Michael Graves, Princeton-based post-modernist architect, dies at 80

Michael Graves, a famous architect based in Princeton, died in his Princeton homeThursday. He was 80 years old.

Throughout his career, Graves made many significant contributions to the world of art and architecture as an avid drawer, painter and professor. He alsoled the post-modernist architecture movement, introducing color and humanistic principles into architecture.

He taught at the University for 39 years and directed the firmMichael Graves & Associates for 50 years.

After becoming partially paralyzed in 2003, Graves used his experience to focus on issues of accessibility for people with disabilities. President Barack Obama appointed him to the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board in 2013.

“He didn’t belong to any one person. He belonged to the world,” Maximillian Hayden, architect and former employee of Graves, said.

Building a Love for Architecture

Graves was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1934 to a retired nurse and a livestock merchant.Although he considered himself a jock who played multiple sports growing up, including football, wrestling and track, Graves gravitated towards drawing very early on and often told those around him that he planned to be an artist or painter.

"It was the side of my brain that I guess I did the best at," Graves had said in an interview for Attention, an audio journal for architecture at the University.

His mother, however, encouraged him to pursue asafer and more reliable professional fieldthat involved drawing instead, such as engineering or architecture. After she explained what engineering was to Graves, who was 8 years old at the time, he immediately declaredthat he wouldbe an architect instead.

Although his mother had not yet had the chance to explain what architecture was, hesaid, "I'm not going to be an engineer and [architecture] has got to be better than engineering,"according to theAttentioninterview.

He fell in love with architecture anyway.

From the Midwest to the Big Apple to Rome

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Years later, Graves attended the University of Cincinnati, where he could pay for his tuition through a flexible work-study schedule. He alternated between work in an architectural office for Carl A. Strauss and Associates and school every 2 months, which meant he had to stay on an extra year. He graduated in 1958 with a degree in architecture.

Graves went on to pursue a master's degree in architecture at Harvard, which he called a terrible place. Josep Lluís Sert, then the Dean at the Graduate School of Design, often criticized and threatened Graves for having different thoughts and opinions about architecture.According to an interview with the Berkshire Fine Arts Journal,Graves said that growing up in the Midwest had made him more of a Mies van der Rohe man and that Harvard instead emphasized the works of Le Corbusier, a Swiss-French architect who pioneered the emergence of modern architecture.

Despite how he suffered at Harvard, Graves did love and treasure Le Corbusier, according to Peter Eisenman, Graves' long-time friend and colleague as well as famous architect who joined Graves at the University in 1963. Eisenman and Graves first met in 1959 in Cambridge, Mass. while working for different architects. They had met again in Rome in the summer of 1961.

After graduating in 1959, Graves worked for George Nelson, a French designer and architect, in a New York office for one year. It was during that time that Graves first met architect Richard Meier, who later became a member of the New York Five along with Graves.

The New York Five was a group of five architects based in New York City who believed in pure modernist aesthetics.

Having been the only student in his Harvard class not to have already travelled to Europe, Graves said in the Attention interview that he surprised himself when he won the Prix de Rome fellowship in 1960. The highly regarded scholarship allowed him tostudy architecture at the American Academy in Rome. There, Graves immersed himself in a magnificent city, unique in its vast and rich history and architecture.

"It was a real awakening for me," Graves said of his time in Rome, adding that he particularly loved to dine well and walk in the streets afterward, observing the buildings and how happy the people were.

Focusing on the work of Francesco Borromini, an Italian architect who contributed to the rise of Roman Baroque architecture, Graves occupied himself with selling sketches and washes of Borromini's buildings that he had drawn or painted himself. He used themoney he earned to take a Grand Tour throughout the Mediterranean, where he studied architecture from both the past and present.

Wreaking Havoc at Princeton

Upon his return to America in 1962, Graves received a partnership offer from George Nelson. Doubtful of whether his vision aligned with Nelson's,Gravesdeclined and decided to teach instead.

The University offered him a full-time teaching position on the condition that he live in Princeton rather than commute from New York. The University's School of Architecture, which had only been recently founded at that time, had no dean, unlike the other professional schools at the time. Robert McLaughlin served as the director.

Graves became the Robert Schirmer Professor of Architecture and held the position until his retirement in 2001.

Graves was a refreshing addition to the faculty, Eisenman said,especially because the University had not made a new hire in the architecture department in the 17 years beforehand.

Eisenman and Gravesworked as junior professors with offices in the basement of the architecture building. Together, they "caused a lot of havoc," Eisenman said, and spent a great deal of time together,so much so that philosophy professor Arthur Szathmary once asked a colleague on McCosh Walk, "Who is this man, Eisenman Graves?"

The powerful duo spent several years together at the University, where they worked on multiple competitions togetherfor projects in Boston, California and Washington D.C.

In 1966, Eisenman and Graves began gathering ideas for a large-scale project in New Jersey called the Jersey Corridor project. The proposal involved transforming a 20 mile long strip of land into a linear city that would consist of two parallel strips, one for homes and stores and the other for industry. The headline of aDecember 1965 issue of Life Magazine described it as "self-sufficient structures" that would "carry a metropolis across New Jersey."

Robert Goheen, then the President of the University, appreciated the ideaand helped raise $100,000 to fund the project, which at that time, was a tremendous amount of money, Eisenman said.

The sixties and seventies were an incredibly exciting and forward-looking era for architecture and the arts, Eisenman said, noting that their work at the University was set against the backdrop of the 1960s, a period of student revolt and cultural shift.

"It happened in Princeton as well as other places. We were right in the middle of it," Eisenman said.

A Career of Color and Commercialism

Graves was considered in the 1960s and 1970s to be a member of the New York Five, along with other architects Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey and John Hejduk, a group that took a powerful stance in supporting a pure form of modernism.

While the definitions and standards of modernism vary widely today, the movement is often associated with the use of industrially-produced materials, simplicity of form, elimination of elaborate furnishings or details and the idea that form should follow function.

In the early 1980s, however, Graves broke away to pursue and explore post-modernism, for which he became widely known and respected.

Bringing color, different textures, materials, decorative and fine arts back into architecture, many of which had been missing from architecture in the period after World War II, Graves wanted to bring humanistic principles back into contemporary architecture, saidTom Moran, chief curator of Grounds for Sculpture, a sculpture museum and park in Hamilton, N.J.

In 1982, Graves built the Portland Building in Portland, Ore., which many regard as the first large-scale creation constructed in post-modernist style. The building, consisting of municipal offices, was later added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2011.

Throughout the end of the 20th century, Graves produced a number of acclaimed works, including the Denver Public Library, a building that featured an atrium with large wood bracings and testified to Graves' inventiveness, according to Moran.

Graves also worked extensively with and designed many buildingsforDisney. The Team Disney Building built in 1991 in Burbank, Calif., features the Seven Dwarves as caryatids and exemplifies Graves' love for infusing joy into the things he built. Graves also designed Disney's Hotel New York in Paris and other resorts at Walt Disney World.

Graves began the steep rise to the commercial pinnacle of his career with his work with Alessi, an Italian company. In 1985, Graves helped design a teakettle with a red bird-shaped whistle that became overwhelmingly popular and grew to become a symbol of his designs.

Some of Graves' notable projects throughout the 1990s include buildings for Rice University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, the American Academy in Rome and the International Finance Corporation Headquarters of the World Bank in Washington D.C.

In the 2000s, Graves' work on the scaffolding for the restoration of the Washington Monumentcaught the eye of a Target executive. Soon after,Graves began designing consumer products for Target stores throughout the country, and then exclusively for J.C. Penney.

Expanding the boundaries of his design to kitchen products, jewelry, watches, rugs and other similar small-scale objects, Graves firmly believed that architects can build more than just buildings, according to a 1994 interview with The Indianapolis Star.

As a result, Graves became extremely well-known for the way he transitioned across the barrier between architecture and the mass market, Mario Gandelsonas, an architecture professor at the University, said.

Among some of Graves' work in the 2000s are the U.S. Embassy Compound in Korea, the Trump International Hotel in Florida, the National Automobile Museum in the Netherlands, additions to Chancellor Green for the University and additions and interiors for Wu and Wilcox Halls at the University.

Graves also contributed to the so-called linguistic turn of architectural theory, Hans Tursack GS ’13, who interviewed Graves for an audio architecture journal last year, said.

The linguistic turn, he said, refers to the 1970s when architects and architectural theorists began using semiotics and structuralism to talk about buildings as a linguisticsystem.

"A column was like a word, the whole building was like a paragraph," Tursack said."Graves' greatest contribution to architectural design-theory was his idea that a building's elevation, as in its frontal view, could be thought of as apainterlysurface to bereadby the viewer."

A Mentor to Many

Although Graves went on to explore many new projects and ventures throughout his career, he remained constant in his teaching.

Graves strove to help his students realize their visions and to help them understand how their own work related to the long arc of architectural history, Stanley Allen GS ’88, acting dean of the School of Architecture,said. While he was not influenced stylistically by Graves, Allen said that Graves' parallel commitment to both creative work in architecture and teaching was an example for him.

Patrick Burke GS '82,who graduated from the University with a master's degree in architecture, studied in Graves' design studio and had him as a thesis adviser. Working in Graves' studio was like entering the playoffs or major tournaments for a sport, Burke said.

"Everyone else's studios were regular and his was a major," he said. "He expected you to bring it. You worked hard in that studio. He pushed you, he challenged you. This was joy and passion, this was for the love of it."

Burke added that Graves emphasized design by drawing and compelled his students to think beyond the simpler, functional issues of their projects. Rather than engaging in overly intellectual and somewhat pretentious debate about architecture like many others, Graves tried to ground the conversation on the fact that, in the end, buildings are designedfor people.

Students from all over the world travelled to study with Graves, Eisenman said.

"He was Princeton," he said. "It was really important to be with Michael."

Michael Graves Architecture and Design Firm

Graves inspired other younger aspiring artists outside the classroomas well.

In 1964, he established Michael Graves & Associates, a public practice in Princeton with an office in New York City. The firm grew larger and stronger throughout the years, and became one of Graves' proudest accomplishments.

Hayden, a Princeton-based architect, first heard about Graves through his work on the Fargo-Moorhead Cultural Center, which had been published in many architectural magazines at the time. Hayden began working for Graves' firm in 1988, and compared the experience to being in a musical or play production.

"There are so many characters. It was very personal and surprisingly small," Hayden said. "There were a lot of very young people and it was very exciting."

At that time, there were only about 100 employees total, 80 of whom were based in Princeton and the rest in the New York office.

The office environmentwas personal and enjoyable, according to Hayden, who recalled that Graves often brought his dog to work and that they would have birthday parties in the office and eat lunch out at the nearby park. The employees also often travelled togetheracross the country for "class trips."

Not all who worked under him agreed with all aspects of his design philosophy, Hayden said, but his work demanded to be respected and appreciated.

"For himto come up with a verybrightcolor palate and a sense of human scale was earth shattering at the time," he said. "It made us all think that buildings are for our use, not for giants, not to be unemotive and cold, but supposed to be useful for us and make us feel good in them. And that’s what he did."

A Wheelchair and a Vision

When a spinal cord infection paralyzed Graves from the waist down in 2003, his perspective on the world shifted noticeably, several people interviewed said.

Forced to spend an extended amount of time in the hospital during his medical difficulties, Graves became extremely frustrated with the way hospitals were designed, with both unattractive and non-functional furnishings.

He shared examples, including the mirror being settled so high that wheelchair-bound patients could not see their own reflection or the sink positioned in such an uncomfortable angle that one could not reach it, according to Janie Hermann, public programming librarian at the Princeton Public Library who often interacted with him when coordinating lectures and series.

Although Graves' illness and subsequent paralysis was a tragedy, hecontinuedto paint and draw as often as possible.

"I think that was a great source of solace for him at a difficult time in the last 12 years of his life when he was in a wheelchair," Allen said.

Afterwards, Graves dedicated himself to improving hospital design and creating medical equipment and furniture that were both functional and aesthetically pleasing.

In 2011, Clark Realty Capital commissioned Graves and his firm to help design homes that could accommodate injured or disabled service members, in an initiative called the Wounded Warriors Home Project. President Barack Obama appointed Graves in 2013 to become a member of the Architectural and Transportation Barriers Compliance Board, which focused on improving access for people with disabilities.

Graves was also working on anongoing projectbefore his death at the Madonna Rehabilitation Hospital in Omaha, Nebraska.

The hospital provides specialized programs to rehabilitate patients with severe and traumatic injuries and Burke said the hospital hired Graves' firm because they believed Graves could empathize with the patients.

Burke said that redesigning the hospital was good for Graves.

“He felt like he had a chance to get it right,” he said

Loving a Community That Loved Him Back

Graves always wanted to give back to the community he lived in, Hermann said. She added that Graves had always been flexible with his schedule and willing to involve himself in community programs and lectures at the Princeton Public Library's request.

One of Graves' happier moments took place in October 2014, when Grounds for Sculpture opened the exhibition season with an installation of Graves' work, titled, "Past as Prologue."

The exhibition includes paintings, sculptures and drawings and demonstrates the magnitude and significance of his contributions across the last 50 years, and will be open until April 5.

"It’s incredibly sad to lose him," Moran said of Graves."He left a legacy that is astounding. When you see the exhibition, it hits you. It hits you hard. You realize that this one individual envisioned all of this work."