Michael Graves: The Rome Connection

Graves's studio at the American Academy (#9)

We've never met Michael Graves, the famous architect.  But we have had a close encounter, or so it seems, looking back fifty years into the early 1960s.  We were Stanford students then, doing the current version of the European tour: undergraduates on a "junior year abroad" (actually my sophomore year), thinking that Europe would always be dirt cheap.  Our base was Florence, but they insisted on taking us to Rome, and in the fall of 1962 we got there, astonished by the Coliseum and the Forum but also confronted with the city's excursion into modernism: Pier Luigi Nervi's Palozetto dello Sport, which had recently been completed.  We had no idea what we were seeing. 

The Portland Municipal Building (1982)

And we had no idea, of course, that we had just missed Michael Graves, who had months early departed, having spent much of 1960, 1961 and early 1962 (we arrived in the fall of that year) at the American Academy in Rome and elsewhere on the continent, absorbed in his own European tour.  He was not famous then.  He had not yet designed the Portland Municipal Building--one of the founding works of "postmodern" architecture--nor the Humana Building, nor the Denver Central Library, nor dozens of other important structures, and it would be decades before he became one of the world's foremost designers of commercial products, producing designs for Alessi (teapot, 1985), Steuben, Target, Dansk, Disney (the Swan and Dolphin hotels), and Delta Faucet (I was repairing a Delta faucet this afternoon--perhaps one that had its origins as a  Graves sketch).  While in Rome, he was already thinking about product design.

Graves, sketching in Rome, 1961.  He sold some
to tourists for $50. 

No, at the time of our near-crossing in Rome, Michael Graves was mostly an intense 28-year old full of expectations and dreams, a Harvard M.A. in Architecture (1959), and good enough to win the Rome Prize at the American Academy, but not yet really an architect--not yet really anything.  I wish we had met him then, before he became, well, "Michael Graves."  We could have shared our drawings. 

A Graves sketch of the Villa Borghese, c. 1961

It is not too much to say that Michael Graves was made in Rome, transformed by that year or two (however long it was) at the American Academy and by the tour of Italy and Europe that followed.  Nothing gets written about Michael Graves that does not emphasize that formative Rome moment, and Graves has fed the myth with his own words.  In the introduction to a recent book that recounts and fixes the architect's Rome experience with his drawings, sketches, and photographs, Graves begins right there: "The extraordinary experience of two years at the American Academy in Rome in the early-1960s transformed how I looked at the world around me.  In that rich and marvelous city, I came to understand architecture as a continuum from antiquity to the present day, and thus as a language.  I discovered new ways of seeing and analyzing both architecture and landscape.  I also developed an urgent need to record what I saw and created hundreds of photographs and drawings." 

A Graves-designed school building

Enrico del Debbio building, 1931-33

The Rome drawings that fill the early pages of Brian M. Ambroziak's Michael Graves: the Grand Tour (2005) are mostly of ancient Rome--the Coliseum, the Basilica of Maxentius, the Arch of Constantine--or of Renaissance/Baroque Rome--the Aqua Paola Fountain, Santa Maria Maggiore, Villa Borghese.  He was particularly taken with the buildings and ornamentation of Francesco Borromini.  But Rome's monumental and rationalist architectures of the 20th century were there to be seen, too, and it seems to us that some of Graves's later works draw as much on these buildings--essentially, the aesthetics of the Fascist era--as they do on earlier periods.  (See comparison in photos above).   

Graves,  the Denver Public Library

By 1967 Graves had emerged from obscurity, joining Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and John Hejduk (with Philip Johnson as mentor) in The New York Five.  He was mostly a house designer in the 1970s.  1982 was a breakthrough year.  With the Humana Building in Louisville, Kentucky, the Portland Building, and two major museums, he quickly became an exemplar of the movement known as postmoderism.  He came to terms with Alessi in 1985, agreeing to design the whimsical tea kettle for 1.5% of each sale; over 2,000,000 have been sold. 

Rome transformed Graves, but that experience was iconic in a larger way, too.  By 1960, existing movements in architecture and the arts had reached a point of exhaustion.  In painting, abstract expressionists had reduced the form to an extreme of simplicity: a canvas painted in one color.  There was nothing beyond, except perhaps not to paint the canvas at all.  The rectagular glass box had done the same in architecture, showcasing a rigid and extreme modernism that suggested that the form, having been perfected, was untouchable.  They ran out of ideas in Detroit, too, desperately attaching huge, space-like fins on the new models in an awkward, failed effort to tap the future. 

Rome gave Graves--and, in the larger sense, architecture--its new direction: it would draw on the past, the collective past, on the buildings of Rome and Athens, on Egypt's pyramids, on the monumentalism of the ancients, on the towers of medieval Europe, on English furniture of the 18th century, on the fascist aesthetic, on the colors of Italy.  The past was complex and seemingly limitless and, for better or for worse, it would fuel the architectural resurgence of the late-20th century.  What Graves found in Rome was the raw material of the postmodern aesthetic experience. 

Why Graves would start thinking about designing commercial products while in Rome is less clear, but he was hardly alone in connecting the artistic and commercial.  In 1962, while Graves was wrapping up his European sojourn, Andy Warhol was having his first important solo exhibitions in Los Angeles and New York, featuring representations of Campbell's Soup cans and Coca-Cola bottles.  Graves designed products; Warhol used products to make designs.  Both understood the limits of modernism; both had a playful side; both drew on the unparalleled dynamism of American consumer culture to revitalize aesthetic forms.

There was one big difference--well, surely more than one, but one that's especially relevant here.  Warhol cared little about the past, and he had not been to Rome--at least, not that we know of.  Where Graves discovered the a glorious past that could be fashioned into the future, Warhol imagined only irrelevance.  "They call Rome 'the Eternal City,' he wrote, "because everything is old and everything is still standing.  They always say, 'Rome wasn't built in a day.'  Well, I say maybe it should have been, because the quicker you build something, the shorter a time it lasts, and the shorter a time it lasts, the sooner people have jobs again, replacing it.  Replacing it keeps people busy." 

Bill

We highly recommend Brian M. Ambroziak's lovely book, Michael Graves: Images of a Grand Tour  (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005).  Foreword by Michael Graves.

Nonsense, or Authenticity? Rome's T-shirts

For years we’ve noticed the gibberish written on shirts sold in Rome, both in the markets and regular shops.  Most of it made no sense at all.  Until recently we thought it had to do with the Asian/Chinese origin of these items; we had assumed that the content was written in small shops in obscure Szechuan towns by uneducated(or at least not English-fluent) Asians who thought they were writing correct English.  And that, indeed, may have been true years ago. 

Dianne, from the State of Washington herself,
thinks this shirt may be a "second", in part
because it was being sold in an outdoor market stall.

But today that market, we surmise, is probably as rational and structured as any other, meaning it wouldn’t be at all difficult for buyers to insist on, and receive, shirts with correct spelling and perfect English.  Also, two decades into the China boom, it is impossible to believe that there are hundreds of Chinese out there butchering the world’s dominant language--unable to spell Washington--because they don’t know any better. 

So what’s going on here?  What appear to be mistakes and errors, we think, are in fact efforts to produce a new form of authenticity.  In a world of increasing homogeneity, the random, or nearly random, juxtaposition of words, ideas, and images--even the intentional introduction of errors—results in products with a claim to the unique, even if mass-produced.  In another "sign" of authenticity, many of these garments carry a date.  Whether all this amounts to genuine progress toward the authentic we aren’t sure.  But we do note the similarity to the postmodern, particularly the collage work of Robert Rauschenberg (right) and his ilk.
More photos below.       

Bill

This jacket for a small child is one of our favorites: "DEATH FROM" is such a nice touch!

RST Top 40. #24: Rome's Signature and Europe's Largest Mosque

With some trepidation (but no doubt about its merits), we offer the Rome mosque, the largest mosque in Europe, as #24 in Rome the Second Time's Top 40. It's a magnificent structure, with some interesting controversy in its planning (why wouldn't there be, with an enormous Muslim landmark in the center of Catholicism's spiritual and administrative and, in every other way, home?).

I loved it instantly. I think Bill took some warming, including some high praise by Ingrid Rowland in a New York Review of Books article on Tiepolo where she devotes substantial coverage to the mosque's architect, Paolo Portoghesi (Bill wrote about this in his January 2 blog - here's the link to it: http://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2010/01/italy-on-surface.html).

Rather than repeat everything I said last June, I'll supply the link to the June 27, 2009 post below, and add a few new comments.

While our primary interest in the mosque is architectural, the religious issues are intriguing as well. One author claims the gorgeous, massive mosque is deserted, abandoned for other, smaller, more active mosques (http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&pagename=Zone-English-News/NWELayout&cid=1228244896427). But another argues that the imam at the main Rome mosque is preaching jihad (http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/articolo/6953?eng=y). Both articles are linked here. You be the judge.

In any event, a visit is definitely in our Top 40. Just remember visiting hours for non-Muslims are limited - Wednesday and Saturday 9-11:30; women MUST wear head coverings. And, Fridays are the most active days, including the market outside the mosque gates - for everyone.

Here's the link to the earlier post: http://romethesecondtime.blogspot.com/2009/06/europes-largest-mosque-in-rome.html, which includes directions at the end and many more photos.

The trepidation I mentioned at the beginning derives from the traffic our blog gets from surfers who seem highly interested in "mosque", but not so much in Rome. We're not exactly anxious to set them off again! But we can't fail to put this wonderful 20th-century architectural statement in Rome the Second Time's Top 40.

Dianne

Europe's largest mosque - in Rome

The principal mosque in Rome is a world apart from the rest of this very Catholic city. Its postmodern decor is reserved; it has wide open spaces—corridors in the open air--and repetitious designs; it’s set in a green space divorced from any other city structures. After all the baroque churches of Rome, even my favorites by Borromini (who also loved repetition built into the architecture of his churches - I think he would have loved this building complex), I find the mosque beautiful and serene, an almost ethereal structure. Bill says it borders on boring (maybe all that Renaissance architecture is getting in his blood).

We both recommend a visit – Wednesday and Saturday 9:30-11 a.m. only, and of course then it is devoid of worshippers, which gives it an eerily empty feeling. (Directions at the end of this post.)

Women: be sure to wear something that covers your arms, no shorts, and you’ll need a scarf to cover your head. I was alert enough to wear appropriate clothing, but had no idea about the scarf and was lucky enough to borrow one from another visitor. Only a few visitors – you can wander around the mosque’s many separate sections on your own, and a couple group tours (all in Italian) were in evidence on a recent Wednesday morning.

It’s something of a miracle that the mosque, the largest in Europe, stands in Rome at all. It took the blessing of Pope John Paul II for it to be built. Controversy resulted in a minaret slightly less tall than St. Peter’s dome (39 meters (128 feet) vs. St. Peter’s 40 (130 feet), but the mosque is built in a very low area of Rome, so the minaret and main building are hardly visible from any distance, and no real threat to the imposing St. Peter’s dome, not too far away. The architectural competition was won by Paolo Portoghesi (with his then partner Vittorio Gigliotti and Iraqi architect Sami Mousawi) in 1976 and the building opened in 1995, funded mainly by Saudi money.

The mosque complex is nestled in a park-like area at the base of the ritzy Parioli district and very near a vast expanse of sports complexes along Acqua Acetosa (literally "vinegary water," but to the Italians that means very good water, a place Goethe liked to visit as well). And speaking of water, there wasn't much in evidence at the mosque. Like many other Rome monuments, the water supposed to be coursing down the main steps was not, and appeared not to have been running for some time.

A bonus: outside the mosque a large food stand was set up with a Muslim man and woman selling all types of prepared food. Of course, we went away with a large box of pistachio and honey-based desserts. A large market operates outside the mosque on Friday mornings, but you can’t visit on Fridays.

There is surprisingly little written on the mosque. See the following site for detailed architectural information: http://www.archnet.org/library/sites/one-site.jsp?site_id=1074 or, if you're lucky, find Frederika Randall's 1995 Wall Street Journal article. The city of Rome has some information in a badly - even humorously - translated website (the architects aren't Portuguese; one of the last names is Portoghese) at http://en.turismoroma.it/scoprire_roma/roma_religiosa/la_moschea Ingrid Rowland, writing about Palladio describes the elegance of the mosque in her New York Review of Books piece, covered by Bill in a later post.

Directions: from the Rome center: take the train just outside Piazza del Popolo (Metro A from Termini to Flaminio/Popolo) to the Campo Sportivi stop (you can use your same metro ticket – but this is the train, not the metro; the station is outside, north of Piazza del Popolo, on the side of Villa Borghese), and head back towards the city, towards the minaret, which you can see from there.

Dianne - and see our RST Top 40 piece on this signature mosque. For a bit more on Rome's ethnic presence, see a couple posts on Romanians (the gladiator controversy and a newsstand , the Pigneto neighborhood, Chinese (and other) stores near Piazza Vittorio, and some immigration controversy.  Oh, yes, and do eat a kebab.