Author Q & A Ian Volner, author of Michael Graves: Design for Life
A conversation with Ian Volner author of Michael Graves: Design for Life
ISBN: 978-1-61689-563-1 6.5 X 9.5 IN / 304 PP / 100 COLOR AND B+W PHOTOGRAPHS $30.00 / HARDCOVER PUBLICATION DATE: OCTOBER 24, 2017
You open your book with Michael’s illness. What was behind that decision? Partially that’s plain old reader-bait: the account of Michael’s illness is so gripping that it helps draw non-architecture people into what’s otherwise a Ian Volner, New York, New York very architecture-y book, and it adds some personal stakes for everything that follows by putting front and center a person undergoing a tremendous ordeal. But from the architectural perspective, it’s also the key inflection point in my whole thesis, which is the most basic question a biography of a designer can ask: “What kind of a designer was this person really, and why was he important?” My case is that Michael was a different kind of architect than a lot of people thought, and his response to his illness revealed that. That’s the moment that alters the way he practiced thereafter, as well as the way his earlier career can be read, and it recasts him as a critical foil to what’s been going on in the built environment in our time. So I wanted it right there in the first chapter.
How did Michael, despite having few creative outlets as a child, and little or no encouragement, gravitate toward architecture? He really wasn’t good at much of anything (or at any rate felt himself not to be good at anything) except drawing, which he could do so much better than anyone else. And in addition to his powerful visual imagination, he was, as an individual, so eager to please and be liked that that facility seemed like the only option he really had. Architecture, at first, was just the mold into which he poured that talent.
For more information, please contact Wes Seeley [email protected] t: 518 671 6100 ext. 314
Princeton Architectural Press | 202 Warren Street | Hudson, New York 12534 | www.papress.com Author Q & A Ian Volner, author of Michael Graves: Design for Life
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How did Michael’s time at the University of Cincinnati and at Harvard shape his career? Cincinnati was formative less for the program than for Michael’s mentor there, an architect called Ray Roush, who taught him all the basic nuts and bolts of architecture. Harvard... well, Michael hated it. But, truth be told, he learned a lot there, too, especially about the architecture of Le Corbusier, which is how he ultimately found his way into an architecture of his own. Of course, he would also rebel against everything he’d learned at both schools, so in a way they’re most important for teaching him what he didn’t want to do!
How did his time in Europe in the early 1960s affect his view of the architecture scene in the U.S? It was a revelation. As he saw it, the richness of architectural history on the continent simply made mincemeat out of American Modernism in terms of visual interest, capacity for meaning, etc. He could never take most architecture back home seriously after that, and he set about trying to change it. Portland Public Service Building, Portland, Oregon How did Michael get into teaching, and what did he get out of it? On a personal level, as someone who very much needed people -- who found profound validation in others’ approval -- the classroom was a great space for Michael, a place where he could hold court and influence people and, occasionally, play demagogue a bit. But there was more to it than that. Michael’s conviction that architecture needed to be made more intellectual, less banal, naturally led him into the academy, where he could elaborate and explore ideas in a receptive environment. Of course, as a practical necessity, it was essential at the beginning that he also get paid while he did all this, so that was an added perk.
How did the reaction to the Portland Building alter the course of Michael’s career? It made him very, very famous. And infamous. It managed to beat Philip Johnson’s AT&T to completion, thus becoming the first PoMo public The Target toaster building in America, and it completely upended people’s expectations of what a big office tower could be. And it led to a stampede of Postmodernist buildings in the decade-plus that followed, to the point that the style became the norm for new buildings in American cities well into the 21st century.
For more information, please contact Wes Seeley [email protected] t: 518 671 6100 ext. 314
Princeton Architectural Press | 202 Warren Street | Hudson, New York 12534 | www.papress.com Author Q & A Ian Volner, author of Michael Graves: Design for Life
(page 3 of 3)
How does one go from creating buildings to creating teakettles and why does it make perfect sense in Michael’s case (if you think it does)? In part, I think Michael never lost touch with Modernism and its ambition to improve all aspects of material life. And then of course -- because he was a down-home Midwestern boy; because he always longed for people’s approval; and because he was genuinely funny, and never believed in taking life too seriously -- he didn’t think making teakettles was any kind of fall from grace, or that architects were these priestly persons who should never debase themselves by designing everyday objects for everyday people.
With Michael’s unexpected passing, how did you decide to turn the book from a memoir to a critical biography? This was what you might call a joint decision. I very much wanted to press forward: given the interviews and editing we’d already done, it would have been a shame to let it all go to waste, and there still seemed such an important untold story here. But Princeton Architectural Press was just as eager, as was Graves’s estate and his surviving firm partners, and it was everyone pulling together that allowed us to finish the project.
What was gained or lost in the transition? You do lose some of the sense of the individual, their outlook and voice. On the other hand, there’s a much bigger story it would have been difficult to tell in the first person -- the story of architecture in the 20th century as seen Michael by the kitchen door of the Warehouse, from many different perspectives, not just Michael’s own. Princeton, N.J., 1981 What is Michael’s lasting impact on design for the disabled? The products for Stryker certainly top the list, but I think there’s a larger point. Michael was the most famous designer ever who was himself in a wheelchair. At exactly the point after the turn of this century when architects were beginning to rethink the way new building technologies were being used, Michael was in a unique position to argue that cutting-edge materials and techniques shouldn’t just be ends in themselves. He was able to serve as a living example of a moral imperative for what design could and should do -- an imperative that, ironically, he’d always tried to obey, but that had too often been obscured from view both by his fame and his own missteps.
For more information, please contact Wes Seeley [email protected] t: 518 671 6100 ext. 314
Princeton Architectural Press | 202 Warren Street | Hudson, New York 12534 | www.papress.com