rowe, “Introduction,” in Five Architects (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), n.p.
86 Paul Davies, “Reputations: Michael Graves (1934–),” Architectural Review, April 25, 2014, https://www.architectural-review.com/rethink/reputations/michael-graves-1934-/8661699.article.
87 MG 8/29/13.
88 LK 12/28/15.
89 RAMS 3/2/16; Robert A. M. Stern et al., “Five on Five,” Architectural Forum 138 (May 1973): 46–57.
90 PE 2/25/16.
91 The conference “Four Days in May,” also known as “White and Gray Meets Silver,” is typically accepted as the inception date for the White versus Gray nomenclature. The Silvers were a more loosely affiliated faction of Los Angeles–based high-tech architects, including Craig Hodgetts, Cesar Pelli, and others. See Harry Francis Malgrave and David J. Goodman, An Introduction to Architectural Theory: 1968 to the Present (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 45.
92 Vincent Scully, “Introduction,” in Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 10.
93 Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, 16.
94 Stern et al., “Five on Five,�
�� 49, 47, 49.
95 Ibid., 56.
96 Ibid., 47.
97 Ibid., 54.
98 Ibid., 51.
99 MM 6/8/16.
100 PW 11/16/16.
101 MG 4/29/13.
102 PE 2/25/16.
103 Paul Goldberger, “Architecture’s ‘5’ Make Their Ideas Felt,” New York Times, November 26, 1973.
104 As with the Grays and the Whites, the exact timing of and responsibility for the “New York Five” coinage is slightly obscure. Goldberger is generally credited, though in the original New York Times article (ibid.), he prefers the term deployed by Arthur Drexler in his prologue, referring to a “New York School.” Only later would Goldberger publish an article entitled “Should Anyone Care about the ‘New York Five’?…or about Their Critics, the ‘Five on Five’?,” Architectural Record 155 (February 1974): 113–16. Whatever the case, the formula of city name followed by number was a trope of the time, an inheritance of the late 1960s, when radical groups, notably the Chicago Seven, often assumed such monikers. The very name “Chicago Seven” would be adopted by a group of architects led by Stanley Tigerman; their ranks actually varied between six and ten, but the title lent them, as it did the Five, a soupçon of subversion.
VI · THE BRIDGE AND THE HEARTH
1 Eric Owen Moss interview 1/27/16.
2 MG 5/16/13.
3 Quoted in Kenneth Powell, Graves Residence (New York: Phaidon, 1995), 9.
4 Ibid., 10.
5 MG 5/16/13.
6 RAMS 3/2/16.
7 JHD 6/15/16.
8 “Newsletter 8 (1973–1974),” Princeton School of Architecture, courtesy of Dean Bob Geddes. This is the first mention of the Asplund Problem in PSOA newsletter, confirming Mary McLeod’s conviction that her fall 1973 studio was the first to receive it. MM 6/8/16.
9 MG 5/16/13.
10 Michael Graves and Caroline Constant, “The Swedish Connection,” Journal of Architectural Education 29 (September 1975): 13.
11 Peter Carl, “Peter Carl on Michael Graves,” PSOA Rumor 1, no. 2 (2010): 6, 8.
12 Graves and Constant, “The Swedish Connection,” 12.
13 “Newsletter 8 (1973–1974),” Princeton School of Architecture. In 1982 Michael would change the title to “Thematic Studies in Architecture.” Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library archivist emails, courtesy of Dean Bob Geddes.
14 “Thematic Studies in Architecture” curriculum, Spring 1991.
15 Ibid.
16 MG 4/29/13.
17 John R. DaSilva, “Recollections for a Celebration of the Career of Professor Michael Graves, May 26, 2010,” Princeton Alumni Weekly, April 17, 2015, https://paw.princeton.edu/article/essay-john-r-dasilva-85.
18 MG 5/6/13.
19 RAMS 3/2/16.
20 MG 4/29/13.
21 The Fort Wayne medical offices’ mural features one extremely compacted fragment of a cornice; without real shading, it is barely recognizable as such. Interestingly, the Transammonia mural (along with the Triennale mural) was excised from Michael’s first full-length monograph, despite having featured in his first book from Academy Editions/Rizzoli.
22 SH 5/20/16.
23 Deamer, “Michael Graves: Bodybuilder?,” 13.
24 CC 5/16/16. The project has since been demolished.
25 Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel, “American Architecture Now: Michael Graves,” taped interview, 1980.
26 Thomas Vreeland, “Citation: Michael Graves,” Progressive Architecture 51 (January 1970): 86; MG 8/22/13.
27 Paul Benacerraf interview 11/14/16.
28 RM 2/29/16.
29 SH 5/20/16.
30 KN 9/2/16.
31 PC email correspondence.
32 Graves and Constant, “The Swedish Connection,” 12.
33 MG 8/22/13.
34 See Michael Graves, “The Necessity for Drawing: Tangible Speculation,” Architectural Design 47 (June 1977): 384–94.
35 Toward the end of his life Michael would produce a number of sketches of his young son, Michael Sebastian. KN notes.
36 AC 11/18/16.
37 Rosalind E. Krauss, Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 33. Michael and Krauss had regular contact through Eisenman’s IAUS, where she was a frequent participant.
38 A similar quality of “spatial collapse” was noted by Peggy Deamer in the Gunwyn Ventures office. Deamer, “Michael Graves: Bodybuilder?,” 10.
39 KN 9/2/16.
40 Ibid.
41 SS 1/21/16.
42 KN notes.
43 Powell, Graves Residence, 13; MG 5/16/13.
44 MG 5/6/13.
45 Ibid.
46 AC 11/18/16.
47 MG 5/6/13.
48 KF 6/16/16; MG 4/29/13.
49 According to Frampton, Rowe’s drinking had likely been a factor in his not being offered a position at Princeton, despite extensive lobbying by Eisenman in the mid-1960s. Bob Geddes disputes this, saying he simply felt he’d already stacked the department with enough (mostly younger) British scholars. KF 6/16/16; BG 11/11/16.
50 KF 6/16/16.
51 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 128.
52 Joseph Rykwert, “Reputations: Leon Krier,” Architectural Review, June 3, 2013, accessed January 10, 2017, https://www.architectural-review.com/rethink/reputations/leon-krier-1946-/8648311.article.
53 The author here plagiarizes himself, repackaging a phrase he used to describe the later work of Robert A. M. Stern. Ian Volner, “Architecture’s King of Tradition,” NewYorker.com, August 21, 2015, http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/architectures-king-of-tradition.
54 LK 12/28/15.
55 Ibid.
56 MG 2/17/15.
57 PE 2/25/16.
58 In the house as built, these features are not really in evidence: the rear studio, for example, was never constructed. Alan Chimacoff would also note the debt that both the Plocek and Crooks landscapes owed to Asplund’s Royal Chancellery. Deamer, “Michael Graves: Bodybuilder?,” 21 note 6.
59 KN 9/2/16.
60 Other key sources included a proposed bridge between France and Italy by the French nineteenth-century architect Henri Labrouste, as well as Ledoux’s Salt Works at Chaux, which Anthony Vidler helped bring to Michael’s attention. Deamer, “Michael Graves: Bodybuilder?,” 18.
61 KN 9/2/16.
62 Deamer, “Michael Graves: Bodybuilder?,” 19.
63 MG 4/29/13; Ada Louise Huxtable, On Architecture: Collected Reflections on a Century of Change (New York: Walker and Company, 2008), 250.
64 Moorhead did ultimately build an interpretive museum, the Hjemkomst Center, opened in 1985 and designed by the local architects who had teamed with Michael Graves Architect on the original bridge proposal.
65 Geoffrey Broadbent, Emerging Concepts in Urban Space Design (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1990), 333.
66 MGGTL.
67 CJ 11/11/16.
68 Charles Jencks, “The Rise of Postmodern Architecture,” Architectural Association Quarterly 7 (October–December 1975): 3–14.
69 PE 2/25/16.
70 Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House (New York: Picador, 1981), 101. The late Mr. Brunner, who had died in 1925, was surely the greatest accidental patron of Michael’s early career: the fellowship that had helped send Michael to Rome was that Academy’s Brunner Prize.
71 Johnson’s Nazi period has been well chronicled. See Franz Schulze, Philip Johnson: Life and Work (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 102–68.
72 Paul Goldberger, Why Architecture Matters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 51.
73 Margali Sarfatti Larson, Behind the Postmodern Façade: Architectural Change in Late Twentieth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 111.
74 Michael suggested at one point that he, in fact, had recommended Johnson to Wundram—somewhat scandalous if true, since it would have meant he’d effectively stacked the dec
k for himself. Karen Nichols doubts that this was so; Mr. Wundram declined to comment. MG 4/29/13; KN notes.
75 MG 8/29/13.
76 DaSilva, “Recollections for a Celebration of the Career of Professor Michael Graves”; MG 4/29/13.
77 Edith Iglauer, “Seven Stones,” New Yorker, June 4, 1979, 42.
78 MG 4/29/13.
79 KN notes.
80 Quoted in Meredith L. Clausen, “Michael Graves’s Portland Building: Power, Politics, and Postmodernism,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 73 (June 2014): 256.
VII · THE TOWER
1 These and other reactions and developments are reported in Clausen, “Michael Graves’s Portland Building: Power, Politics and Postmodernism,” 256–58.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 259.
5 Ibid., 261.
6 MG 5/6/13; KN 9/2/16.
7 As reported in Lance Knobel, “It’s the Building of the Future,” Architectural Review, November 1983.
8 The comparison is frequently attributed to Ivancie, though the source of the quote cannot be identified. See Brian Libby, “Reevaluating Postmodernism,” Architecture Week, June 5, 2002, C1 1.
9 Michael Blackwood (dir.). Beyond Utopia, Michael Blackwood Productions, 1984.
10 Charles Jencks, The Language of Postmodern Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1984), 7. This is in the introduction to the revised edition.
11 Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman, Architecture from Prehistory to Post-Modernism: The Western Tradition (New York: Abrams, 1986), 573.
12 Paul Goldberger, “The Modern Cityscape Now Finds Room for the Picturesque,” New York Times, December 26, 1982.
13 Paul Goldberger, “Architecture of a Different Color,” New York Times, October 10, 1982.
14 Douglas Brenner, “Portland,” Architectural Record 170 (1982): 90.
15 Kurt W. Forster et al., “Portland,” Skyline 2 (January 1983): 19.
16 Quoted in Joe Stecker, “A Hollow Icon,” Portland Mercury, November 19, 2014; Wolf von Eckardt, “A Pied Piper of Hobbit Land,” Time, August 23, 1982.
17 MG 5/16/13.
18 MGMD; MG 8/29/13. The origin of this poll has not been identified.
19 In all candor, this pun is a bit of rank gossip. The author recalls hearing it bandied about the lunch room at Columbia’s Avery Library as far back as the early 2000s, and was given to understand that it had been in circulation for decades. No interviewee, however, would claim responsibility or go on record to substantiate it. Scholarship must, on occasion, give way to jouissance du texte.
