Майкл Грейвс: Архитектор, дизайнер и педагог

American architect, designer, and educator (1934–2015)

Michael Graves (July 9, 1934 – March 12, 2015) was an American architect, designer, and educator, and principal of Michael Graves and Associates and Michael Graves Design Group. He was a member of The New York Five and the Memphis Group and a professor of architecture at Princeton University for nearly forty years. Following his own partial paralysis in 2003, Graves became an internationally recognized advocate of health care design. Graves' global portfolio of architectural work ranged from the Ministry of Culture in The Hague, a post office for Celebration, Florida, a prominent expansion of the Denver Public Library to numerous commissions for Disney and the scaffolding design for the 2000 Washington Monument restoration. He was recognized for his influence on architectural movements, including New Urbanism, New Classicism, and postmodernism. His postmodern buildings include the Portland Building in Portland, Oregon and the Humana Building in Louisville, Kentucky. For his architectural work, Graves received a fellowship of the American Institute of Architects as well as its highest award, the AIA Gold Medal (2001). He was trustee of the American Academy in Rome and was the president of its Society of Fellows from 1980 to 1984. He received the American Prize for Architecture, the National Medal of Arts (1999) and the Driehaus Architecture Prize (2012). Graves produced both high end and mass consumer product designs for several companies, including Alessi in Italy and Target and J. C. Penney in the United States.

Graves was born on July 9, 1934, in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Erma (Lowe) and Thomas B. Graves. He grew up in the city's suburbs and later credited his mother for suggesting that he become an engineer or an architect. Graves graduated from Indianapolis's Broad Ripple High School in 1952 and earned a bachelor's degree in architecture in 1958 from the University of Cincinnati. During college he also became a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity. Graves earned a master's degree in architecture from Harvard University in 1959. After graduation from college, Graves spent a year working in George Nelson's office. Nelson, a furniture designer and the creative director for Herman Miller, exposed Graves to the work of fellow designers Charles and Ray Eames and Alexander Girard. In 1960 Graves won the American Academy in Rome's Prix de Rome (Rome Prize) and spent the next two years at the academy in Italy. Graves describes himself as "transformed" by his experience in Rome: "I discovered new ways of seeing and analyzing both architecture and landscape."

Graves began his career in 1962 as a professor of architecture at Princeton University, where he taught for nearly four decades and later helped to establish the Michael Graves College at Kean University in Union Township, New Jersey, and established his own architectural firm in 1964 at Princeton, New Jersey. Graves worked as an architect in public practice designing a variety of buildings that included private residences, university buildings, hotel resorts, hospitals, retail and commercial office buildings, museums, civic buildings, and monuments. During a career that spanned nearly fifty years, Graves and his firm designed more than 350 buildings around the world, and an estimated 2,000 household products.

In 1962, after two years of studies in Rome, Graves returned to the United States and moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where he accepted a professorship at the Princeton University School of Architecture. Graves taught at Princeton for thirty nine years while simultaneously practicing architecture. He retired as the Robert Schirmer Professor of Architecture, Emeritus, in 2001. Later in his life he contributed to the founding of a new college, which bears his name at Kean University.

In his early years as an architect, Graves did designs for home renovation projects in Princeton. In 1964 he founded the architectural firm of Michael Graves & Associate in Princeton and remained in public practice there until the end of his life. After Graves's death, Kean University acquired his former home and studio in Princeton, along with two adjacent buildings.

Graves spent much of the late 1960s and early 1970s designing modernist residences. His first commission was the Hanselman House in Fort Wayne, Indiana, a design completed in 1971. The modernist structure built for $55,000 received an American Institute of Architects Honor Award in 1975. The New York Times described the home as "another of Graves's experiments in cubist‐influenced spatial manipulations" and cited the obvious influence of Le Corbusier on Graves' work. Built for friends he met in high school, the home went up for sale in 2017 for $264,888. The four bedroom residence features a Graves painted mural in the living room signed by the architect during a visit to the home in 2000. He also designed the Snyderman House in Fort Wayne (1972, destroyed by fire in 2002)
Graves also became one of the New York Five, along with Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier. This informal group of Princeton and New York City architects, also known as the Whites due to the predominant color of their architectural work, espoused a pure form of modernism characterized by clean lines and minimal ornamentation. The New York Five became the "standard bearers of a movement to elevate modernist architectural form into a serious theoretical pursuit." The Plocek Residence (1977), a private home in Warren Township, New Jersey, was among the first of his designs in this new style. The "monolithic cube" with decorated facades and colorful, oversized columns is "considered a seminal Postmodern work" and one of Graves's best known works of architecture. The celebrated but controversial municipal office also became an icon for the city of Portland and subject to an ongoing preservation debate. Although it faced demolition in 2014, the city government decided to proceed with a renovation, estimated to cost $195 million. Some architecture critics, including Paul Goldberger of The New York Times, consider the Humana Building, a skyscraper in Louisville, Kentucky, one of Graves's finest building designs. TIME magazine also claimed it was a commercial icon for the city of Louisville and one of the best buildings of the 1980s. Graves and his firm also designed several buildings for the Walt Disney Company in the postmodern style. These include the Team Disney headquarters in Burbank, California; In addition to the Swan and Dolphin hotel buildings, Graves's firm designed their original interiors, furnishings, signage, and artwork. Graves's other notable commissions for buildings that were completed in the 1990s include an expansion of the Denver Public Library (1990) and the renovation of the Detroit Institute of Arts (1990). Graves's prominence as a postmodernist architect may have reached its peak during the 1980s and in the early 1990s, but he continued to practice as an architect until his death in 2015. Later works include the O'Reilly Theater (1996) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the NCAA Hall of Champions in Indianapolis, Indiana; and 425 Fifth Avenue (2000) in New York City, among others. Graves also received recognition for his multi year renovation of his personal residence in Princeton. International projects included the Sheraton Miramar Hotel (1997) in El Gouna, Egypt, and the Hard Rock Hotel in Singapore.

In addition to his architecture, Graves became a noted designer of consumer products. His distinctive style was well known among the general public in the United States in 1980s and 1990s, when he began designing household products for major clients such as the Target Corporation, Alessi, Steuben, and The Walt Disney Company. In the early 1980s, Ettore Sottsass recruited Graves to become a member of Memphis, a postmodern design group based in Milan, Italy. Graves began designing consumer products such as furniture and home accessories. Especially notable is his "Plaza" dressing table. The kettle featured a red, bird shaped whistle at the end of the spout. It remained the company's top selling product for fifteen years. In honor of its thirtieth anniversary in 2015, Graves designed a special edition version with a dragon replacing the kettle's bird shaped whistle. In Italy in 1987, clock on display Apollodoro Gallery, seventh event The Hour of Architects, with Hans Hollei, Arata Isozaki, Ettore Sottsass, Paolo Portoghesi, paintings by Paolo Salvati, Rome. In 1997–98, when Graves designed the scaffolding used in the restoration of the Washington Monument in Washington D. C., he met Ron Johnson, a Target executive who appreciated his product designs. (The Target Corporation contributed $6 million toward restoration of the monument.) The result of their acquaintance was the formation of a business relationship between Graves and the U. S. retailer that lasted until 2012. Graves began the collaboration with Target by designing a half dozen products for the mass consumer market. His collection of housewares began selling in Target stores in January 1999. In 1998, Target Corporation commissioned Graves to design a model home to showcase the new line of housewares, but Graves went a step further. He designed "Cedar Gables," contemporary house in Minnetonka, Minnesota, complete with custom furniture, lighting, fixtures, and other unique items, making it only one of three homes he designed and furnished. By 2009, however, Graves noted that the house "doesn't have a wow factor. That gets old quickly." When the partnership with Target ended in 2012, Graves had designed more than 500 objects for the retailer. Increasingly concerned about Target's dwindling partnerships with outside designers, Graves decided to explore other relationships for marketing his consumer products. After Johnson became CEO of J. C. Penney in 2011, he and Graves reached an agreement for Graves to design products exclusively for Penney's. In 2013, Graves designed what became known as the “Hitler teapot” for department store JCPenney, which garnered controversy due to its perceived resemblance to Adolf Hitler. In addition to housewares, Graves was involved in a variety of other design projects that included sets and costumes for New York City's Joffrey Ballet; a shopping bag for Bloomingdale's department store; jewelry for Cleto Munari of Milan, Italy; vinyl flooring for Tajima, a Japanese company; and rugs for Vorwerk, a German firm. In 1994 Graves opened a small retail store named the Graves Design Store in Princeton, New Jersey, where shoppers could purchase his designs and reproductions of his artwork. At that time Graves had designed products for more than fifty manufacturers.

Graves retired as a professor of architecture at Princeton University in 2001, but remained active in his architecture and design firm. He also became an advocate for the disabled in the last decade of his life. When Graves became paralyzed from the waist down in 2003, the result of a spinal cord infection, the use of a wheelchair heightened his awareness of the needs of the disabled. After weeks of hospitalization and physical therapy, Graves adapted his home to suit his accessibility needs and resumed his architectural and design work. In addition to other types of buildings and household products, Graves designed wheelchairs, hospital furnishings, hospitals, and disabled veteran's housing. In 2014, a year before his death, Graves helped to establish and plan the Michael Graves College, which includes The School of Public Architecture at Kean University in Union Township, New Jersey. Kean University's Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies program began in 2015; its Master of Architecture program is slated to begin in 2019. As part of gift from Graves's estate, in 2016 the university acquired The Warehouse at 44 Patton Avenue in Princeton, New Jersey, Graves's former home and studio, and two adjacent buildings. The university plans to use the facility as an educational research center for its School of Public Architecture, although its main campus and its School of Public Architecture are located about forty miles away in Union, New Jersey. Graves was the father of three children, two sons and a daughter.