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By Tom McNichol Photograph Courtesy Alessi; Barry Johnson
Internationally renowned architect and product designer Michael Graves has lived and worked in Princeton since 1964. His many celebrated buildings include the Humana Building in Louisville, KY (named by Time magazine as one of the 10 best buildings of the decade) and the restoration of the Washington Monument.
Closer to home, Graves has designed the Newark Museum as well as the Alexander House in Princeton, a postmodern addition to a 1930s colonial-style private home. But he is best known as the designer of stylish, affordable kitchenware for Target and his signature product—the popular Alessi tea kettle, featuring a whistling bird on its spout, which became available in 1985.
In 2003, a suspected bacterial infection left Graves paralyzed from the waist down, but he is still actively involved in Michael Graves & Associates, which recently completed two projects in Princeton, and Michael Graves Design Group, which creates graphics and designs home furnishings and products. He is also professor emeritus of architecture at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1962.
Thanks to the New Jersey chapter of the American Institute of Architects, Graves has been nominated to the New Jersey Hall of Fame’s Class of 2010. As the first architect to be nominated to the Hall of Fame, established in 2008, Graves is one of 30 nominees in five categories. His competititors in the Enterprise category make for an impressive group: Mary G. Roebling, first female governor of the American Stock Exchange; David Sarnoff, father of American TV and radio; astronaut Wally Schirra; former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker; and influential chef Alice Waters.
New Jerseyans—and out-of-staters—can vote online for next year’s six Hall of Famers through November 20 at njhalloffame.org.
When people ask, ‘What do you do for a living?’ what do you
tell them?
I tell them I’m an architect.
But that doesn’t take in everything else you’ve done in product and interior design.
No, it doesn’t. I suppose I would say I’m an architect and I also have a design practice. But it kills me to have to say that.
Why is that?
I would rather it be known that architects can be—and some are—broader than that. Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe—all those people were architects, but they also had lines of furniture. In Italy, to be trained as a product designer, you have to go to architecture school. But architecture in our society, I’m sorry to say, is limited to the making of buildings. In the commercial architecture world, it’s limited to the outside of buildings.
You recently designed two projects in Princeton.
One is a very small job I’m doing for [Princeton] University—it’s essentially a big dining room and a serving room in a dining hall. It’s comfortable, lively; it engenders conversation by the way we’ve arranged tables. I didn’t make a candlelight place; I didn’t make it jokey or something that was over the top. I painted three paintings that depict the cycle of the day in a kind of archaic landscape. I’m quite pleased with it. Someone recently wrote on a student blog that they had always avoided eating in that dining hall, but now it’s hard to get a seat.
What’s the other Princeton project?
It’s a shopping center called MarketFair that’s just outside of Princeton in West Windsor Township. I’m almost embarrassed to say that the building seems so different with doing so little. It’s a new coat of paint that’s lighter and whiter, it’s a new stone floor that’s more engaging than the old red tile, it’s new furniture that I designed, and new planting. I was trying to make it more inviting by making it more of a public space. We’ve taken so much away from our towns and put it in our shopping centers. We need to put some of the town back in the shopping centers.
How did a world-renowned architect get involved with Target?
Target asked me to do an architecture project, which was to design the scaffolding for the Washington Monument. Target was paying for the renovation. It was such a hit that one of the vice presidents of Target came up to me and said, “Look, Michael, we’ve been knocking you off for 20 years, maybe you’d like designing some products for us.” And I thought that the attitude of what I did was exactly right for [Target], designing for the masses.
Did you have reservations about designing for a discount retailer like Target?
Well, places like the Bauhaus made all of their objects themselves in a shop by hand. So I was very happy to see the linkage between the Bauhaus and Target in that they make well-designed objects for the masses. I love working for Target. The demographic that Target serves may not be doctors and lawyers or the rich, but it’s for the rest of us.
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