by Ian Volner
This reflexive turn to the classical past as the locus of legitimacy was an acquired trait of his time in Rome, and this was the mixed blessing of those years. As the critic Joan Ockman has written, Michael and other architectural pilgrims had found, in the city’s timeworn streets, “the shock of the real,” its glorious history somehow more substantial than the flimsy present. Impressing itself upon a young man so hungry for authenticity, the architecture of classicism had wound itself around Michael’s belief in an architecture of meaning, until the two had become almost inextricable.58 And so, threatened and bewildered by a changing world, it was in this double dream that Michael now sought asylum.
Nowhere was this more obvious than in the Warehouse, the gorgeous, building-size totem to Michael’s image of the good life and his image of himself. Away from the world’s welter, immured in an ambience of antique splendor, he made his home an elaborately contrived containment device, a place where he could live, as the critic Kenneth Frampton put it, like “the mythic aristocrat he thought himself to be.”59
BUT WAS EVER AN ELITIST such an irrepressible populist? Michael, as Patrick Burke put it, “never wanted his designs to be challenging.”60 From the same springs as Michael’s anxieties and jealousies there also came his overwhelming desire to be liked, and this, above all, is what drove his continued devotion to an architecture of bright colors and recognizable forms, where meaning was never hard to find. Whenever his team was working on a design, the surest sign that they were onto something was when Michael would turn up his chin slightly and utter one of his best-known catchphrases:
“That’ll put a smile on their faces.”
“I’m not making designs for a new gravestone,” he would say, and while his work was not so jokey as sometimes believed, there was never anything too grave about Graves.61 This made him, from a certain perspective, an odd choice to take on a commission for what was effectively a large hunk of funerary architecture.
In 1997 the United States National Park Service announced that Michael Graves Architect had been selected to design the scaffolding for the planned two-year restoration of the Washington Monument. Target, the nationwide chain of discount retailers, was planning to expand into Washington, DC, and under the advisement of Vice President of Marketing Bob Thacker they had hammered out a high-profile promotional opportunity by subscribing as official sponsors to the monument project.62 For a $1 million contribution (plus $4 million drummed up from other corporations), Target had the privilege of helping to choose the architect, and Thacker thought to approach Michael.
With the firm aboard, Thacker flew to Princeton to meet his architect for the first time. An Amtrak train bringing representatives from the National Park Service was late in arriving, and while Michael and Thacker waited, they took a quick walk, during which Michael broached the idea of collaborating with Target on some kind of commercial initiative. Thacker’s interest was piqued, and within a matter of weeks the company’s vice president of merchandising, Ron Johnson, proposed a Graves-branded product line to be sold in Target stores nationwide.
In one of their first meetings, Michael explained to Johnson that a large, low-cost product collection was exactly what he’d been wanting to do for years. “Ron,” Michael said, “my whole problem is that everything I create is out of the price range of my students at Princeton.” Proud though he was of the firm’s Swid Powell dinner plates, Alessi salt and pepper shakers, and all the rest, Michael thought the firm could get still closer to the dream of bringing real design to real people. He said he’d be thrilled to work with Target.63
The next eighteen months were among the busiest in the history of Michael’s office. The steady stream of residential building projects continued apace—an apartment building in Midtown Manhattan, an embassy in Korea, luxury residences in Europe. All the while, the firm was hurriedly readying the design for the monument scaffold and simultaneously scaling up its products division in time to make a rollout planned for only eighteen months after the Target contract was signed. One hundred and sixty products were to be part of the initial launch, and to ready them the firm devised a system that would ensure that all of the work had a consistent but flexible identity: they developed “a new language,” as associate Donald Strum put it, a matrix of forms that were rooted in Michael’s drawings and sketches but that could be applied to any product by any designer sufficiently fluent in Graves-ese.64
Central to this new formal language was an egg-like shape, deployed first as a handle for cleaning and kitchen utensils and then later as the inspiration for whole products. “I just fell in love from the moment we held the egg,” said Johnson.65 The executive and his designer quickly “got to be pals,” recalled Michael, but while they were on the same aesthetic wavelength, Michael’s graphic approach didn’t quite suit Johnson, who preferred not to pass judgment on drawings alone.66 Instead, Michael’s studio produced models, prototype after prototype flowing out of the Princeton office toward Target HQ in Minneapolis, all of them styled with their own distinctive personalities: a streamlined toaster with peaked shoulders, a comical-futurist teakettle, like the 9093 dressed up for an episode of The Jetsons, a coffee maker with the silhouette of a short, bald sparrow [PLATES 52–54].
By early 1999 the scaffold was up in Washington, DC, and public opinion came down solidly in favor. The glowing, reticulated fabric sheath that covered the metal grid carried its Graves-ism lightly: its azure hue faintly recalled the one Michael had used in his drawings, on the Alessi teakettle, and in other projects, while the boxy patterning on the surface was a subtle historicist gesture, referencing the cyclopean masonry blocks beneath it [PLATE 55]. Intentionally or not, the structure was also open to alternate interpretations, with some viewers reading it as a purely artistic wrapping—reminiscent of the work of the installationists Christo and Jean-Claude—and others seeing it as a boldly industrial overlay—“a splashy, high-tech hairnet,” as one critic wrote.67 Opening as it did during the public campaign against AIDS, still others couldn’t help but read it as a giant prophylactic, fitted snugly over the nation’s most famous phallic symbol.68
Synchronized with the scaffold’s completion, and just in time for the opening of a local DC Target outlet, the Graves “Design for All” collection went on sale all across America, and it became an instant best seller. Over the next thirteen years, the line would expand to more than two thousand products—spatulas, brooms, dog toys, all in the telltale bright blue boxes and labeling. While Target has declined to release precise sales figures, there’s little doubt they ran into the millions of units and into the billions of dollars. The first in a series of designer collaborations that would go on to include Thomas O’Brien and others, Michael’s collection helped recast the brand as the more urbane alternative to Kmart and Walmart. “Tar-zhay” the public was calling it now, the name pronounced à la française.
Using inexpensive materials, value-engineered to ensure efficient production and to stand up to wear and tear, the products made real Michael’s dream—and the dream of generations of Modern designers, from Walter Gropius on down—of bringing sophisticated architectural thinking to everyday household items affordable to nearly everyone. In exchange Michael received the anticipated hoots from formerly supportive critics who said he’d been “consumed by consumerism,” in the words of Charles Jencks—the popularity of the products further justifying their portrayal of Michael as an irredeemable sellout.69 Michael recalled being asked to speak at the AIA shortly after the collection’s debut, and as he approached the podium, the emcee for the evening introduced him by saying, “It’s a wonder Michael Graves has taken time from drawing teakettles to grace us with his presence.”70 Gordon Bunshaft had died, but his spirit lived on.
Would the reaction have been so hostile if the products had exhibited less of Michael’s cheery anthropomorphism and more of the Bauhaus’s undemonstrative functionalism? Perhaps, perhaps not. If they had, there’s no telling whether they would have been half so popular—
or half so functional, with many buyers holding onto their twist-mops and toilet cleaners long after they’d gone out of production, only to call up the designers in Princeton and beg for replacements.71 And not all the critics turned up their noses at the Target line’s alleged frippery. In a pleasing bookend to the Battle of Portland, coming directly from the halls of Michael’s yet-unforgiven grad school, Harvard Design Magazine published an appreciative article in 2000 on the Target homewares, written by the midwestern designer and academic Daniel Naegele. “We Dig Graves,” the author declared.72
HAD THE PRODUCTS NOT SOLD as well as they did, Michael might have had good reason to question his choices, indisposed though he was to second-guessing. As it was, the 1990s had seen him take his lumps and come up smiling—ever his favorite expression, the adolescent joker in him alive and well despite his advancing years. Michael Graves & Associates greeted the new millennium with a staff of more than eighty and dozens of commissions in the pipeline.
Bedimming his contentment somewhat was the end of his Princeton seminar, which was removed from the course list at the School of Architecture in 1999.73 The popularity of both the renamed “Thematic Studies in Architecture” and his graduate studio course had dipped over the decade in tandem with Michael’s critical reputation. What exactly precipitated the termination of his undergraduate teaching is in dispute. Michael felt that the director of graduate studies at the time, the architect Elizabeth Diller, had been instrumental in removing 402 from the bulletin; Diller contends that this was not so.74 Certainly Michael felt a rather extraordinary animus toward Diller, having once (while talking to former dean Bob Geddes) dismissed her work and that of her well-known office, Diller + Scofidio, as “performance art.”75 Whatever the case, the outcome was clear enough. “That’s when I lost my clout,” Michael would say later. “I kept going for a while afterward, but it wasn’t much fun without the seminar.”76 Soon he stopped teaching the studio course as well, remaining on the faculty in an emeritus capacity but scarcely ever returning to campus.77
Next to the elusive Pritzker, this was Michael’s greatest sore spot. However market-friendly his practice had become, he had never ceased craving academic approval. In the mid-1990s he was coteaching a Princeton studio with Peter Eisenman—who had long since patched things up with the university that had formerly rejected him—and the two invited Colin Rowe to attend as a critic. Another visitor, the Columbia University historian (and later MoMA architecture curator) Barry Bergdoll, recalled watching Michael and his old friend jockeying for the august critic’s attention, still trying to curry favor with the man whom both claimed as an intellectual forefather.78
Not having coursework had its advantages, however, leaving Michael more time for other pursuits. As part of the contract for his 1998 condo project in Miami Beach, he got an apartment in the waterfront building for his own use and stayed there frequently to visit his new girlfriend, Lynn Min. South Florida was an ideal climate for golf, and the building was an ideal climate for Michael—a total Graves environment inside and out, including one of his murals in the lobby. Michael would fly down for a few days, fly back up, fly down again. Min told him of her pregnancy while driving him to the airport, and even though their relationship formally ended, Michael looked forward to flying down even more to visit her and his soon-to-be-born son. “We stayed more than just friends,” said Min. “We were family.”79
Michael flew and flew. “He saw flights as the only downtime he had,” recalled Patrick Burke.80 Michael and Burke flew back and forth to Egypt many times, designing a series of resorts there; Michael flew with firm partner Tom Rowe to Houston to design a branch of the Federal Reserve Bank and then a master plan for the campus of Rice University. For all his success, the architect still felt he needed the work (“I can’t afford to retire,” he’d say), but in some ways it might be said that he did not, after so many years, know how to stop.81 Michael flew to Shanghai, where the firm was involved with the restoration of one of the Beaux Arts beauties on the Bund, and he flew to Nashville, and to Pittsburgh, and then back to his childhood turf in Indianapolis to design the NCAA Hall of Fame. He flew and he flew, and one day he flew to Germany, feeling a touch under the weather and carrying in his bag a bottle, possibly half-empty, of what may or may not have been antibiotics.
IX
THE SKY AND THE FRAME
EVERY MORNING FOR the last decade of his life, Michael Graves awoke between five thirty and six thirty. “I get up,” as he put it, “not in the sense of ‘getting up’”: his nurse would enter his room, roll him onto his side, and then go through a ritual process of washing his body, face, and back.1 Immobile during the night, he often sweat heavily in his sleep, despite an automated air mattress that puffed up and down at regular intervals to reduce his discomfort and fend off bedsores.
After washing, his nurse would lay out his breakfast—oatmeal two mornings out of the week, cereal the rest, and toast on weekends, though the gluten and carbohydrates of white bread had to be avoided to try to keep his weight down and his digestion good. After breakfast, his nurse would dress him, his attire less formal than in the old days but not without a certain panache, often with a colorful sweater thrown around his neck. He had learned, while in rehabilitation, how to dress himself and could even wash himself if need be with the aid of a mirror on a long stick. Naturally he preferred to have his nurse do both, though even with her help the business of tooth brushing, fingernail trimming, and pill taking could take several hours, and he usually did not arrive in the office until close to ten-thirty.
“But I don’t leave for lunch,” he noted.2 With his wheelchair in a standing position to improve his circulation, Michael would draw and take meetings until midafternoon, when he would enjoy a small snack of crackers and cheese. (If a visitor was present, he might permit himself a sandwich and a cookie.) He would then resume working and keep on going until at least five, or later still if he was reviewing his associates’ designs during a project charrette, before being loaded once again into his customized van and taken back to the Warehouse.
There, his trusted nurse (or one of her associates; his primary nurse also worked two half-days a week at the local hospital) would place Michael on his exercise bike for a brief spell, then serve him dinner in bed, which he would eat while watching television. He had developed a special fondness for MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and would watch all the network’s programming straight through her talk show before drifting off to sleep.
That was Michael’s day, day after day, barring travel or other special occasions. Even when these intervened, his illness and the struggle to overcome it were the logic of his life. His condition did, at times, provide a useful pretext: to avoid the dreaded pressure ulcers—a bedsore had ultimately killed his fellow paralytic Christopher Reeve—Michael could not be allowed to remain in any one position for too long. With a still-packed schedule of sometimes tedious cocktails and gala functions, the architect now had the perfect excuse to give his gracious hosts. “If I’m at a dinner party and I don’t want to stay,” he explained, “I just tell them I’ve got to get out of the chair. And I leave.”
BY THE TIME of his paralysis, Michael had all but lost touch with his second wife, Lucy, who had long ago remarried. His daughter, Sarah, was in Calgary with her husband and children, and though he spoke to Gail on occasion, she had her own life, and Adam, in Indianapolis. Even if any of his current or former family members had been available to do so, none of them could have been expected to take on the level of responsibility necessary to help him in the wake of his illness. He required the commitment and expertise of a trained professional, but one with a personal touch.
Michael was slow to accept that his condition would not improve. “He was stubborn,” recalled his surgeon, Dr. Barth Green, but as Michael began to reckon with the long-term nature of his illness, he started to search for a permanent home health aide, hoping for the right match.3 Several came and went, and none quite seemed to fit—until he met a f
orty-three-year-old woman from Hangzhou, China, a nurse at the local University Medical Center of Princeton, where Michael stayed briefly in late 2003 while the Warehouse was being retrofitted to accommodate his wheelchair. The nurse’s name, in a cosmic coincidence, was Min Lin, closely matching that of Lynn Min, Michael’s last girlfriend and the mother of his infant son, Michael Sebastian.
“He needed help,” said Min Lin.4 When the two met, Michael’s condition had stabilized, but he was gaining weight and in poor spirits. After being hired at the suggestion of Michael’s lawyer, Susan Howard, Lin quickly put Michael on a new workout and dietary regimen. Schedule allowing, she accompanied him everywhere, to black-tie galas and client meetings, lectures and dinners. Her presence in the last decade of Michael’s life was vital: totally unable to fend for himself, he needed assistance with nearly everything, and he and Min shared an intimacy more intense, in some ways, than that of any other relationship in his life. “Except for the romantic thing, we’re warmer and closer to each other than ninety percent of couples,” Michael would say. He called her “Minnie.”5
With Minnie’s help, everything in Michael’s world was reconfigured and reordered around his health and his limited mobility. Hotels were vetted in advance to ensure they could cater to his needs; medicines were refilled and monitored to make sure he took them in the right amounts and at the right time. The costs were sometimes astronomical—and not just in terms of dollars. Some of his medications caused Michael’s hands to shake uncontrollably. He would need Minnie’s help to hold a fork and draw it to his mouth, and he chafed at the feeling of infantilization.