Michael Graves

by Ian Volner

  Of more immediate import was the appearance of a special section in the May issue of Architectural Forum, the flagship publication of the American design press. “It was a little bit hatched by Eisenman and me,” said Robert A. M. Stern: together with the architect Charles Moore, original CASE attendee Jaquelin Robertson, and like-minded colleagues Allan Greenberg and Romaldo Giurgola, Stern produced a multipart rebuttal to Five Architects under the heading “Five on Five.”89 Earnest and in places quite stinging in its criticism, the article nonetheless was prepared and published with the full connivance of the original Five. “It was all staged,” said Eisenman, the article merely a bigger and more theatrical platform for a debate already underway in American architecture.90

  What had begun as a fault line at CASE 1 had widened, by the time of Five Architects, into a chasm. The belligerents did not yet have official names, but they soon would: in May 1974 a conversation at UCLA took place between what was termed for the first time the “Whites” and the “Grays,” two inimical affinities divided over the legacy and the future of the Modern movement in the United States.91 As they had since the days of their Princeton insurgency, Michael and Eisenman argued for staying the Modernist course while pushing the principles of the pioneers to their formal and conceptual limits. This (along with the fact that most of their buildings were, of course, white) made them emblematic of the White faction, and for the first time since those early Princeton days, it meant that they, along with Meier, Gwathmey, and Hejduk, were on the defensive.

  Against them were the Grays, the party of dissent. Represented by what came to be called the “Yale-Philadelphia axis”—anchored by Vincent Scully in New Haven and Robert Venturi at the University of Pennsylvania—the Grays were far less credulous of Modernist pieties and far more appreciative of the patterns of pre-twentieth-century urban life. Their architectural scripture was Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, a radical revaluation of architectural values that had been steadily gaining adherents since its publication in 1966. In the introduction to the book’s first edition, Scully took Modernism to task for sins of both commission and omission, citing “its utter lack of irony, its splinterish disdain for the popular culture but shaky grasp on any other, its incapacity to deal with monumental scale, its lip-service to technology, and its preoccupation with a rather prissily puristic aesthetic.”92

  Venturi himself was more concise. Describing his pragmatic, pluralistic outlook, he wrote: “I prefer ‘both-and’ to ‘either-or,’ black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white.”93 The color choice stuck, and the Grays were picking up speed.

  Although both blocs were born of the same simmering discontent with the midcentury mainstream, the Grays’ quarrel with Modernism was of a heavier caliber than that of the loyal opposition that had gone before. Stern, Robertson, and the rest used “Five on Five” as an opportunity to denounce their opposite numbers for “machismo” and “puritanical cultural attitudes,” calling the buildings in the book “a depressing and disjointed assortment of parts.”94 Though they reserved a token regard for Le Corbusier himself, their attack was aimed squarely at the moral chauvinism, austere form making, and indifference to history that had marked Modernist thinking for decades. The Five were merely a convenient proxy.

  None of them afforded so serviceable a target as Michael. “Subscribes too much to a formal vocabulary,” wrote Giurgola.95 “Graves’ dependence on Le Corbusier can be unintentionally ironic,” wrote Stern.96 “Imagine my orange and black apoplexy,” said Moore, “on reading a deadpan announcement…that ‘the organization of the Hanselmann design of Michael Graves is intended to recall, more than anything else, the procession from the profane to the sacred spaces of the Athenian Acropolis.’”97 Why, Moore wondered, was such “puffing up” necessary? If the processional narrative was truly present, why enlist an essayist to point it out?

  Most cutting perhaps was Jaquelin Robertson’s assessment:

  Both [Graves] houses are crawling inside and out with a sort of nasty modern ivy in the way of railings, metal trellises, unexplained pipes, exposed beams, inexplicable and obtuse tubes—most to no apparent real or architectural purpose.… The “language” has become so mannered as to defeat its purpose.98

  These were the very devices Michael had inserted into his designs to make their meaning more, not less, legible. What didn’t Robertson understand?

  To the other four, this going-over in the design press was all in good collegial fun; they could give as good as they could take, and usually did. (Eisenman even launched a partnership with Robertson years later.) But it was not so easy for Michael. “A bit shy and self-conscious,” as his former student and longtime Columbia professor Mary McLeod would describe him, Michael was far touchier than his fellows.99 “We called him Michelangelo,” said Peter Waldman. “His sensitivities were right on the skin, his enthusiasms and disappointments.”100 The sudden burst of sharp-tongued critical attention was difficult to bear, and not long after the appearance of “Five on Five,” Michael had a private conversation with Charles Moore.

  “I score very high on the reading of architecture,” Michael remembered Moore telling him. Then he pointed to Michael’s work. “Here I don’t.”101

  Michael let it sink in. If Moore doesn’t understand, he recalled thinking, then the layman won’t know. It was the beginning of a crisis of architectural conscience that would define the next several years of his life.

  The attention attracted by Five Architects was not universally negative, and “Five on Five” served the purpose that the conspirators behind it had intended, raising the profiles of all concerned. One morning in November 1973, Eisenman was reading the New York Times—the sports page, naturally—when one of his sons gasped from across the breakfast table.

  “Daddy!” he shouted. “There’s your picture in the paper!”102

  All five of their pictures were there, in fact, lined up on the left side of the page in alphabetical order, with Benacerraf featured prominently at top right. The article was among the first by a twenty-three-year-old Paul Goldberger, the publication’s future architecture critic, and though circumspect in its praise, the mere fact of its appearing in America’s paper of record was validation enough.103 All publicity, as Eisenman knew, was good publicity. The New York Five, as they came to be known, were now national news.104

  VI

  THE BRIDGE AND THE HEARTH

  FROM AS FAR AWAY as the West Coast—among the freeways and factories of central Los Angeles, where he’s spent most of his career—the architect Eric Owen Moss watched the steady ascent in the media and in academic discourse of the New York Five, and Michael in particular. Moss and Michael were never more than passing acquaintances, and in their practices (to say nothing of their backgrounds) the two couldn’t have been more different. A native Angelino, committed to a cryptic and intellectually probing California Modernism, Moss was several degrees removed from the Gray-White debate and its central figures. And yet, speaking of the years immediately following the arrival of Five Architects, Moss formulated a judgment of Michael as apt as anyone who knew him better.

  “Graves,” Moss said, “was most interesting when he wasn’t sure what he was doing.”1

  It is tempting to attach every circumstance of Michael’s life, his every strength and failing, to the work for which he became best known. Surely such causal links do exist. But what the next period in Michael’s career demonstrates is that his practice might yet have gone in almost any direction, taken any turn. More than just a disavowal of an overly deterministic methodology (or old-fashioned fatalism), this sense of contingency and possibility comes with seeing just how wildly diverse Michael’s practice was during the 1970s.

  It would be a decade of rapid-fire improvisation. Flying in the face of Mies’s admonition that “one does not invent a new architecture every Monday morning,” every new project from Michael’s office seemed to take a different tack, to explore a different architectural par
ti, and any one of these might have opened into an avenue toward a new architecture. That Michael developed as he did should not preclude speculation as to what other kinds of buildings he might have built, and what American architecture might have been, had he emerged from this personal and professional interregnum in a different form, or if had he found a way to somehow prolong this time when—in so many ways—he wasn’t sure what he was doing.

  “IT WAS THE STUPIDEST THING I ever did,” said Michael.2

  On a Sunday morning in 1970, he was out for a walk in Princeton in the company of one of Lucy’s two daughters. Since his divorce he had been living near the university, establishing himself as the somewhat overcommitted paterfamilias to two households, with periodic visits to Adam and Sarah in Massachusetts balanced by stepfatherly duties in New Jersey. In performance of the latter, he was strolling with his stepdaughter down a quiet street not far from their own when he spotted a “For Sale” sign, unaccountably sticking out of a small mound of rocks and broken cement.

  Looking beyond it, between two neighboring houses, he saw what he later described as “a real oddity.”3 In the middle of the block, there was a building he had never noticed before, occupying a site that ordinarily would have been divvied among the backyards of the homes surrounding it. The lot was flyswatter-shaped, with a narrow handle connecting it to the street, and the sole building on it had been constructed back in the 1920s by Italian masons who were in Princeton erecting the stony spires of the neo-Gothic campus. In a canny bit of opportunism, the craftsmen had built the structure in their spare time for the purposes of commercial storage, charging well-to-do professors for the privilege of leaving their furniture there. It contained forty-four rooms, none of them more than ten feet long; it had neither electricity nor water; and the only source of heating was an open fire that the owner kept in a small office toward the back. “Zoning would never allow it to be built today,” Michael said, and probably no halfway decent homeowners’ association would allow it to be resold as a residential property, either.4 He was immediately taken with it, and the asking price was a steal at $35,000—not that it much mattered. A sale was already pending, the buyer a local developer who planned to convert it into rental apartments.

  Lo and behold, the deal fell through. The developer could not secure the necessary permits, and no sooner had the building gone back on the market than Michael procured a mortgage and grabbed it. He and Lucy immediately put her house up for sale, sold it, and made ready to move into what Michael had already begun to call the Warehouse, planning to take up residence there just as soon as it was fit for human habitation. “I was buying a ruin,” he said, and he was ready to begin the long process of rehabilitating it, piece by junk-strewn piece.5

  Princeton felt otherwise. The borough government chose this precise moment to institute a “sewer moratorium” prohibiting all construction in the area until a major new upgrade to the community’s water and drainage systems could be completed. Lucy and Michael were obliged to move into the housing project that Lucy helped manage.

  Thus, by the time they were properly married, Michael and Lucy were living in a provisional shelter. They had a mortgage hanging over their heads, her two children to look after, and his two children in Cambridge to consider, with the ever-present distractions of his practice and a mounting record of mutual suspicions (some of them well founded) leading to a veritable crescendo of marital discord. Something had to give; by and by, it would.

  There were good times as well as bad. Michael and Lucy would stay at Richard Meier’s house in East Hampton, New York, stopping by Robert A. M. Stern’s place nearby.6 On one of their visits to the Hanselmanns in Fort Wayne, just as the house was being completed, Lucy helped sketch out the pattern for Michael’s mural.7 The couple would host dinners for Michael’s students, and those who were there remember Lucy as cutting a singularly stylish figure in the sometimes drab, scholastic setting.

  Things had, meanwhile, become more interesting around Princeton. Caroline Constant, who had worked on the Jersey Corridor almost a decade earlier, came back to study with Michael in 1973; the year before, Mary McLeod had enrolled as well. In a profession where women were only beginning to make inroads, the addition of these two—both of whom would go on to major academic careers—was a mark of the program’s progressivism. With additions to the faculty such as Kenneth Frampton, Anthony Vidler, Alan Chimacoff, and Diana Agrest, as well as a revolving cast of prominent guest lecturers, Princeton was finally catching up with its peer institutions.

  Into this new ferment, Michael tossed two more intellectual ingredients. In 1973 he introduced an assignment in his studio course that was to become a staple of his teaching repertoire, the first assignment he gave to every incoming studio class for the remainder of his life as a teacher.8 This was the Asplund Problem: seemingly straightforward, easy enough for a first-year student, it was nonetheless a clever bit of pedagogical sleight of hand.

  The Swedish architect Gunnar Asplund had died in 1940, and his work was little known outside Scandinavia, save for a handful of lyrical, low-key projects completed just prior to his death—early iterations of the Nordic Modernist style that would take hold across the region (and gain a following around the world) after the war. But this was not the period in Asplund’s career that had caught Michael’s fancy. He’d been introduced to the semiforgotten architect by a Swedish visiting professor, Sven Silow, who’d been in Princeton the year that Michael arrived there, and his interest had grown under the influence of Colin Rowe, who shared it.9 For Michael, what was most compelling about Asplund was not his later portfolio but his earlier, non-Modernist buildings.

  Typical of these, if slightly more restrained than some, is the Villa Snellman, built in the genteel Djursholm district north of Stockholm for a wealthy private client in 1918. Deceptively plain in appearance, the building seems at first an only slightly more polished take on an old Swedish farmhouse, an oblong box topped by a pitched roof and symmetrical windows. On closer inspection, however, it boasts a few puzzling anomalies. The main door sits not at the center of the house but just to the left, atop a raised terrace that it shares with a large French window giving onto the main parlor. Above the latter is an almost abnormally small decorative emblem, a sort of double volute, mirrored in a number of equally small swags set above the second-story windows. These windows are themselves very small and are topped by even smaller ones in the attic story.

  Villa Snellman, 1918, by Gunnar Asplund. Drawing created by Peter Carl for Michael’s students

  This was the house Michael presented to his students, along with the following instructions:

  A guest house is to be built as an addition to the existing villa. You are asked to design the guest house which will provide the following spaces: living, bedroom, kitchen with a small eating area, and toilet. The guest house must be physically connected to the existing villa at either the first or second level or both.10

  With this simple brief, Michael punctured a minute hole in the fabric of architectural training in America.

  “A vehicle,” as Peter Carl later wrote, for “opening a challenge to the limitations of ‘form’ and ‘space,’” the Asplund Problem dared students to consider aspects of the building art that had been off-limits to young architects for decades (and entirely verboten at Sert’s GSD).11 Confronting them with a pre-Modernist building, one whose distinguishing features were located entirely on its facade, it tasked them with creating an extension to that building that would, perforce, respond to the way the facade was organized. It thereby upended the received order of the Modernist design process: instead of beginning with the plan—always “the generator,” according to Le Corbusier—students would have to begin with the elevation; instead of focusing on making an autonomous architectural object, they would have to be sensitive to the historical character of an older building. While they were at it, they would have to think about Asplund, an architect who fell outside the accepted canon of pioneers and who, a
s Villa Snellman demonstrated, was sufficiently uncouth as to continue using the classical ornamentation of the nineteenth century well into the twentieth.

  That wasn’t all they would have to think of. In an essay he would write in 1975 (with a key assist from Caroline Constant), Michael said of the Villa Snellman that it “can be seen as a wall in a layered system of increasing degrees of privacy”: the twinned exterior doors, for example, one transparent and the other solid, bespeak twinned impulses for shelter and for exposure. The building’s symmetry, its tall first-floor windows, and the detailing above them make reference to “body image,” to the shapes of the human form and the human face, inspiriting it with an air of welcome—of empathy, even.12 Snellman, in Michael’s eyes, was teeming with meaning, and he wanted his students to see it.

  To ensure they did, he made a couple of telling changes to the house in the drawings—executed by Carl—that he gave to the class. He lopped off the house’s real-life service wing, replacing it with a garage, and shifted it ninety degrees from its oblique relation to the street. Instead of an early twentieth-century house in Sweden that you approach from the side, Michael’s students found themselves face to metaphoric face with a house approached dead-on, which looked for all the world like it could be in any American suburb.