by Ian Volner
Staying on with Koch or with one of the other Cambridge firms would have meant becoming a Cambridge architect, possibly for life—a proposition that held as little allure for Michael as it had for Eisenman. Though Indianapolis still beckoned, Michael might have been considered a little young to start his own office just yet. There was some gravitational pull from one direction: New York. A little seasoning at a big firm in the Big Apple would be just the thing.
“I expected I would work there for about five years,” Michael said. After that, “I’d go back to Indiana.”62
He secured a position in the Manhattan office of the designer George Nelson. From the unlikeliest of beginnings (as a college student at Yale, he had run into the architecture school to get out of a rainstorm), the fifty-one-year-old Nelson had risen to become one of American Modernism’s foremost hierophants, an early admirer of Mies and a brilliant polemicist who made his case for simplicity and precision though his products, his buildings, and his writing.63 “Good design,” he once averred, “like good painting, cooking, architecture, or whatever you like, is a manifestation of the capacity of the human spirit to transcend its limitations.”64
Nelson’s output, and his fame, were more focused on his chairs and tables than on his houses and high-rises; given Michael’s education as an architect, the new office might have seemed an odd fit. But Michael was already very much interested in industrial design, and long had been. On the fabled trip to Racine with Gail, though he was unsure what to make of the Johnson Wax building’s decorative and spatial quirks, he was instantly drawn to Wright’s stylish desks with their built-in wastepaper baskets and en suite chairs. Corb had designed furniture, as did Mies; the whole Modernist mind-set in which Michael had been reared had always put interiors and products on at least equal footing with any category of design, and Nelson was of the same persuasion. With his stature in the profession enhanced by his years as an editor of Architectural Forum, Nelson could give Michael the ins and outs of the trade from every angle. He was a good person to know, and a better one to impress, if Michael could.
He did. He and Nelson never grew close—with his fingers in so many creative pies, Nelson “had his own life,” as Michael would say—but maintaining the same level of industry he had kept up in school, Michael made his presence felt, helping turn out an array of products and doing some residential work alongside the firm’s primary architectural partner, Gordon Chadwick.65 Occasionally some of Nelson’s illustrious design-world connections would blow through the office, and the boss would introduce them to the new recruit from GSD. Michael recalled in particular “a very shy little guy,” Charles Eames, though the two did no more than shake hands.66
AS WITH LE CORBUSIER in Cambridge, so with Nelson in New York. The enlargement of Michael’s design outlook was still proceeding somewhat below the surface, the young designer groping his way half-blind toward what he really wanted from architecture. His job, at any rate, was sufficiently demanding that it pushed aside any consideration of the bigger picture. It even pushed aside New York.
Gail had been wary about moving to the city, especially the prospect of living in an older building, so the two took up a lease in the Washington Square Village apartments, one of the enormous new housing complexes near New York University.67 It was a tiny place, humbly appointed with some of the self-made furnishings they’d trucked from Cincinnati and Boston to Manhattan—despite the income from Nelson’s studio, they were still living on scratch. Right smack in the middle of Greenwich Village, in the early days of the folk boom, with the newly opened Cafe Wha? just around the corner and Willem de Kooning and Frank O’Hara drinking at the San Remo only a few blocks away, Michael managed to miss out on the city’s midcentury golden age. Even had he and Gail known it was going on, they couldn’t have afforded to participate.
They did like the Village. “We’d go out in the morning, get the Times, get donuts,” Michael recalled. Gail was continuing to work on her art, putting some of her skills to use as an illustrator at a department store. On the way to work they’d take a “short passegiata,” as Michael called it, strolling through Washington Square and stopping occasionally to listen to the performers around the park fountain.68 They didn’t have any children yet, and they didn’t have terribly many good friends—though that was shortly to change.
Early in 1960 a coworker from Nelson’s office invited Michael to join him for drinks with another friend then working in the studio of Marcel Breuer (who was now based in New York, following his departure from Harvard). That evening, Michael was introduced to a tall, slender, serious-seeming young architect—twenty-six just as he was, bespectacled just as he was, but with a forehead that sloped away precipitously, giving him a hawklike aspect altogether different from Michael’s googly-eyed ingenuousness.
What Michael did not know, and would not learn for some time, was that Richard Meier was the second cousin of Peter Eisenman—the TAC associate from Boston with the bad drawings. Meier and Eisenman had grown up together in Maplewood, New Jersey, both sons of upper-middle-class Jewish parents, and had set off for college together at Cornell. More soft-spoken and outwardly less energetic than his cousin, Meier had an understated manner that masked an appetite more capacious than Michael’s for wine, women, and song. It didn’t take long for the unmarried Meier to conscript his new friend into some of his after-hours escapades.
What Meier and Michael shared from the start was intense ambition, and an equally intense enthusiasm for art. Michael had kept up with his drawing and painting clear through Harvard, and, looking to expand his repertoire, he proposed that Richard and he should be creative stablemates. “At that time I had been doing small paintings at home,” Meier remembered. “Michael had, I guess, been painting, so he said: Why don’t we find a studio space where we can work together and share the space? So that summer we rented space in what was then the Tanager Gallery, on [East] Tenth Street, and started working together.”69
Meier’s abstract paintings at the time were large canvases, jets of color in layer upon layer; Michael’s, as Meier recalled them, were “very somber, dark brown and dark blue palette knife paintings” [PLATE 2]. The two would go into the studio together, work side by side, and then go out for drinks afterward. They did not, despite being in what was then a teeming gallery district, take in much contemporary art together, nor did they spend a great deal of time discussing what kind of art they wanted to make. As Meier put it, Michael “didn’t grow up with a knowledge of art.… He had a certain disdain for a lot of artists,” younger ones especially.70 The disdain extended to one of Meier’s other new friends, the artist Frank Stella, whose work Meier very much admired. In late summer Michael would show his work as part of an open studio, but while he’d hoped to lure the celebrity architect Edward Durell Stone (who had lately graced the cover of Time), he didn’t seem to much care about the artists of the inchoate Pop movement, such as Alex Katz and Tom Wesselmann, who were then in the orbit of Tanager.71
“I don’t think Michael had the same respect for art at that time that I did,” Meier said, and the vague sense that their tastes differed on this point meant they largely avoided the subject.72 On architecture, however, they found they were more compatible. That summer of 1960, the two submitted a joint entry in the competition to design a Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial in Washington, DC. As much as either of them could remember in later years, their proposal comprised four large pillars of glass to be poured into place on site, like concrete—suggestive of some of Meier’s later fascination with glass, paired perhaps with Michael’s training in Miesian symmetry. According to Michael, they used Nelson’s office, and some of Nelson’s money, to prepare their scheme, and the competition entry was ultimately credited as the “George Nelson scheme,” much to their annoyance. Not that it made any difference: “We got last place,” Michael recalled.73 As it transpired, none of the winning projects was realized, and the capital remained without a memorial to FDR until the late 1990s.
&
nbsp; To the young designers, the setback didn’t feel like a very big one. Looking back, Meier said, “We had a good time.” Undaunted, spirits still high in spite of all the hard work at Breuer’s office and at Nelson’s, the two found a little time that summer to kick up their heels. One night they had dinner together, followed by drinks, and then shared a taxi back home. Arriving at the latter’s apartment, Meier lifted himself tipsily out of the cab and announced as he looked back through the open car door: “Frank Lloyd Wright? Frank Lloyd Wright? He ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”74
Surpassing the grand old man of American architecture wasn’t such a bad goal. Hitting the mark, though, would take more than martini-primed bluster.
But by then Michael could back up his own bravado. A friend from the University of Cincinnati, an artist and designer named Ted Musho, had lately been in touch from a more colorful clime—from Rome, where he was living for the year. He had won a fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, the study and research center for American artists and scholars in the Eternal City, and he encouraged Michael to apply.75
The fellowship had been on Michael’s mind for some time. Nelson had been a winner back in 1932, and his time abroad had been decisive in his joining the Modernist cause.76 Everyone at GSD would have been aware of it, though few might have seriously considered applying. In December 1959, before the disappointment of the FDR competition, Michael had adequate faith in his accomplishments to think it was worth a try. He had a full portfolio of work from his Harvard days, more from Nelson’s office, and most crucially he had the backing of Nelson himself, who liked his chances and wrote a flattering recommendation to the Academy jury on Michael’s behalf.
Not that Michael was confident he would win. The lingering doubt as to his own suitability—not for the art of architecture, but for the profession—was still with him. His written essay, though remarkably free of copy errors, was a pallid retread of first-generation Modernist buzzwords, to the effect that he wanted to understand the “space value” of old European cathedrals.77 Worse, he was up against applicants from all over the country with more experience outside the country (where he had never been) and more knowledge of foreign languages (of which he had none). The breadth of his architectural purview had grown steadily under the tutelage of Roush, Strauss, Nelson, and (in spite of himself) Sert, and with a pencil in his hand Michael could speak fluent Corb and flawless Mies. But did he really understand the architectural language he was using? He felt himself, at least in retrospect, more suited to a deanship at some school and a reasonably quiet practice of his own, somewhere in Indiana or Ohio.
The judges felt differently. They selected him as a finalist for the Rome Prize (as the fellowship is known), no small honor in itself. The jurors in 1960 included some of the most prominent names in American architecture: Edward Durell Stone, later to become Michael’s Tanager invitee; Edward Larrabee Barnes, a model-handsome former student of Gropius’s; and Nathaniel Owings, one of the founding members, though not quite the most famous, of the Modernist megapractice Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM).78
SOM, dubbed by Frank Lloyd Wright “the Three Blind Mies,” had only just finished work on the Pepsi-Cola Building, overseen by their star principal, Gordon Bunshaft, and it was here that the finalists were summoned to be interviewed in person by the jury.79 In the lobby outside the office where the interview was to be held, Michael sat with the four other finalists—the men in narrow ties, the women in patterned dresses—staring anxiously out the enormous windows looking onto the avenue. Casting a glance across the room, Michael saw one of the women holding a copy of Golf Digest. She was reading it upside down.80
At last he was brought into the room where the older architects waited to quiz him on his work. “They said, ‘When you get to Rome, you’ve got do this or that,’” he remembered. “They asked me questions. They had already looked at my brochure and ranked me, but I didn’t know where I was ranked.” It was nerve-racking, and though they seemed to approve of his Harvard work (more so, indeed, than Sert had), he came out no more confident than before—though not necessarily less.
Michael had, on the whole, very little to lose. His ongoing competition with architecture notwithstanding, if he had returned to Indianapolis at that time, he would have done so trailing clouds of Eastern glory. He could have continued painting and drawing, had a family, grown a practice that would have given him at least the stature that Strauss had had, the creative satisfaction that Roush had had, and he could always have said of the Eastern scene that he had been there and done that.
But that is not what happened. By the time of his summer revels with Richard Meier, Michael truly had something to celebrate. The Harvard hayseed had made good. The mechanical drawing set awarded by Purdue University paled in comparison.
THAT SPRING MICHAEL PENNED a letter. He was not of an epistolary habit, and what little correspondence he did engage in he rarely ever saved. This was plainly a capital-O Occasion. “Dear Dean Sert,” it began:
I’m writing this letter to inform you of the very good news I have recently received. The American Academy in Rome has awarded me a Rome Prize Fellowship for 1960. The Grant entitles me to a year of study at the Academy with the possibility of renewal for a second year.
In a sense this is your award as well as mine, for I’m sure it wouldn’t have been possible without your most excellent turotrage [sic].
When I first arrived at Harvard last year I was addicted to a formalistic-axial-symmetry in my work. But if you’ll remember you quickly shook me out of my “precious” rut. (I must admit, at the time, I thought you shook a bit severely.) After being with you in your studio last year I am enjoying Architecture and its possibilities more than ever. “Variety”, and what it can mean, was my lesson from you.
I will keep in contact with you while we are in Rome and try to let you know of any “progress” I might make.
Sincerely yours,
Michael Graves81
It is perfectly gracious, of course. But the scare quotes and the parenthetical give it away, and the self-satisfied smile is nearly audible. Michael never did send another letter to the Teeny-Weeny Deany.
IV
THE LIGHT
AFTER SOME EIGHT DAYS at sea aboard the SS Cristoforo Colombo, Michael and Gail arrived in the late afternoon of September 30, 1960, in Naples, where they were met dockside by Ted Musho and a small delegation from the American Academy.1 Piling into a car, the group drove north the 140 miles to Rome, a fairly bumpy ride in the early 1960s, passing through a dozen-odd small towns as the sun set over the low hills and coastal plains of the Mezzogiorno: Aversa, Cassino, Frosinone, Colleferro.
Shortly after nightfall they entered the region of Lazio, and at around eleven o’clock at night they reached the Academy, high on the Janiculum hill in Trastevere, the sprawling district of Rome on the west bank of the Tiber River. The Academy rustled up some food, gave Michael a peek at the space that would be his studio, and showed the couple to their room. No sooner had they set down their bags than a friend of Musho’s showed up with another car. “I’ll give you Rome in an hour,” Musho announced, and in the middle of the night they struck out for a moonlight tour.2
Down the Janiculum, through the medieval maze of Trastevere, they made their way into the lush urban undergrowth of Rome. The year 1960 was a momentous one for the city: the Olympics had wrapped up there only a few weeks earlier, and a number of fine modern structures had been built to accommodate them. Pier Luigi Nervi, Italy’s great engineer-poet, had designed two concrete sports palaces, their coffered domes vaulting unsupported over the bleachers and arena floors; in one of them, Cassius Clay had lately boxed his way to a gold medal for the United States. The architects Luigi Moretti and Adalberto Libera had teamed up to create a new Olympic Village, curving rows of apartments separated by irregular courtyards in a pattern that felt equal parts organic and rational. Even the city’s ancient buildings had been enlisted in the effort: the Baths of Caracalla host
ed the games’ gymnastics contests.
Michael and Gail took it all in through the car window. The Colosseum in those days was covered in a thin grime of automotive exhaust, and the center of the Piazza Venezia was doubling as a parking lot, with ranks of Fiat 500s cluttering up the view. Italy was entering the new decade with an antic buoyancy born of newfound affluence, and in its new design-obsessed consumer culture, everything modern and American was the rage.3 Tu vuò fà l’americano, as the song had it.
Yet it was the city’s agelessness, its centuries-old ruins and crumbling monuments, that caught the attention of the young stranger from the Midwest. The group headed first to the Vatican, driving as close as they dared to the steps of Saint Peter’s Basilica. “It was like nothing I’d ever seen before,” said Michael. “The ellipse of the piazza, and all those figures on top of all those columns—I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.” They took a moment to catch their breath and then cut eastward, past the dark fulcrum of the Castel Sant’Angelo, over the river to the Campus Martius.4
They drove past the Spanish Steps; through the Piazza Barberini; and past the Trevi Fountain, designed in 1735 and frolicked in only a few months before by Anita Ekberg in La dolce vita. They turned south to the Piazza Navona, then looped back toward the Pantheon and east toward the Via del Corso, where riderless horses once raced during the Roman carnival. Hopelessly turned around by the winding, narrow streets, Musho steered them toward the Forum, and when they reached the foot of Capitoline Hill, they left the car and mounted the steps. At the top of the Campidoglio, in the middle of Michelangelo’s famous plaza, the group stopped and stared. It was a festival night, and there were candles on the corners of the three exquisite buildings flanking the piazza, streaking the scene in bolts of light and shadow.