by Ian Volner
The third and final phase of Warehouse renovations [PLATES 61 AND 62] included the installation of an elevator to the south of the old kitchen door and the removal of the miniature tempietto in the second-floor hallway so that his wheelchair could pass through. (Conveniently, the open oculus in the floor had already been covered with a glass top after one of the dogs fell through it into the foyer.) Every university and institute to which Michael was invited as a guest panelist or presenter had to be fully accessible, with means of getting him from van to greenroom to auditorium stage, wheelchair and all.
Or wheelchairs, plural. For everyday use, Michael favored a Permobil C500, a standard utility model equipped with a built-in table for eating or perusing documents. But on weekends, or when painting and drawing, he switched to something called an iBOT—a technological marvel created by Dean Kamen, the inventor responsible for the battery-powered Segway transportation device. The iBOT featured multiple sets of wheels, six in all, and was equipped with an ingenious system of gyroscopes and gears that allowed Michael to mount and descend stairs, as well as “stand” to a height of nearly six feet. A fellow paraplegic and acquaintance of Michael’s, the artist Chuck Close, is also a proud iBOT owner, and while the device went out of production in 2009 (at $25,000, it was beyond the reach of most prospective buyers), it was still possible to have it serviced. Michael became adept at maneuvering the contraption and in midconversation could often be seen making subtle adjustments using the joystick control, shifting in place to avoid feeling cramped or uncomfortable.
The wheelchairs, along with Minnie’s vigilant care, helped put Michael back in control of much of his professional life. But some things would never return to normal. He had forgotten the physical demands of the act of creating architecture: instead of being able to draw on the big rolled-out sheets of yellow trace, he was confined to smaller templates. “You’ve got to see it the way Morandi did,” he’d say, “not the way de Kooning did,” though he could make slightly larger drawings by stitching miniature ones together via digital scans.6 When clients requested one of his murals, he would do the cartoon and then have an associate complete the painting. He was never displeased with the result, but he sorely missed the satisfaction of completing a big piece himself.
The operations of the office had changed, and although his associates continued to keep Michael engaged as much as possible, many of the larger architectural projects were handled almost exclusively by designated associates working autonomously with limited input from the chief. No renovations were undertaken to the labyrinthine rooms in the south building of Michael Graves & Associates, discouraging random drop-ins by the boss. This kind of devolution of power is not uncommon as firm principals grow older and move into semiretirement—Carl Strauss’s dependence on Ray Roush was a perfect example—but in Michael’s case it took a sharper turn owing to his disability.
The tale was different at the Michael Graves Design Group, the products division established as a separate entity in 2003, where Michael’s influence was paramount. First at a temporary space down Nassau, later in the house that formerly held the retail space across the street from the architecture studio, ramps and adequate circulation space gave Michael room to maneuver and allowed him to keep up with all the goings-on. He had decided, while still recuperating at Kessler Institute in New Jersey, to point the industrial design department toward the health-care market, and the firm now began a pitched effort to remake the entire patient environment, from bedpans to hospitals. With the man whose name was on the door himself in a wheelchair, the firm could draw on his unique insights into the challenges of the physically impaired. Improving their lot became the cause of Michael’s life.
“THE MORE PLACES I WENT, the worse they were,” Michael said.7 Early in his illness, he recalled sitting in a restaurant and watching as an older customer walked in with a pronounced limp. The maître d’ showed the guest to his table and then left him there, and as the gentleman stood motionless, it became evident that he had no way of settling himself into the armless chair in front of him. Scooting it as close as he dared to the table, he remained standing there for several minutes trying to think of a way of lowering himself safely onto the cushion without leaning so hard on the back as to tip it over.
“I wanted to get out and go help him,” recalled Michael, “to say, ‘Here, the chair is behind your knees, I got my hand behind your back, let yourself down slowly, if you can.’” Confined to his wheelchair, he could only look on helplessly.8 He resolved then and there to create a chair that could help people like his fellow diner regain a bit of their autonomy, and a bit of their dignity.
Moving into the health-care sphere was like starting all over again, going back to the days when he first tried (and frequently failed) to cultivate clients and create work for his fledgling studio. Hanging out a shingle and hiring some new staff would not suffice; the firm would need to aggressively court major manufacturers and forge new industry contacts. The investment of time and money would be steep, but Michael felt he had no choice. “I had to do it,” he said. “I had the empathy, and I wanted to get involved.”9
Rob Van Varick, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, joined the Michael Graves Design Group in March 2003, just a couple of weeks after Michael had taken ill. His first meeting with Michael was at Kessler: “He was just talking about how terrible everything there was,” recalled Van Varick. “The sponges on a stick!”10 In time, under the guidance of firm principal for product design Donald Strum, Van Varick began—along with a growing complement of his colleagues—to transition into research and development for health-care products that could relieve some of the vicissitudes of the patient experience.
A clamp-on adjustable tub rail, a bath seat, a showerhead [PLATE 57], a cane that folded neatly into a carrier bag—the firm’s first creations for the brand Drive Medical in 2005 signaled the comprehensiveness of its approach, as well as the sensibility it brought to the field. Most medical product design, noted Strum, “didn’t conjure any thought except for the thought of how sick you are”; the Gravesian flair for color and contour made the products a welcome change of pace.11 In a convenient coincidence, the bulbous, egg-like geometries that had given the Target products their goofy charm had an added advantage when applied to accessibility design: for cramped fingers unable to grasp narrow handles and for bodies prone to bump against sharp edges, the fattened volumes of the Graves health-care line were far easier and safer to use.
The Drive Medical relationship was short-lived, the economic realities of the marketplace making it difficult to achieve production at the scale and with the quality the design team had hoped for. It was followed, however, by a more gratifying partnership, launched in 2009 with medical device maker Stryker [PLATES 58–60]. An over-bed table, a bedside table, a hospital transport wheelchair, and a stand-assist chair have been its main results to date, and they’ve shown how far the firm is willing to go in adapting its long-established design formulas to meet the demands of its new customer base. The stand-assist chair in particular, born of Michael’s restaurant revelation, is notable for its unprepossessing profile and practicality: “It’s just a chair,” said Michael, “not a [Mies] Barcelona chair. It’s not going to grab you in terms of its looks, though it’s not medicinal-looking.”12 Its arms made of a flexible composite that gives just enough resistance to spring off or settle into, the stand-assist chair is miles away from the decorative excesses of Michael’s Memphis days, while still somehow remaining recognizably Graves.
Perhaps the most remarkable product in the Stryker line is the firm’s hospital wheelchair, which has quickly become the most sought-after model on the market. The design process behind the device delved into the fine grain of how such products are really used in the health-care space. “We went into hospital rooms,” said Van Varick, “interviewing cleaning staff, watching them clean the furniture, documenting that, making models, trying them out.”13 The numberless contingencies of the user experience
for an in-patient transport wheelchair (how long the average user sits in it, how likely the chairs are to be stolen, the danger of getting extremities caught in the works) required a more data-driven, trial-and-error approach than Michael’s firm had ever attempted. And for his young associates, the final testing stage was the most intimidating of all: the team had to bring each product to Michael, who would make sure that the wheelchair’s seat cushion was comfortable enough, that its foot-rests didn’t get in his way when getting in or out of it.
Gradually, the transition from a more aesthetically minded to a more research-oriented design process began to affect every aspect of the firm’s product practice, which also continued to grow outside of the health-care realm. After Ron Johnson stepped aside at Target, the Graves design team found itself passed off to a succession of executives, most of them supportive, though the bond between client and designer began to fray as Target moved on to other brand collaborations (Marimekko, Isaac Mizrahi) inspired by its initial success with Graves. When Johnson landed at JCPenney in 2011, he called his old friend Michael and asked if he’d be interested in jumping ship from Target; he said yes, and the new Michael Graves Design Collection for JCPenney was launched in 2013. Unfortunately, Johnson did not enjoy the same success at JCPenney that he had Target, and within months of the new collaboration’s debut he was ousted as CEO. The new Graves product line was orphaned at birth and gradually went out of production.
Products, however, were not Michael’s only line of attack in transforming his office. Hospitals, wellness centers, and large-scale medical facilities of every kind have become central, over the last decade, to the firm’s portfolio. Designed mostly by firm associates, the half-dozen projects to date nonetheless preserve much of the spirit of Michael’s own thinking. In Lincoln, Nebraska, the firm completed the Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital in 2016, a modest but thoughtfully designed facility of some 240,000 square feet, specializing in exactly the kind of treatment Michael had received at Kessler. In Washington, DC, the firm’s St. Coletta of Greater Washington, a school for the disabled, resembles nothing so much as a small, multicolored trulli village [PLATE 56]. The warm, welcoming gaggle of forms is a perfect solution given the emotional sensitivities of its occupants: the facility specializes in children with serious intellectual disabilities, another instance of Michael achieving in his work some of the things left undone in his life.
ILLNESS BROUGHT MICHAEL full circle in countless ways. With Minnie, he was once again entrusted to the care of a nurse, just as he had been as a child, when Erma was his sole protector. Grappling with immobility, he was facing down a challenge not so different from his mother’s. Disability had been the leitmotif of his existence—“I think my family is cursed,” he once told Minnie—and in his final disability he triumphed over some of the older ones: gone was the needling guilt, a disability of its own that had driven him so hard for so many years.14 With his health-care work, Michael could dispel any questions about having made himself “of use.”
There was still one last disability left unreckoned with: Adam’s. Yet even there, Michael decided it was time to seek again, if not reconciliation, at least normalization. After trying telephone and video chats without success, Michael and his elder son discovered that they could keep up an email correspondence. It wasn’t much, but it was an improvement, and Michael helped secure his son a job working at a Target store in Indianapolis, checking in by email to see how he was faring.
Michael’s other personal relationships remained more or less as they’d always been. With his older brother, Michael kept in regular if not frequent contact, though before Tom died in 2008 Michael had the opportunity to repay him for his early financial support. Of Michael’s peers, John Hejduk had died in 2002 and Charles Gwathmey nine years later, leaving only three of the Five. Michael and Eisenman, after all they’d been through, were still as close as ever: they attended their last football game together in the fall of 2014, an Indiana versus Rutgers matchup on the latter’s home turf in New Brunswick, New Jersey.15 Long content to sit in the nosebleeds, they now enjoyed Eisenman’s private box seats, a better perch by far and a necessity given Michael’s wheelchair.
Both Michael and Eisenman remained in frequent contact with the other surviving Fiver, Richard Meier: all three participated in awards juries together, though Michael’s thoughts on design were so at odds with those of his friends, and of the field in general, that Meier recalled he mostly said nothing except occasionally, “Oh! This is terrible.”16 Fran Lebowitz was still close, too (paraplegia had spelled the end of Michael’s years of dog ownership, much to her relief), and she continued to prank him constantly. She spread a rumor that Michael’s favorite food was Peeps, the ubiquitous yellow marshmallow treats found in stores around Easter, and once persuaded the marketing director for the candy maker to send Michael a truckload of Peeps and Peepsiana—strawberry and chocolate Peeps, Peeps coloring books, Peeps toys. Michael hated Peeps and gave most of the stuff away.17
One last personal relationship took on special importance in Michael’s later life: the one with his preadolescent son, Michael Sebastian. Michael’s youngest only ever knew his father in a wheelchair—his head grown bald, his voice lower, and his speech slightly slurred. Yet Michael’s role in his namesake’s early life was more active and involved than it had been with his older children, back when he had his strength. Though separated by hundreds of miles, the two were constantly in touch, and Michael continued to keep his apartment—retrofitted, like the Warehouse, for his wheelchair—in the South Beach apartment building he had designed, with regular stays there to visit Michael Sebastian and his mother. Embittered as Michael was by his condition, fatherhood turned out to be the great consolation of his final years, a late reminder that empathy mattered not just in design but in life.
WHAT REMAINED OF Michael’s time and energy, after his work and the day-to-day aggravations of his illness, was largely absorbed by painting—which he did regularly despite the difficulty involved—and by advocacy—to which he now devoted his still-considerable celebrity.
Of the paintings, there was really only one: The Painting [PLATES 65 AND 66], as his partners called it. A continuation of the genre he had begun working in starting in the late 1990s, The Painting appeared in hundreds of iterations, the canvases varying in size and dimensions but generally small and square, featuring a dusty, indeterminately Tuscan setting populated by vaguely architectural forms. The colors were soft and Corot-like, their composition bringing to mind Giorgio Morandi, but the mood was closer to Giorgio de Chirico, dreamy and elegiac. In Michael’s at-home studio, the canvases eventually covered every inch of available wall space, reminding the visitor of the clipping-covered hovel of a conspiracy-minded shut-in in a Hollywood thriller—which, in a sense, it was. “He always said, ‘I can’t play golf, so I just draw and paint,” recalled Minnie.18 Painting was the last outlet for Michael’s compulsive bent.
Keeping Michael from becoming a true shut-in was his advocacy work. Once he’d found Minnie and the iBOT, the architect hit the circuit, giving a TED talk on accessibility, lecturing in cities large and small, bending the ear of anyone he could on the subject. Even before his firm began producing health-care products, he’d attempted to persuade Target to move into the field; when he heard that Jackson Memorial, the Miami hospital where Dr. Green had operated on him, was planning a rehabilitation center, he wanted to be involved and donated lavishly to its construction. (Naturally he had originally hoped to design it himself.) He formed friendships with other disabled celebrities, including the radio and print journalist John Hockenberry, who has been wheelchair-bound since the age of twenty. The title of Hockenberry’s 2006 interview for Metropolis magazine summed up Michael’s experience in the foregoing three years: “The Re-education of Michael Graves.”19
Equipped with his new understanding, Michael gained prominence as an accessibility advocate. In 2011 the Graves firm was selected by fair-housing specialists Clark Realty Capital
for a pilot initiative of the Wounded Warrior Project to design small private homes optimized for returning veterans with special needs. Two of the houses have been built to date [PLATE 63], typical suburban residences but fine-tuned for the disabled, with adjustable-height countertops and one-floor plans that obviate the need for ramps (or for an iBOT). Ideally Michael’s firm wanted to stock them full of its own health-care products, creating the health-care equivalent of the Swan and Dolphin Hotels: wall-to-wall Graves environments, only this time for life, not just for pleasure. The logistics proved too complicated, much to Michael’s displeasure.
Hope, however, came from a higher office. Two years after Michael took on the Wounded Warrior Project, President Barack Obama named him to a position on the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board, a federal sub-agency dealing with accessibility in public accommodations. Mostly ceremonial, the appointment nonetheless afforded Michael a still bigger platform to speak out on the issues that mattered to him most, and he took the posting seriously. “We would go to Washington for meetings every other month,” recalled Minnie, and although Obama and he never met personally (the only president since Reagan of whom that can be said), Michael felt that his administration was poised to do real and lasting good.20 Michael had been in Washington for one such meeting the day before he died, and his presence on the panel was so forceful that those who were there could hardly believe the news of his passing.