Ghosts, Tricks, and Tuscan Columns: Unlocking Michael Graves’ Secret Laboratory

If a warehouse is a container of goods stored for future use, then the home Michael Graves fashioned out of a former stone depository in Princeton, New Jersey and named after its former purpose holds memories embodied in architecture waiting to be applied in future buildings.

Once used by Graves for as such a repository of ideas, the Warehouse is now owned by Kean University (where I am Visiting Professor of the Michael Graves School of Public Architecture) and is awaiting its unlocking by students, scholars, l and the architecturally curious.

On a recent, blustery spring day, Kean’s Dean, David Mohney, his wife Sara, and their curly-haired toddler walked me through the meticulously preserved building. The Warehouse is in much the same state it was when Graves, then 80 years old, died in 2015.

The paintings he was working on are still on their easels, the tubes of paint and brushes nearby. The kitchen is ready for the kind of convivial meals he enjoyed. The bed is made. The elevator the architect had installed after a rare disease rendered him a paraplegic is still there, though not currently operational.

Like all house museums (though this is not currently, and, if it is up the neighbors, never will be, an actual one), there is an eerie quality about the spaces that makes you feel that Graves’ ghost could return at any time and reclaim this time capsule.

The sense of the architect’s presence is even more extreme because the house was so obviously a place where Graves tried out his tricks, moves, and motifs. Its closest parallel and obvious model is the house Sir John Soane built and continually rebuilt for himself on London’s Lincoln’s Inn Field in London between 1792 and 1812.

There are hints that are more or less direct, such as the narrow and vertical library that recalls Soane’s basement space with the same purpose, and the abstracted classical elements that punctuate the space, framing views from one space to another or transforming a balustrade into a freestanding Tuscan column.

Soane’s and Graves’ home thus share the quality of being a site of relentless experimentation with how a designer can use forms and materials to reference, evoke, or just point to a larger, though fragmented, order.

There are columns, arches, and pediments everywhere, but usually they are isolated, abstracted, or used in places where you would not expect them. Yet, they are still present. They anchor, pivot, or focus spaces and move your eye from one room to the next.

None of these pieces are “real.” They are confections of plaster, painted and sometimes off-the-shelf moldings, and sheetrock slathered in the hues of which Graves was so fond.

My favorite little invention is the design of the columns or vertical supports between the bookcases in the library. According to Mohney, the whole Graves office (small at the time, in the early 1980s) spent a week painting PVC pipes a wood color to achieve the effect Michael Graves wanted.

All this inventive fragmentation shows up in the Warehouse’s plan, but there the existing building, which stonemasons constructing Princeton University’s neo-Gothic fantasies had used to store their material, sets the tone. Set back behind a row of houses and next to a public park, the Warehouse faces you in a stucco wash that melds its various elements and invites you in through an entrance beyond a trellised gazebo. The entrance is elaborately staged.

You come inside past a small courtyard, reorient yourself to the slightly off-center entrance to a round space whose ceiling is pierced by a skylight (glassed over when Graves had to maneuver his wheelchair around the space above) that leads you into either the living room, with the library beyond or, in the other direction, to the dining room, which is in turn is serviced by a ramble of more quotidian spaces that stretch back towards the front of the lot. Upstairs, the rooms where Graves lived have the same sense of being moments of order carved out from what was an open building and infused with geometry, shape, and stylistic references.

As such, the Warehouse is indeed not only a former storage space, but now also a former laboratory in which you can see the elements of Graves’ particular approach to architecture at work.

The overall character he sought to develop here was somewhere between a Tuscan farmhouse and a city apartment in New York, circa 1925, with an infusion of Soane and collage sensibilities. The common thread is that this is architecture that seeks to give culture, but not a closed order, to raw materials and sites.

That transformation of raw data into spaces places you, through the elements’ shape, configuration, and specific non-structural pieces, in a framework that has a history reaching to Roman times and beyond. The molding of place in time evidences itself in heavily modeled environments that compact all that history into abstracted and collaged, but still recognizable compositions.

There is an added element to these design operations, though, and that is a certain rough and elemental quality. This was not a space that Graves intended to be a showcase, except for selected friends, colleagues, and students he entertained there. Nor was it meant to show his wealth and power.

Slathered with his favorite building color, a terra cotta that he thought would connect his structures directly to the earth, it is a bit of a mess, both in terms of its appearance and its additive, functional spaces. But that very sense of stuff-ness, fullness, and fragmentation, combined with its site a block away from Graves’ office, made it the perfect base on which Graves could erect his grander designs.

My students today, including the ones studying at the School named after him, have little use for Michael Graves or his work. That is a pity, as I think he was one of the most inventive and skilled practitioners of the late 20^th century.

Like many architects, he concentrated later in his career on making large buildings in which he both had less direct connection to the client and process and could control each space with less care. Unfortunately, he is today remembered more for buildings whose budgets were inadequate to his vision (the seminal Portland Government Building) or for his later confections for companies such as Disney.

What the Graves Warehouse shows is that it is, if you are as talented as Michael Graves was, possible to create order, beauty, surprise, and a sense of home out of the roughest and simplest materials. It is a lesson we forget, as we once forgot much of the history Graves and his Postmodern colleagues sought to revive, at our peril.