Michael Graves Biography, Buildings and Best Books

Michael Graves (1934-2015) was an American architect, designer and teacher and one of the leading figures of postmodern architecture. After early work as one of the New York Five, he turned to colourful, classically inspired buildings such as the Portland Building and the Humana Building, and his designs for Alessi and Target brought architecture into millions of homes.

Indianapolis, Harvard and Rome

Graves was born in Indianapolis in 1934. He studied architecture at the University of Cincinnati and at Harvard, and won the Rome Prize, spending 1960 to 1962 at the American Academy in Rome. In 1962 he began teaching at Princeton University, where he taught for almost forty years.

From the New York Five to postmodernism

His early houses in white, Corbusian forms made him one of the New York Five with Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier. In the late 1970s he turned to colour, mass and classical reference. The Portland Building in Oregon (1982) became the emblem of postmodern architecture, followed by the Humana Building in Louisville (1985) and buildings for Disney.

Design for everyday life

His whistling bird kettle for Alessi (1985) became a design classic, and from 1999 his collaboration with Target made his products widely available. After an illness left him paralysed in 2003, he became an advocate for better healthcare design. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1999 and the AIA Gold Medal in 2001, and died in Princeton in 2015.