GROUNDED

Architect Francisco Sanin opened the recent symposium Past as Prologue, which honored the fifty-year career of Michael Graves, with an incisive and touching lecture. He highlighted the moment in the mid-1960’s when Graves began working as an architect, describing the avant garde thinking that gripped the schools, the radical politics that swept the culture, and the conceptual projects that were being published in architecture journals.

The images of Graves’ paintings that Sanin showed seem alive with these ideals. They are elegant and audacious: flat Mediterranean landscapes rendered in sunburnt hues and inhabited by still streams, rows of cypress trees, and a variety small freestanding structures, all of which are rendered in platonic geometric forms. The paintings are, presenter Adelle Chatfield-Taylor later commented, “faint landscapes,” with a delicate, empty feeling. They are mapped only lightly, and left open to dream, desire, and imagination.

The influence of Corot, Cezanne, deChirico and Morandi are all apparent. But what’s unique about these paintings is the charged presence of the buildings within the landscape. Each one is an architectural cipher – with its own geometry and syntax – as well a physical structure – a primitive hut. Each one is its own character. Sanin described Graves’ understandings of “the city as a series of fragments,” and of “building as composite.” Even more than his best-know buildings, Graves’ paintings make these ideas apparent. And they show a spatial and narrative complexity that’s not always apparent in his architecture.

Image courtesy of Michael Graves.

January 03, 2015 by Nalina Moses

In 1985 architect Michael Graves designed a flat-bottomed stainless steel teapot for Alessi, with a powder blue plastic handle and a sweet, red, bird-shaped stopper. The design is handsome, whimsical, and entirely functional. The teapot is one of those objects that seems both indelibly of its time – a postmodern icon – and timeless – as if it has been around, in our imaginations and in our homes, forever.

It seemed special then that an architect was designing a teapot that someone could go into a department store and buy. That same object, I think, would not have the same power now. Because consumers are more design-savvy, less awed by the status of an architect-designed object (or an architect-designed building, for that matter), and also because retailers like IKEA and Target consistently offer high quality design at low prices. The relationship between retail and architecture, a fascinating, symbiotic one, is something I explored recently in AIArchitect. The only thing for certain is that the entanglement of these two spheres is strengthening a popular design culture, which is good for everyone involved.