The Unstoppable Genius of Michael Graves

By: Louise Sloan | Source: NRTA Live & Learn | February 17, 2006

by Louise Sloan

Architect, designer, and professor Michael Graves, 71, has won enough laurels for several lifetimes—160 awards and 11 honorary doctorates, among others—but he won't rest on them. He's too busy taking on new challenges and learning new things, like how to engineer a public fountain to adjust to wind speed so passersby don't get soaked on a blustery day or how to add an elevator to his Princeton home without spoiling its villa-like style. He is a big thinker who masters the details: "We want to design the house and everything in it."

"Learning is an essential part of the creative process," Graves told NRTA Live & Learn recently. "There is no 'right way' to do something, so design is an ongoing exploration of possibilities."

Intertwined Careers. Professor at Princeton for nearly 40 years, Graves is often credited with moving American architectural thought from abstract modernism to postmodernism. Go to the library, and you'll find a stack of books on him and his work. But this venerated designer, who in 2001 won the highest award the American Institute of Architects can bestow on an individual, is perhaps best known for his teakettles and toilet brushes, available at your local Target store. Contradictory? Not to Graves.

Graves's interest in lowly objects has a rather high-falutin history. After he got his master's in architecture from Harvard, Graves won the prestigious Rome Prize, which allowed him to study in Italy. "When I lived in Rome, I was struck by the value that Europeans ascribe to good design," he explains. "Design sensibility was widespread and an expected component of the quality of one's life. When I returned home, I decided that one of my career goals was to make good design accessible to the widest audience. Frankly," Graves adds, "it takes as much design energy to design an inexpensive object as an expensive one."

Entering a Medicalized World. In 2003, Graves faced a challenge of a different nature. An untreated sinus infection turned into a spinal infection, which left him paralyzed from the waist down.

Ever the designer, he says that as he lay, critically ill and in terrible pain, on a stretcher in a New Jersey hospital's ambulance bay waiting to be transferred to New York, he had but one thought: "I do not want to die here, because it's so ugly."

He lived, but his paralysis thrust him into a world of more ugliness and bad design. It wasn't just the hospital rooms that had sinks and light switches he couldn't reach from his wheelchair. It was the hideous but necessary medical equipment: bath benches, commodes, walkers, and the dreaded wheelchair itself, bulky and ugly.

"As a designer, I find it visually painful and demoralizing to use poorly designed equipment that is supposed to aid mobility but is ugly and often not completely functional," Graves says. He has too much real-world market clout to be dismissed as an ivory-tower thinker.

Tar-jay Teapot. For Target, the upscale competitor to Wal-Mart, Michael Graves has designed a line of household products, eventually numbering in the hundreds, that has been a huge commercial success. In 2004, the business magazine Fast Company described Graves as having "revolutionized product design." His touch is called witty, playful, comforting, always very human.

Of course, Graves would like nothing better than to walk again—and he's working with a specialist who believes that may be possible, with advances in treatment. Meanwhile, he's taking his physical challenges as another opportunity to learn—about design, and about life. He mentions his new nurse as an inspiration. "Nothing seems to throw her," he says. "She's such an extraordinary role model that giving in to the pain would be like letting her down." He adds: "I think it's terribly important, especially for those of us who are teachers, to stay open-minded about learning from others."

Graves says his private practice keeps him more than busy (his two firms, Michael Graves & Associates and Graves Design, employ more than 100 people and take on 25 to 30 new buildings and 250-odd products every year). He loved his years at Princeton, but says of his recent retirement, "I don't really miss teaching since I'm still always learning. In the office design studios I work with the younger staff to encourage them to develop their own critical ways of thinking."

Graves is now back at work full time and is bringing his deeper understanding of accessibility issues to projects like the St. Coletta School in Washington, DC, that's to open this year for 260 children with various disabilities. He's also working on a line of home medical equipment for mobility and bath safety—taking particular interest in making these products universal in appeal. For example, "We are working on concepts for handheld showerheads with brushes and extendable handles to make it easier for wheelchair-bound people to shower on their own," he says. "But I think these devices would also have far wider application, whether washing yourself, your child, or even your Labrador retriever!"

About the Author

Louise Sloan regularly writes about health and lifestyle issues.

This article originally appeared in NRTA Live & Learn, Winter, 2006.