40 Facts About Michael Graves

Michael Graves was recognized for his influence on architectural movements, including New Urbanism, New Classicism, and particularly Postmodernism.

Michael Graves was trustee of the American Academy in Rome and was the president of its Society of Fellows from 1980 to 1984.

Michael Graves received the American Prize for Architecture, the National Medal of Arts and the Driehaus Architecture Prize.

Michael Graves grew up in the city's suburbs and later credited his mother for suggesting that he become an engineer or an architect.

Michael Graves graduated from Indianapolis's Broad Ripple High School in 1952 and earned a bachelor's degree in architecture in 1958 from the University of Cincinnati.

Michael Graves earned a master's degree in architecture from Harvard University in 1959.

In 1960 Michael Graves won the American Academy in Rome's Prix de Rome and spent the next two years at the Academy in Italy.

Michael Graves was the father of three children, two sons and a daughter.

Michael Graves worked as an architect in public practice designing a variety of buildings that included private residences, university buildings, hotel resorts, hospitals, retail and commercial office buildings, museums, civic buildings, and monuments.

In 1962, after two years of studies in Rome, Michael Graves returned to the United States and moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where he had accepted a professorship at the Princeton University School of Architecture.

Michael Graves taught at Princeton for thirty-nine years while simultaneously practicing architecture.

Michael Graves retired as the Robert Schirmer Professor of Architecture, Emeritus, in 2001.

Michael Graves's firm maintained offices in Princeton, New Jersey, and in New York City, but his residence in Princeton served as his design studio, home office and library, and a place to display the many objects he collected during his world travels.

Michael Graves spent much of the late 1960s and early 1970s designing modernist residences.

The four-bedroom residence features a Michael Graves-painted mural in the living room signed by the architect during a visit to the home in 2000.

Michael Graves designed the Snyderman House in Fort Wayne.

Michael Graves became one of the New York Five, along with Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey, John Hejduk and Richard Meier.

Michael Graves began by sketching designs that had Cubist-inspired elements and strong, saturated colors.

Postmodernism allowed Michael Graves to introduce his humanist vision of classicism, as well as his sense of irony and humor.

Michael Graves designed some of his most iconic buildings in the early 1980s, including the Portland Building.

Postmodern architecture did not have a long-lasting popularity and some of Michael Graves's clients rejected his ideas.

Michael Graves received recognition for his multi-year renovation of his personal residence in Princeton.

Michael Graves began designing consumer products such as furniture and home accessories.

Around the same time, Michael Graves became associated with Alessi, a high-end Italian kitchenware manufacturer.

Michael Graves designed a sterling silver tea service for Alessi in 1982, a turning point in his career, and he was no longer known solely as an architect.

In 1985 Michael Graves designed his iconic a stainless-steel teakettle.

In honor of its thirtieth anniversary in 2015, Michael Graves designed a special edition version with a dragon replacing the kettle's bird-shaped whistle.

Michael Graves began the collaboration with Target by designing a half-dozen products for the mass-consumer market.

Michael Graves designed "Cedar Gables," contemporary house in Minnetonka, Minnesota, complete with custom furniture, lighting, fixtures, and other unique items, making it only one of three homes he designed and furnished.

Increasingly concerned about Target's dwindling partnerships with outside designers, Michael Graves decided to explore other relationships for marketing his consumer products.

Penney in 2011, he and Michael Graves reached an agreement for Michael Graves to design products exclusively for Penney's.

In 1994 Michael Graves opened a small retail store named the Michael Graves Design Store in Princeton, New Jersey, where shoppers could purchase his designs and reproductions of his artwork.

At that time Michael Graves had designed products for more than fifty manufacturers.

Michael Graves retired as a professor of architecture at Princeton University in 2001, but remained active in his architecture and design firm.

Michael Graves became an advocate for the disabled in the last decade of his life.

When Michael Graves became paralyzed from the waist down in 2003, the result of a spinal cord infection, the use of a wheelchair heightened his awareness of the needs of the disabled.

Michael Graves became a "reluctant health expert", as well as an internationally recognized advocate for accessible design.

Michael Graves died at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, on March 12,2015, at the age of 80, and is buried at Princeton Cemetery.

Michael Graves favored a "humanistic approach to architecture and urban planning" and was a major influence in late-twentieth-century architecture.

Michael Graves was among the most prolific and prominent American architects from the mid-1960s to the end of the twentieth century.