“I don’t care what people call me, labels have the negative value of making smaller boundaries for people.” ~ Michael Graves
The world lost a gifted designer last week. Michael Graves, one of the country’s most prominent architects and a principal figure in the postmodernist movement, died at the age of eighty. Graves left a design legacy of more than 350 buildings around the world, but was perhaps best known for the design of his iconic teakettle and many other everyday household items.
He trained as an architect at the University of Cincinnati and Harvard University and worked as a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome from 1960 to 1962. Upon returning to the US, he started his own practice and took a teaching position at Princeton, becoming a full professor in 1972.
Influenced by the work of Le Corbusier, Graves began his career in architecture as a designer of private houses in the abstract and austere style of orthodox Modernism. Graves was associated with the “New York Five”, a group of architects who had a common allegiance to a pure form of architectural modernism. They were also known as the “Whites”, because of their penchant for white buildings inspired by the purist forms of Le Corbusier.
By the late 1970s, however, Graves defected from modernism, rejecting it as too cool and abstract. As Graves became less concerned with the roots of Modernism, he developed a wide-ranging eclecticism which borrowed elements and and references from the past and reintroduced color and symbolism to architecture. He went on to design projects like the Humana headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky and the Portland Municipal Building in Oregon, considered seminal postmodernism works with their reliance on color and ornament.
In the 1980s Graves became a member of Memphis, the influential Postmodern design movement based in Milan. During this period he created products for the Alessi design firm, including the playful and iconic 9093 stove-top kettle. The conical stainless-steel kettle, which featured a circular handle and whistling bird on its spout, became the brand’s best-selling product that decade. Graves later went on to design more than 2,000 products for other companies like Target, Steuben and Disney.
While Graves brought quality designed products within reach of everyone, he paid a price for this utilitarian direction. But when asked by The New York Times in 2011 if he worried about injuring his reputation, he answered: “Just the opposite. It was my hope to do that.” Graves elaborated:
“I always wanted to do what Josef Hoffmann, Wiener Werkstätte and the Bauhaus wanted to do, which they never got to do because they designed in a craft mode. We have behind us all this mass production, so why not take advantage and bring the price down for everybody? It was Target who called it the “democratization of design.” I figured, if it’s going to get designed, let’s do it well. So that’s what we did, and I’m happy about it.”
Graves admitted in the Times interview that he lived with his own stuff and that his kitchen looked like Alessi and Target. Additionally, he bought his own things at Target, receiving a 10% discount.
Though paralyzed in 2003 after a spinal cord infection and confined to a wheelchair, Graves continued to work, designing houses for people with disabilities, including veterans, and became internationally recognized as an advocate of health care design.
May you rest in peace, Mr. Graves.
