Michael Graves is a leading twentieth-century architect and designer whose drawings, buildings, and products are notable for their manipulation of archetypal forms into highly abstract, figurative compositions. He is especially interested in responding to the scenes and practices of everyday life with designs that can be universally understood while responding to the site, program, and context with a degree of sensitivity that has often eluded his peers.

One particular event, "New York Eve," (along with Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk, and Richard Meier), gained recognition in his career at a relatively early age through a meeting of the Conference of Architects for the Study of the Environment (CASE) held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1969. The work exhibited by these five architects at this meeting led to the publication of a seminal book, "Five Architects" (1972). Immortalized as the progeny of "The White Gods" (Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) in Tom Wolfe's "From Bauhaus to Our House" (1981), these five were linked by a common interest in both reviving and reinterpreting the forms, typically painted white, of the modernist architects Le Corbusier and Giuseppe Terragni. This deliberate focus on form constituted a radical break from the contemporary preoccupation with technology as the guiding force behind modern architecture. Graves, however, is the one member of the group whose work introduced figural form and color to this monochromy: a wavy shape painted blue made reference to the sky while a terra-cotta rail suggested a closeness to the earth.

Along with his penchant for using color to refer to the natural environment, an interest in Cubist painting led Graves to concentrate on the design of surfaces and elevations, an approach that had all but disappeared with the Modernist movement. Introducing classical motifs in an abstract, collage-like manner, with a variable palette, Graves established a new identity for himself that was much more painterly, based on the history of architecture, and strongly concerned with the relationship between building and nature.

While in Italy in 1978, Graves became increasingly preoccupied with the rustic simplicity of the Mediterranean landscape—its topography and colors, vernacular barns, and farmhouses. It was during this second stay in Italy that Graves developed an even keener appreciation of Classical and Renaissance architecture that he would apply to his own work in highly original ways.

In 1980, Graves achieved instant international fame with his winning entry for the competition to design a new civic building for the city of Portland, Oregon (Portland Public Services Building). Forsaking the neutral glass curtain wall of late modernism in favor of a colorful cloak of cladding that reintroduced the hierarchical composition of classical buildings, he brought a new and unexpected image to the otherwise ubiquitous glass box of the American city.

Following this tour de force, an avalanche of highly visible commissions poured into the Graves atelier, including the Humana Corporate Headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky (1982), the highly controversial unbuilt schemes for an extension to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (1985-87), the Dolphin and Swan Hotels at Disney World in Orlando, Florida (1987), and the Disney Corporate Headquarters in Burbank, California (1986). All of these projects employed a similar colossal scale in their design while addressing the salient features of their locations. The Humana Building defines the Louisville skyline with an enormous bow-front sky porch overlooking the city and the Mississippi River while its base responds to its mid-rise neighbors. The Whitney proposals made Marcel Breuer's 1966 building just one element of a much bigger three-part composition. The Denver Central Library in Colorado (1990) has enjoyed a great deal of visibility and success as well, marking the skyline of the city with a giant crown of copper-clad truss work.

More recently, Graves' design for the scaffolding of the Washington Monument Restoration in Washington, D.C. (1999) afforded him the opportunity to distill his ideas into a single iconic gesture: revealing the essence of the building through a magnification of scale and representation so that it can be read from a great distance for what it is—simple and powerful stone coursing. Graves continues to test his own knowledge of architecture and design through teaching and working closely with his associates, many of whom are former students. By adroitly synthesizing the programmatic logic and figuration of historically-based architecture with the compositional devices of abstraction and scale variation associated with modernism, Graves has established himself as a major figure in twentieth-century architecture.

CHRISTIAN ZAPATKA

Sennott R.S. Encyclopedia of twentieth century architecture, Vol.2 (G-O).  Fitzroy Dearborn., 2005.