Art

Follies

Gavin Stamp

Michael Graves is an American archi- tect who produces charming architec- tural drawings. He is also a cult figure whom some consider a genius and responsi- ble for changing the course of architecture. Students imitate the blue-grey, red and buff of his coloured crayon drawings as well as the simple geometrical forms of his designs. In a recent television programme entitled, irrelevantly, Kings of Infinite Space, Mr Charles Jencks, the hagiographer of Post- Modernism, compared Graves with Frank Lloyd Wright although the only significant connection seemed to be the number of wives and mistresses each architect had managed to notch up.

To an English audience, some of the claims made for Graves do seem excessive.

While a recent exhibition at the Heinz Gallery on The Language of Michael Graves showed how pretty his drawings are — whether his crayon elevations or his wobbly-Expressionist pen sketches doubts remain about the substantiality of

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his buildings. The trouble is that Graves is a typical product of a fashionable architec- tural world which, even by English stan- dards, is too much of a mutual admiration society. American architecture seems to need cult figures and the East Coast univer- sities have provided them. Graves was once part of the 'New York Five', who assiduously promoted each other at great and impenetrable length in print and occa- sionally designed highly intellectual white houses, redolent with references to Le Cor- busiheern

Then Graves became slightly more

populist and responded to that widespread public yearning for an architecture which was again decorative and symbolically com- prehensible. He went 'Post-Modern' and produced drawings of coloured buildings with exaggerated keystones, semi-circular windows and stripped columns, all combin- ed with a self-conscious perversity. So Graves might have remained: an influential, stylish draughtsman who, in the great tradi- tion of the avant-garde, had hardly built anything, if the old hard-line Modern establishment had not made him into an international celebrity by attacking him.

The occasion was the competition for the

Public Service Building in Portland, Oregon, held in 1980. Graves won, but his design might never have been built if it had not been ferociously savaged for its decorative frills and, even worse, its

sculpture, by all the local architects who had done their best to make Portland look like anywhere else. As a result, local people rather took to the design and it was built: a sort of stubby Deco skyscraper with exter- nal colour and decoration, naive in form but certainly a great improvement on curtain-walled glass boxes.

Graves was now launched on a glittering and successful career and was asked to design anything from visual arts centres to tea services. He is currently engaged in repeating the Portland formula over and over again, for skyscrapers and department stores. Unfortunately, it is all too clear that, despite the number of wives, Graves is no Frank Lloyd Wright for his buildings show little formal or stylistic development. They are also, by the Classical canons with which Graves chooses to define his work, illiterate — like so much Post-Modern Classicism'.

Of course, Graves is showing he is modern by being mannered and incorrect. It is an old game, but mannerism seems to me to have no value unless the discipline, the orthodoxy, has been mastered first. With Graves it has not been; rather, as often in American tradition, history and European architecture is used as a treasure trove of sources and references, but put together with tiresomely self-indulgent irony.

But perhaps I am too hard on Graves. Many admire him and Colin Amery, ar- chitectural correspondent of the Financial Times, chose to organise the Heinz Gallery exhibition. Mr Amery makes a suggestion that I find impressive, that Graves may be 'an American phenomenon rather like Frank Furness'. Furness was a most remarkable architect who took High Vic- torian Gothic motifs from English archi- tects like Street and played with them by ex- aggerating their scale. Graves plays analogous games but Furness, like Wright but unlike Graves, also knew how to build and understood the nature and texture of materials. Graves's buildings all look as if they are made of coloured cardboard.

Poor Michael Graves may well be the vic- tim of his own success. A distinguished exponent in the current revival of interest in architectural drawings, he should, perhaps, have kept to unbuildable buildings on paper or at least to small buildings, like houses or follies. How very pretty follies can be, on paper as well as in the countryside, can cur- rently be seen in an enchanting exhibition of Ruins and Follies at the Maclean Gallery. Here, as well, are examples of the potent influence on architects exercised by ruins. There are, of course, Piranesi's sublime interpretations of Ancient Rome and many views of Greek temples: on the Acropolis and those haunting examples at Paestum.

The most remarkable work on display is a painting by J. B. Mauzaisse entitled 'The Destruction Wrought by Time and the Mas- terpieces Left to be uncovered by Posterity'. It shows a bust of Napoleon ly- ing next to a ruined piece of architecture. Architects, like Bonaparte, were flattered to be compared with the Ancient World and

hoped that their buildings would make as good ruins as those of the Romans and Greeks. In the Soane Museum is a painting commissioned by Soane showing how his Bank of England might look to Macaulay's New Zealander gazing on the ruins of Lon- don, and Hitler asked Speer to make sure his buildings would make good ruins. I fear that will not be true of buildings by Michael Graves.