THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, September 28, 1995 TAG: 9509280036
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY TERESA ANNAS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 112 lines
MICHAEL GRAVES who speaks tonight at the Virginia Beach Center for the Arts - is at the top of the heap of American architects. He's the post-modernist poster boy, a man unembarrassed to slather his buildings in the festive hues, columns and rich ornamentation that thumbs its nose at modernism.
He's won dozens of top architecture awards, and has become a favorite designer of ``entertainment architecture'' for Disney, the Medicis of today in terms of architectural patronage.
His daring designs have brought him fame and made him a controversial figure.
Graves risked kitsch to place the seven dwarfs as pediment supports - like ancient caryatids, usually shaped like women - for his 1991 Disney corporate headquarters in California.
From 1985 to 1989, he risked the wrath of modernists, as he designed a succession of three post-modern additions to New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, considered by some leading architects as a modernist fixture that should not be touched. While no version has left the drawing table, the much-publicized episode brought on a hot national debate that intrigued even those with the slightest interest in architecture.
Like Frank Lloyd Wright, to whom he has been compared, Graves also designs furniture, rugs, lamps, even his own painted murals to go with his buildings. His whistling bird tea kettle has been a staple in home magazines interiors since he designed it in 1985.
Graves hasn't always been such a superstar.
In 1970, when Virginia Beach architect Ed Lazaron took a basic design course from Graves at Princeton University, Graves was just another professor. Sort of.
``Michael was - I don't want to say flamboyant, because we had some hippie professors, too - but he was definitely not the preppie type,'' Lazaron recalled.
Today, at age 61, Graves is silver-haired and distinguished in fine-fitting suits. In those days, however, he wore bell-bottom jeans, work shirts and ties with big flower motifs. He was very approachable, not far removed from his modest middle-class upbringing in Indianapolis in the '30s and '40s.
And he was truly infectious in his enthusiasm for design dialogue.
Graves' course transformed the Norfolk-reared Lazaron, then an anthropology major, into an architect. His buildings, including Chesapeake Central Library, have since been inspired by Graves.
``I came away with this strong sense of spontaneity and rational thought combined in design, and feeling that design is not just this absolute. That things are only done one way,'' Lazaron said.
``It was an exciting time to be in school. It was, in fact, a period of transition that was the gasping end of the International Style (of glass-and-steel modernity) and the beginning of the emergence of what came to be called post-modernism,'' Lazaron said.
Graves, then 36, was still designing within the modernist camp of Le Corbusier-inspired cubist buildings that - with jungle gym-geometric facades and the like - were more intellectual than the average doctoral dissertation.
With each new building, it seems, Graves has astounded his audience, which has grown beyond the architectural community.
In turning to post-modernism - which, in his case, is loosely defined as the suggestion or use of of classical elements like columns and caryatids in contemporary buildings - Graves was drawing partly from the early architecture that excited him while studying at the American Academy in Rome in 1960-'62.
Those two years spent looking at Italian Renaissance architecture and hanging out with art historians and scholars contributed greatly to his eventual shift.
Basically, he went from seeing architecture as abstraction to envisioning buildings in relation to people and to its surroundings. He began to look at the narrative and ritual qualities of buildings.
The change was huge.
Certain elements, like color, became very significant. In a modernist building, white, black and gray is the usual palette. Graves's signature colors grew to include terra cottas, creams and blues, used to suggest the equivalents of earth (floor) and sky (ceiling) within a building's structure.
``There are a lot of people who would accuse the post-modernist style of being cartoonish, and not really being a proper reinterpretation of classicism,'' Lazaron said.
``We see a lot of bad imitators out there who don't have a sense of proportion, grace, style and color that Michael Graves has. He has such a strong sense of space, and of the ritual of buildings in life. His buildings are graced by all these little rituals and metaphors, and sometimes you need to read the book to understand them.''
In his famous 1980 Portland Building, a municipal structure in Portland, Ore., Graves used a decorative garland motif, which conveys welcome in classical architecture.
And the Disney dwarfs signified more than whimsy: ``Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'' was the firm's first full-length animated film; like the 19-foot-tall dwarfs on Grave's facade, it became a basis on which a megacorporation was built.
``It is, in fact, a higher art,'' Lazaron said of such metaphors.
``It's Michael Graves.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color Photo]
MICHAEL GRAVES
Speaking tonight
What: A lecture by Michael Graves, a leading American architect.
Sponsored by American Institute of Architects Hampton Roads.
Where: Virginia Beach Center for the Arts, 2200 Parks Ave.
When: 6:30 tonight
How much: $30, includes pre-talk hors d'oeuvres and champagne
dessert reception after
Call: 461-2899
ARCHITECTURE
Graves placed the seven dwarfs as supports for his '91 Disney
corporate headquarters.
by CNB