Michael Graves

by Ian Volner

  Still, the anecdotes and insights garnered during my one-on-one sessions with Michael remain central to this text. In some instances, especially as relates to his early childhood, there are no living persons to verify his version of events, and in cases of doubt the appropriate qualifiers appear. Michael was as prone as anyone to failures of memory—and was known to occasionally embellish the record—but whenever documentary or third-party evidence has differed from his account, the latter has naturally given way to the former.

  Given the amount of uncertainty surrounding any individual’s life, and the often-conflicting perspectives on it of friends, family, and fellow professionals, there is still room to cavil over this or that attribution or assessment. Such are the pleasures of history. Many of these knotty points are taken up in the footnotes, and in the acknowledgments and bibliography one can find a few of the more valuable sources that brought a level of detail that Michael sometimes either did not or could not contribute.

  All in all, the biographer must be reckoned very lucky who has the opportunity to meet his or her subject while living, to become acquainted firsthand with the subject’s character and outlook, and to bring these to life in writing. When the subject in question is Michael Graves, the biographer—and, it is hoped, the reader—will feel luckier still.

  I

  THE SEA

  ON THE MORNING OF Monday, February 24, 2003, Michael Graves awoke in his home in Princeton, New Jersey, with what felt like a nasty flu. He’d been feeling poorly for several days, but that was hardly uncommon.1

  At sixty-nine, Michael maintained a travel schedule that would have worn out a man half his age; sickness, in his case mostly sinus infections, came with the territory. The heady days of the 1980s and early ’90s, when the office phone seemed to ring off the hook at all hours, were behind him. But that only seemed to strengthen his resolve, and with his powerful work ethic he was always on the lookout for new opportunities, constantly traipsing around the globe in search of clients.

  At symposia, in interviews, and at dinner parties in city after city, people would turn to him and ask, “Which of your buildings is your favorite?” His answer was the same every time: “The next one.”2

  There always seemed to be a next one, despite the changing times. In 1997 the completion of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, by Michael’s old friend and competitor Frank Gehry had caused a sensation even greater than Michael’s own Portland Building had fifteen years before, proving that the high-flown schemes of the late-1980s Deconstructivists (the name, mercifully, had already fallen into disuse) could be made real. The folksy monumentality of the PoMo that Michael had helped champion, already in eclipse, would now be in full rout.

  Which left some to wonder why Michael didn’t change too. “He could have done anything he wanted,” said Peter Eisenman, Michael’s best friend of more than five decades. Eisenman shared with him a bond that had survived sometimes profound professional differences. “We always used to talk about sports,” he recalled, and their regular outings to college football games helped sustain an alliance that seemed, in other ways, rather improbable.3

  Michael, with his lifelong virtuoso ability as a draftsman, was an architect of the eye, a devotee of the image; Eisenman was and remains an architect of the idea, sworn to a lofty conception of design as an autonomous discipline on par with art or literature. Eisenman’s theoretical absorptions had been a major influence on Philip Johnson in the run-up to the theory-infused Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition at MoMA in 1988, and in the fifteen years since, he had watched with growing consternation as his old comrade Michael had drifted further and further from the architectural avant-garde.4 Up until the late 1970s, Eisenman and Michael had plied more or less the same waters, both of them members (along with colleagues Richard Meier, John Hejduk, and Charles Gwathmey) of the famed ultra-Modernist group the New York Five—until Michael had abruptly cast off the Modernist mantle for a Postmodernist one. Why, Eisenman thought, did Michael not now reverse course? Or at least alter it?

  What had seemed, twenty years before, a thrilling change of direction—“the equivalent for architecture culture,” quipped the critic Paul Goldberger, “of Bob Dylan going electric”—Michael’s turn to color, classicism, and kitsch now looked out of season.5 In 2001 Herbert Muschamp, Goldberger’s successor at the New York Times, wrote that “Postmodernism’s pseudo-history has been driven back to the wealthy suburbs whence it came,” and few design watchers seemed to lament its passing.6 In the age of the starchitect, Michael was cast as a PoMo revanchist, a pandering populist, a Luddite with a retrograde commitment to the art of drawing. His work was ridiculed as too jokey, too thin, too repetitive.

  Yet the Graves name still held considerable commercial, if not critical, cachet, and his firm was still securing major commissions, even if it required a little more campaigning to do so. A surprise burst of positive media attention had come the firm’s way at the turn of the millennium, thanks to its design for the scaffolding of the Washington Monument during its late-1990s renovation. It seemed, at first, a modest enough proposition—maintenance infrastructure is not typically the stuff of tourist snapshots—but Michael Graves & Associates’ luminescent blue envelope, with its rectangular patterns echoing the masonry of the tall obelisk behind it, proved such a hit with the public that a movement was launched to keep it in place indefinitely. Among the scaffold’s admirers was its near neighbor, First Lady Hillary Clinton, who invited Michael to several White House dinners. Chelsea, he later remarked, seemed to hate public settings, and when he reached out to shake her hand, he could sense her anxiety in her nervous, shaky grip.7

  Thanks to the Clintons’ support, the scaffolding was kept up for the city’s millennium celebrations, where it was seen in innumerable news clips of the New Year’s Eve fireworks lighting up the National Mall. The exposure helped garner Michael a National Medal of Arts in 1999 and brought a few big new commissions into the office from New York, Texas, and Washington, DC. But architecture was hardly the fastest-growing part of the practice.

  The scaffolding initiative had been sponsored by the Minneapolis-based Target Corporation, the country’s third-largest discount retailer, and that collaboration led to a Graves-designed product line for the company that became a major commercial success upon its introduction in 1999. In the early years following the launch, the chain’s locations maintained a separate shop-within-a-shop, a dedicated twenty-four-foot aisle, exclusively for Graves’s designs—toasters and alarm clocks, coffeepots and teakettles, all from the Michael Graves Design Group, its signature blue branding sticking out amid the store’s red signage. Even more than his buildings, the Target homewares made Michael (in a pun that journalists never tired of repeating) “a household name,” and in the winter of 2003 he and his client were laying plans to make their growing family of products even bigger.8

  With all this, not to mention a crowded schedule of lectures in the United States and abroad, Michael could not let a flu get in the way of his busy day—least of all when his personal life was no less demanding than his career.

  The two, he found, often became entangled. Michael had been happily unmarried for more than twenty years, and the bachelor’s life suited him, but in the late 1990s he had begun dating one woman to whom he’d grown particularly close. In 1998 she introduced him to the comedian Jerry Seinfeld, whose television comedy was then in its final season and who was looking for someone to design his new Manhattan apartment. Actor and architect met and spoke at length, and the latter was impressed—especially given Seinfeld’s famously snide on-air persona—by his candor and modesty as he walked casually into the shabby, unfurnished old space. “What do you think, Michael?” asked Seinfeld. “Coat of paint?”9

  Michael was certain he’d gotten the job, but he was more than slightly taken aback when, before any contract had been signed, his then-girlfriend stepped in to demand a fee for having made what had seemed like a casual introduction. The relationship e
nded shortly thereafter—but it was a loss that seemed to rankle Michael less than the loss of the Seinfeld commission. After he mentioned it to a mutual acquaintance (he later claimed), word of the imminent project reached his old friend and fellow New York Five alum Charles Gwathmey, who swooped in and snatched it.

  Not long thereafter, Michael was introduced to a Florida-based, Chinese-born architect named Lynn Min, who was consulting on a project for a Chinese developer that Michael was being considered for. The two became romantically involved, and Michael began making frequent trips to Boca Raton, spending more and more time with Min and using the visits to meet with prospective clients in the area. In the end, however, he found that the demands of his practice were calling him elsewhere and decided it was best to end the relationship—only to find that Min was pregnant. A few months later, in August 2002, Michael Sebastian Graves was born in a Florida hospital, four decades after the birth of Michael’s older son, Adam.

  IT WAS A STRESSFUL TIME, if a happy and productive one, and instead of dashing off to work that chilly February morning, Michael might just as soon have remained in the comfort of his very comfortable home—though even that, his sanctuary for three decades, was part of the fraught intermingling of his personal and professional activity.

  The Warehouse, so called for the building’s original purpose when it was built in the 1920s, had transformed into an all-purpose receptacle for Michael’s shifting artistic tastes and architectural ambitions. Shaping and expanding the interior consumed much of his energies and not a little of his resources, with every trip abroad presenting a new opportunity to snap up something for the living room or upstairs study. The habitual belt-tightening of his early life, together with his native shrewdness, kept him from giving in altogether to his voluptuary instincts, and his foreign travels were always for work, never pleasure. Yet the life of the Lord of the Warehouse did not come cheap, least of all when combined with all the other impedimenta of his existence: alimony was no longer a consideration, his two divorces being long in the past, but he had grandchildren by his daughter Sarah in Calgary, Canada, to spoil with presents, and his young son in Miami to support. Although his teaching days at Princeton had ended several years earlier, he would still wine and dine visiting professors at the Warehouse, to which an invitation remained much coveted.

  All this—plus the expenses of running a firm with simultaneous ongoing projects around the globe—made for a staggering volume of overhead. Michael continued working as hard as he did because he loved it, but he also worked because he felt he had to. And so, instead of staying in bed, he ignored the throb in his temples and the aches in his joints. He got in his car and made the three-minute drive to his office, just as he did every Monday morning.

  He carried with him a bottle of Bactrim, a low-level antibiotic hastily prescribed the week prior by his local doctor. Feeling another sinus infection coming on and looking ahead to a difficult week of foreign travel starting on Valentine’s Day, Michael had persuaded his physician to grant him a last-minute appointment.10 The examination, he later claimed, had been cursory at best, and the prescription written only grudgingly. It may be wondered how many of the pills he had actually taken: according to one account, the bottle he brought back with him to Princeton might not have been an antibiotic at all but a decongestant prescribed simultaneously, which he had mistaken for a second bottle of Bactrim. Michael was not, on the whole, known for assiduous self-care, and for all of his sports fandom he engaged in no athletic activity more strenuous than golf (though he was fiercely competitive when playing it, to the point, occasionally, of cheating).

  The four days in transit between the doctor’s visit and the return to work in Princeton on Monday had done nothing to bolster his health. The first stop had been Frankfurt, Germany, for the Ambiente fair—the furniture and product show at the Messe Frankfurt trade hall—where Michael met with his collaborators at Target to discuss upcoming product deadlines. On the plane over the Atlantic and in the endless meetings that followed, he felt the illness intensifying, leaving him weary and muddle-headed. By February 18, when the Frankfurt fair was over, it was off to Geneva, Switzerland, where Michael toured a construction site for three hours in the freezing cold. Once he’d finished there, as often happened, his client wanted to take him out for a long evening of dinner and drinks. Keen to stay in his good graces, Michael obliged.

  Come Saturday, he was back in the United States—but not in New Jersey. He had gone to New York to give a pair of lectures on Sunday, had managed to get through both, and then had endured another evening among friends and colleagues, the kind of evening not uncommon in the social run of the New York design world. Michael could hold his own in any such company, but though he was no teetotaler he rarely ever drank to excess. (Growing up in his father’s house had cured him of that.) He was out late but got back to Princeton in time to get a good night’s sleep before the working week began.

  The office was a fifteen-minute walk from campus, in two converted houses on either side of Nassau Street. On the north side were the offices of Michael Graves Design Group, the portion of the practice expressly devoted to consumer products, while to the south, in a pair of conjoined colonials, were the offices of Michael Graves & Associates, responsible for the firm’s buildings and interiors. The two structures together sheltered some hundred-plus designers, all busily turning out proposals and models and drawings and prototypes. Preferring to stay somewhat aloof from the moil but close enough to keep an eye on the proceedings, Michael kept his personal studio and library suite on one side of the south building.

  Sitting down at his desk, he started to work. Ever since childhood, pen and paper had been his constant companions; drawing, the simple action of translating those forms and colors that inhabited his head into images on the page, was to him an almost irresistible impulse, part of what drove him to keep designing and building according to his own lights, his own idea of a possible architecture. But on this particular Monday, he could draw nothing. For perhaps the first time in his life, he told his colleagues he was leaving early, and around noon he drove back home again to the Warehouse.

  Here, in the cozy warren of well-lit rooms packed with Biedermeier chairs and ancient Greek potsherds in built-in niches, Michael thought he would finally be able to relax. Yet the Warehouse afforded him no refuge that day. He lay down in bed and only felt worse, the pulse in his head and the pang in his limbs making it impossible to sleep. By early evening, a neighbor stopped by to check on him. Alarmed by what she saw, she notified Michael’s colleagues, promised to take care of his dog, Sara (he’d kept a series of Labradors for years), and called an ambulance.

  At the University Medical Center of Princeton, Michael was put into a hospital bed. And there, as he recalled many years later, “it really started.”11

  WHAT EXACTLY WAS HAPPENING in Michael Graves’s body at this point remains something of a medical mystery. Bacterial meningitis seems a probable candidate, though he never tested positive for it despite several diagnostic lumbar punctures. Myelitis, a viral or occasionally fungal disorder with similar effects, is the likelier culprit, but—while theories abound—no variety or vector has ever been definitively identified. As a matter of epidemiological record, Michael’s illness remains essentially idiopathic, a one-off disease afflicting practically no one in history except for Michael Graves.

  The most one can say is that somehow, whether by exhaustion or by sheer fluke, Michael’s bodily defenses had become dangerously compromised, and the sinus infection he had been battling for days managed to do what almost every infection, from the common cold to the Spanish flu, longs to do: jump the ramparts of the human immune system and spread uncontrollably through the body. In Michael’s case, it made directly for his spinal column, ravaging the cells of the central nervous system. Many similar disorders also affect the brain, causing swelling that can induce coma and leave patients with serious cognitive impairments. But Michael’s brain, remarkably, was largely un
affected by the progress of the disease.

  In the future that would make all the difference. But for now it only meant that for those first twenty-four hours in the hospital, Michael was fully, appallingly conscious, not knowing what was happening to him except that it was agonizing. The center of the pain, as he remembered it, crept along the length of his spine, spreading down his upper back until it rested at about chest level and hovered there. Any kind of movement was nearly impossible. He was able, at one point, to drag himself to the bathroom—only to find when he got there that he couldn’t urinate. He lay back down again, and again the pain spread and intensified: a lashing, incisive pain that seemed to drive down on every fiber of his body at once.

  A nurse came in during the night. The only words he could manage were, “What is this?”

  “It’s nerve pain,” she said, unhelpfully, and gave him morphine.

  She gave him more morphine, and then still more; it did nothing. He remained awake and in incredible suffering. Hours passed.

  Of what followed on that first night, Michael did not remember much—except for this. It was the middle of the night and two colleagues had arrived, sitting at his bedside, watching him. He recalled a sensation, an image: that he was holding on to the mainsail of a ship, an old sailing ship caught in some terrible storm out at sea. He was gripping the mast and draped out in the gale like a flag, battered by the wind. Why that image should come to mind he couldn’t think; he’d spent almost no time at sea in his life. But he knew that he had to hold on to that slender wooden shaft with all his strength or else die.