Michael Graves, pioneering figure in postmodern architecture, dies at 80

Not many architects can claim to have spearheaded a major design movement. Michael Graves played a prominent role in three.

Graves, who died Thursday at 80 of natural causes at his home in Princeton, N.J., was a pioneering figure in postmodernism in the 1980s and 90s. He added historical ornament and bright color to prominent and often controversial buildings like the Portland municipal building in Oregon, the Denver Central Library, the 26-story Humana tower in Louisville, Ky., and the Disney Studios in Burbank, Calif.

As a product designer, creating chess sets, stainless-steel colanders and dustpans for Target and tea kettles for Alessi, Graves brought high-design housewares to a broad public, paving the way for the later success of Design Within Reach and Ikea and arguably setting the stage for the ascendance of new stars like Apples in-house design guru Jonathan Ive.

Late in life, after complications from a sinus infection left him in a wheelchair, Graves became a leading voice calling for reform in health care design, arguing that hospitals and medical products were not just thoughtlessly made but often soul-sapping for patients.

If there was a thread connecting that disparate work, it was a deeply felt populism, a philosophy embodied in the slogan Target attached to his products: Good design should be affordable to all.

His architecture, similarly, represented an effort to bring back all the crowd-pleasing details columns, gables, gargoyles that dour modernist architects, with their emphasis on flat roofs and functionalist dogma, had banished. Though many of his buildings had a limited, scenographic quality more effective as eye-catching billboards for innovative design ideas than as built space and havent aged well, they were always full of vitality and humor.

Graves was born in Indianapolis on July 9, 1934. After earning a degree in architecture from the University of Cincinnati in 1958, he enrolled at Harvards Graduate School of Design, a place very much still in thrall to the ideals of strict modernism. After finishing at Harvard and spending two years at the American Academy in Rome, Graves settled in New Jersey, joining the Princeton University faculty, where he would spend his entire teaching career, and opening his own practice.

Early on, Graves architecture reflected the influence of his time at Harvard. He was a member (with Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and John Hejduk) of the so-called New York Five, a collection of young architects who produced abstract designs reminiscent of the French modernist Le Corbusier.

But the group was always a loose-knit one philosophically; they first came together almost by chance, having been invited by Museum of Modern Art curator Arthur Drexler to meet in 1969 to discuss their work and contemporary design. The 1972 book Five Architects nearly cemented their reputation as a coherent group.

But only nearly. And it was Graves who broke from the pack and proved how flexible its bonds had always been by beginning to look to history and ornament as sources of explicit inspiration. In fact an important early project, the 1972 Snyderman House in Fort Wayne, Ind., was completed the same year Five Architects was published, while undermining some of its modernist principles.

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Michael Graves, pioneering figure in postmodern architecture, dies at 80