by Ian Volner
FOR MICHAEL
Published by Princeton Architectural Press
A MCEVOY GROUP COMPANY
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© 2018 Princeton Architectural Press.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the publisher, except in the context of reviews. Every reasonable attempt has been made to identify owners of copyright. Errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions.
Editor: Sara Stemen Image research: Nolan Boomer
Designer: Benjamin English
Special thanks to: Janet Behning, Nicola Brower, Abby Bussel, Tom Cho, Barbara Darko, Jenny Florence, Jan Cigliano Hartman, Susan Hershberg, Lia Hunt, Valerie Kamen, Simone Kaplan-Senchak, Jennifer Lippert, Kristy Maier, Sara McKay, Eliana Miller, Wes Seeley, Rob Shaeffer, Paul Wagner, and Joseph Weston of Princeton Architectural Press — Kevin C. Lippert, publisher
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
NAMES: Volner, Ian, author.
TITLE: Michael Graves : design for life / Ian Volner.
DESCRIPTION: First edition. | New York : Princeton Architectural Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2016059450 | ISBN 9781616895631 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781616896850 (epub, mobi)
SUBJECTS: LCSH: Graves, Michael, 1934–2015—Criticism and interpretation.
CLASSIFICATION: LCC NA737.G72 V65 2017 | DDC 720.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016059450
Contents
PROLOGUE
NOTE ON SOURCES
I
The Sea
II
The River and the Compass
III
The Book and the Doorway
IV
The Light
V
The Garden and the Machine
VI
The Bridge and the Hearth
VII
The Tower
VIII
The House, the Tomb, and the Teakettle
IX
The Sky and the Frame
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
INDEX
IMAGE CREDITS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AND THE SONG
HAD FINISHED:
THIS WAS THE STORY.
— John Ashbery, The Double Dream of Spring, 1970
I REQUEST, CAESAR,
BOTH OF YOU AND OF
THOSE WHO MAY
READ THE SAID BOOKS,
THAT IF ANYTHING
IS SET FORTH WITH
TOO LITTLE REGARD FOR
GRAMMATICAL RULE,
IT MAY BE PARDONED.
— Vitruvius, De Architectura, I.1.17
Michael (in wire-frame glasses) and Peter Eisenman (in hat) with colleagues in the basement of the Princeton School of Architecture, circa 1964
Prologue
“Trois rappels à MM. les architectes”
— Le Corbusier1
FROM THE MOMENT he or she sits down to write, the biographer’s goose is pretty well cooked. There is no getting out from under the demands of the genre—the author must attempt to connect the life with the work. This is a dicey methodological proposition in any case, but especially in architecture, a creative endeavor with too many moving parts to be reduced, à la Citizen Kane, to some long-lost childhood sled. And yet the present subject lends himself, more so than most architects, to the biographical treatment. Through his intense industry, as well as sometimes extraordinary happenstance, his work and his life entered into something like a cyclic loop, the one perpetually feeding back into the other. What’s more, examining the two together befits his particular architectural ethos, which took into its compass the personal and the universal, the monumental and the everyday. If ever a designer’s individual history afforded a handy guidebook for understanding both his own designs and the design of his times, it was this one, and the only thing to establish in advance is: Why should this designer, or his times, matter? And why now?
Here’s one possible answer. Over and again during the last three and a half years, as I have researched, written, and edited this book, I have been put in mind of Bruno Latour’s landmark 1991 anthropological study, We Have Never Been Modern.2 Certainly its operating premise—that continuity is a more informative model of history than repeated disjuncture—has come to seem more and more pertinent. But it is Latour’s title that keeps coming back, albeit with a curious twist. In considering the life and afterlife of Michael Graves, his impact not just on the design profession but on the built environment as a whole, I’ve begun to suspect that, in many of the ways that count, we have never stopped being Postmodern.
No doubt we had thought the moment long since come and gone. Postmodernist architecture—“PoMo” as it is often called, with a slight sneer—burst onto the American scene in the late 1970s amid a flourish of flattened columns and multihued facades.3 By the end of the following decade, its historical references and pop irreverence had already fallen into disfavor. In 1988 the city of Yonkers took a sledgehammer to architect Walter David Brown’s Getty Square colonnade, an unloved pseudoclassical portico built a mere ten years prior. The critic Alastair Gordon, only half joking, claimed the event marked a “Pruitt-Igoe” moment for Postmodernism: the reference was to the infamous St. Louis housing project of that name, whose 1972 demolition had been seen (by another critic, Charles Jencks) as a death knell for the purportedly dull, unadorned severity of midcentury American Modernism.4
At least Modernism had enjoyed a good three decades of unchallenged supremacy before the wrecking crews arrived. Postmodernism lasted scarcely half as long before being muscled aside by another “ism.” Only months before the Yonkers colonnade came down, New York’s Museum of Modern Art debuted its Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition. Heralding an abstract and technically daring new approach from a roll call of soon-to-be-familiar names (among them Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid), the show was godfathered by Philip Johnson, America’s premier gadfly-tastemaker and until lately a major advocate of Postmodernist playfulness. The critics panned it, but Johnson’s involvement sent a clear signal. For lovers of the nostalgic, the ironic, and the colorful, the lamps were going out all over architecture.
They’ve stayed that way ever since—or so we’ve been told. The scholar Jean-Louis Cohen has characterized Postmodernism as a “hesitation within the discourse,” a moment when the profession apprehended with a start that much of the social promise of Modernism, its vision of a pristine utopia of glass and steel, had not been borne out.5 The reaction was less a radical break than a corrective reflex, almost like an immune response. Bubbling up through the academy in the early 1960s, the Postmodernist tendency began as a measured critical attack on the disruptions to the traditional urban fabric wrought by Modernist interventions; practice soon took up the cause, trying to mend that fabric by returning to its traditional constituents. Soon, Postmodernism was everywhere, manifesting in symptoms such as applied ornament, polychromatic surfaces, and familiar typological outlines.
These were already in evidence in what is generally recognized as the ur-Postmodernist project, Robert Venturi’s Vanna Venturi House, built for his mother in 1964. An idiosyncratic variant was popularized on the West Coast by Charles Moore, as in his collage-like Moore-Rogger-Hofflander condominium in Los Angeles of 1975. The architects dubbed the Chicago Seven (Stanley Tigerman foremost among them) would carry the banner for the movement in the Midwest, and Robert A. M. Stern and Jaquelin Robertson (and eventually Philip Johnson) would give it establishment cred in the East. Countle
ss other firms would follow.
But, most importantly, there was Michael Graves. If Getty Square was PoMo’s Pruitt-Igoe, Graves’s Portland Building of 1982 was perhaps its Seagram Building, the epochal moment of its architectural ascendancy. It thrust the Postmodernist movement to the forefront of the design world, and Graves himself to unprecedented international fame. During the 1980s he was indisputably the most celebrated, the most talked-about, American architect of his generation.
And then—the fever broke. By the early 1990s other architects were vying with Graves for the covers of magazines, for major design awards, and for the idolatry of students at architecture schools everywhere. But what I have come to believe in the course of preparing this biography is this: when the hesitation of Postmodernism subsided and the architectural organism resumed its customary forward movement, its behavior was forever changed. For not only did Michael Graves himself not go away (in many ways his renown, and that of his office, only grew), but the problems and principles that concerned him most have never vanished. Quite the opposite: they remain a crucial part of design culture worldwide and are deeply embedded within practice as a whole, perhaps nowhere more so than in the very places where Graves’s influence has been most effectively suppressed.
“PERHAPS IT’S TIME,” wrote the author Jimmy Stamp in 2012, “to reclaim Postmodernism for a generation for whom all of history is only a hyperlink away.”6 Many such sentiments have been floated in recent years, as Postmodernism has come in for a qualified rehabilitation. Several museums, including London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 2011, have staged retrospectives on the topic, and in more commercial quarters there’s been a mini revival of sorts, with splashes of 1980s style visible in the booths of the big chair fairs like Milan’s Salone del Mobile. In the preservationist community, energies that have long been trained on saving Modernist masterworks are now being directed toward Postmodernist ones presently under threat of redevelopment, including a number by Michael Graves himself. But don’t call it a comeback: Gravesian currents have never stopped flowing through architecture, though the channels have often been subterranean.
This has happened before. By the late 1950s Italian Futurism and other marginal movements of the prewar years had been all but written out of the official history of Modernism, their unsavory political associations and aesthetic crotchets considered out of step with the wholesomely corporate-democratic aspirations of the glassy, plainspoken International Style. In the words of the British critic Reyner Banham, those other, discarded Modernisms occupied a “zone of silence”—even though they had been every bit as essential in the evolution of design as more notionally acceptable antecedents such as the Bauhaus.7 The history of architecture is fairly strewn with such zones of silence, evidence of a recursive process that has subjected successive design movements, from 1900s Beaux Arts to 1920s Art Deco to 1960s Brutalism, to a variety of institutional forgetting. Postmodernism has undergone only the latest of these serial sublimations.
And yet step outside and take a walk in almost any major American city, in particular in those neighborhoods the real estate agents like to call “emerging” or “transitional.” There you will see urban infill apartment housing, block upon block of it, much of it clad in brick with quasi-historical touches: cornices, windows with dip grooves, maybe a little flashing over the crown—all of it done in a good-faith effort to play nicely with the nineteenth-century neighbors. Even where the newer building stock is a little splashier—faced in shiny composite panels with strip windows—you’ll find things like datum lines that match perfectly with the row houses on either side, or surface patterning on the facade meant to give it some of the textural quality of older masonry buildings. This has been the lingua franca of real estate development in cities, to say nothing of suburbs, all across the country for decades, and it is unmistakably Postmodernist in inspiration.
Admittedly, in the more rarefied reaches of high design, such gestures are held in low esteem. But look closer. However irregular their forms, however bracingly innovative the technology and materials they use, contemporary designers will unfailingly avow (especially to any journalist within shouting distance) that their buildings are “contextual,” blending in ways subtle and overt with their urban surrounds. This might be regarded as merely a rhetorical holdover of Postmodernism—but that is a shade too cynical. The design process of even the most progressive architects working today includes careful and serious consideration of the existing urban fabric, a sensitivity that has become a practical necessity, given a preservation-minded bureaucratic climate that is itself a product of the same forces that gave rise to Postmodernism.
Of course, even if they admitted to Postmodern precedents, contemporary designers wouldn’t necessarily credit Graves. Nor would they have to: Postmodernism had many fathers, and not a few mothers, and its latter-day reverberations can’t be wholly ascribed to any one of them. But in addition to a few specific features of Postmodernism that can be confidently attributed to his influence, there is a broader narrative connecting the 1980s to the 2010s, and it centers on the person of Michael Graves himself.
The word starchitect, that lamentable portmanteau, has come into general use to describe the architectural headliners, Hadid and Gehry foremost among them, whose inventive hypermodernism displaced Postmodernism in the years following the MoMA “Decon” show. Celebrity culture in architecture certainly predates the term: Johnson, Eero Saarinen, and Edward Durell Stone were just a few of the architects featured on the cover of Time before 1981, and Frank Lloyd Wright was once a guest on the 1950s panel show What’s My Line. And obviously the advent of the internet, and the concomitant obsession with celebrity of all kinds, has hastened the rise of marquee names. But the 1980s marked a key juncture.
This was, after all, the first decade in which growth in the American service sector far outstripped manufacturing.8 As the US economy shifted rapidly to a postindustrial basis—under the influence of a president who was himself a media celebrity—there emerged a new media landscape, one that prepared the way for the digital age to come. Postmodernist architecture during its heyday was a creature of this bigger, more riotous media landscape, and above it all there stood but one figure.
Michael Graves’s fame not only made Postmodernism a normative mode of practice in the United States; it made him, for good and ill, the progenitor of the twenty-first-century global starchitect. That Graves achieved this status was ultimately as much a function of his product designs as his architecture (although there’s a crucial reciprocity between the two). But besides the fact that industrial design remains very much within the purview of today’s design stars, their architectural activity really only picks up where Graves’s product work left off. Commissioned by cities all over the world shopping around for an urban-scale collector’s item, starchitects’ museums and condo towers are as indelibly branded to them as Graves’s teakettles and toasters were to him: for many architects—and not just star ones—buildings have become products. Only lately have practitioners begun to grapple with this hypercommodified condition. It was known to Graves long ago, and much can be learned by his example.
Add to that the enduring legacy of his forty years as a teacher at Princeton University, the monument he left nearby in the form of his beloved Warehouse, and the ongoing work of his namesake firm, and one begins to see how much Michael Graves is still with us. Since well before his death in March 2015, Graves and his contribution to design had become specters (though there are countless others) haunting the profession. His story is the half-neglected story of design in the last half century, and each of his projects is a signpost along the way, reminding us of architecture’s twists and turns, its dashed hopes and surprising successes.
That his work is so riven—to borrow the famous phrase from Venturi’s foundational Postmodernist treatise—with complexity and contradiction is indeed a reflection of the man who created it. And for that reason he, and the life he lived, are of the utmost conse
quence to anyone who wants to know why the world today looks the way it does.
Ian Volner
Harlem
January 2017
Note on Sources
I FIRST MET MICHAEL GRAVES in 2009, while I was briefly employed in a Manhattan public relations office that was representing his firm. I wasn’t working on the account myself, but I insisted on tagging along to a meeting in Princeton, and being an architectural historian by training I couldn’t resist bending Michael’s ear for several minutes afterward. It wasn’t until four years later that I found myself back in Princeton at the suggestion of my agent, conducting a series of interviews with Michael in furtherance of a collaborative book project of undetermined form, imagined as either an oral history or a memoir.
In the succeeding months, it evolved into the latter, and after nearly a year and a half we began the formal process of organizing Michael’s life into a first-person narrative, with me acting as amanuensis. By then we had accumulated more than thirty hours of material, recorded (and most of it simultaneously transcribed) during a series of five meetings at his office in Princeton, each lasting upward of five hours. These were augmented, as the text took shape, by edits and additions from Michael’s own hand, as well as those of his firm partners, some of whom were shown the proposal drafts for review. These sources are referred to in the notes as MGMD (Michael Graves monograph documents).
Sadly, only weeks after Princeton Architectural Press accepted the proposal, and before several more planned interviews could take place, Michael passed away. Determined to bring his story before the public, the publisher, Michael’s office, his family, and I resolved in the fall of 2015 to turn the project into a critical biography. This meant expanding its scope dramatically, interviewing dozens of former clients, students, and colleagues, as well as carrying out extensive archival research and consulting scores of scholarly articles. This I did over the following year while continuing my primary activity as a journalist and critic of architecture, in the course of which I was able to visit many of Michael’s buildings and the buildings that inspired him most, as well as to meet more and more people eager to share their own memories of the late designer.