The Re-Education of Michael Graves

For most of my life I have had a love-hate relationship with architecture and architects. It has generally been my experience that the making of physical spaces to welcome people in wheelchairs has ranked on the low end of the scale of importance for most architects, down there with selecting the paint for a stairwell. Accessibility is fine for ugly strip malls in Texas but somehow eludes the stair-encrusted Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan. Universal design seems like more of an architectural afterthought than a central tenet of building, even today. So upon visiting the personal domain of a world-renowned architect—especially one who reveres Le Corbusier’s “expressive” spiral staircases and “five points” zealotry about roof gardens and suspended entrances—ease of access is not my expectation.

I had last seen Michael Graves in early 2003, when we shared a stage at Manhattan’s Javits Center as part of a panel on innovation in retailing. Graves, David Rockwell, and I took turns speaking about “branding” or some such fashionably urgent bullshit that has long ago faded from memory. Graves, I remember vividly, was athletically trim in hipster black and slightly wizened in a ­handsome, meticulously tailored way. He was soft-­spoken but acid-tongued about the state of design. I clearly recall that I was the only one of the three of us who used a wheelchair.

Much has changed in Graves’s life since that encounter. For one thing, we both use wheelchairs now. Shortly after our appearance at the Javits Center a virus destroyed nerves in his spinal cord, bringing on paralysis from his midchest down. In a quirky coincidence he and I were paralyzed at virtually the same level—he from a disease three years ago and I from a car accident 30 years ago. So as I steer my Audi sedan into the gravel parking lot of Graves’s impressive terra-cotta home in Princeton, New Jersey, I look for telltale signs of retrofitting, door widening, and makeshift ramps. There are none. These outward details of accessibility—items associated with the 16-year-old Americans with Disabilities Act, which critics have famously cited as a scourge of modern architecture—are invisible if they’re present at all. Perhaps, I think, some architect had figured out a way to live with the ADA.

As I remove the disassembled titanium wheelchair from my car’s passenger seat, where it was stowed for driving, and begin to snap the quick-release wheels back on, two people rush into the parking lot transfixed by what I’m doing. “Michael is going to want a videotape of this,” Karen Nichols says, introducing herself. A principal of Michael Graves & Associates (MGA), she absorbs every detail of my transfer from car to chair and then carefully watches me roll in my chair to the house. “We’ve been trying to gather data about how ­disabled people solve physical problems. We’ve learned that the only way is to just pay attention to see precisely how people use their tools for getting around.” This is a degree of interest in my physical details that I had rarely seen from doctors, let alone designers.

I observe that Graves’s house is, apparently, accessible. It was built at ground level with wide doors and no stairs. I ask Nichols how long Graves has lived here. “Michael’s been here forever,” she says. “The amazing thing is how little needed to be done to make the house work for him.” Inside I roll effortlessly past furniture that exudes comfort and shelves packed with well-loved books and art pieces. Flat, straight, spacious corridors connect wide, sedate rooms appointed with ornate colorful tiles and intriguing arrangements of household objects, some sculptural, some more whimsical, such as a Bauhaus-looking chess set. A newly constructed elevator is similarly appointed. It opens onto a second floor flooded with natural light and framed by solid classical doorways. The numerous skylights and many levels of overhead space give the impression that there’s no ceiling at all.

When I visit Graves again one steamy morning last summer, he is confined to his bed due to a prolonged bedsore, under strict medical orders to heal it by staying down and out of his wheelchair, so he insists that we speak in his room. A number of chairs are set up for his designers to join what will be a long meandering conversation about design, disability, and one of Graves’s favorite subjects: America’s obsession with originality for its own sake and transitory fashion over beauty. The man whose sparkling eyes greet me from the large hospital bed, I discover, is much younger than me. After all, in wheelchair years Graves is 27 my junior, and it shows.

Physically, however, he seems frailer than the last time I saw him. His voice wavers at first; but he’s bursting with curiosity about me and my chair, brimming with invective about the lack of accessibility in the world and the dreadful state of design for people with disabilities—and full of plans to fix it all tomorrow. It’s a feeling of mission and outrage I recall from my own early days as a paraplegic: Graves, the architect, is the wide-eyed idealist about what might be done to improve the world for the disabled, while the visiting journalist in the wheelchair is the curmudgeonly skeptic, jaded from the many times in the last three decades that architecture and design has said, “Sorry, no access here.”

“People who become disabled have to radically redesign their outlook about the physical world,” Graves says, remembering the first days after he was out of danger and learning to live with paralysis. “They redesign their sense of privacy and their sense of independence. Yet in the products they have to use, design has abandoned them.”

Three years after the illness that changed him forever, Graves and his team are hard at work on a line of products that fuse one-dimensional medical utility with style, multifunctional elegance, and beauty. The product line (eventually to number in the hundreds) from the Michael Graves Design Group is called Michael Graves Solutions. Nearly a decade ago at Target, Graves leveraged brand identity into a loyal, lucrative customer base that sought out his products with the expectation of higher quality and smart design. Much the same trajectory is anticipated with Solutions. It begins as an exercise in branding, with an ambitious end point of reconfiguring medical devices that in many cases have remained static for decades.

The first products include heating pads and simple shower seats for the mobility impaired. They experiment with unifying colors and styling, and add some important improvements. Graves anticipates that Solutions eventually will have its design stamp on ­everything from walking canes to complicated wheelchairs. “I’m looking forward to doing a chair,” Graves says with the gusto of someone designing a new sports car for Maserati. Though its roots are clearly in the designer’s recent health setbacks, Solutions represents a fusion of ideas that Graves has lived throughout his career. When I clumsily suggest that in my experience most architects care as much about universal design for people with disabilities as they do about choosing doorknobs, Graves blurts out impatiently, “But I love doorknobs. I’ve done doorknobs in almost every one of my buildings. I always thought that was the job of architects to do like Le Corbusier and Saarinen—design rooms and the objects that went in them. I discovered it wasn’t quite like that.”

Graves has always combined what some call the ornamental with the design of spaces, much to the chagrin of critics, who often see his work as decorative compared to the stark geometric majesty of Richard Meier or aeronautic chaos of Frank Gehry. Despite his critical ups and downs, Graves has maintained a distinctive identity and a fabulously successful business. He has been an evangelist for beauty and humor in product design, as in his famous silver conical Alessi teapot as well as his buildings all over the world. MGA’s people-oriented spaces anoint Disney World in Orlando and Disney headquarters in Burbank. The award-winning Humana Building, in Louisville; the Houston branch of the Federal Reserve Bank; and the Ministry of Health, Welfare, and Sport, in The Hague, were all seen as triumphs of distinctive style when they were built but now seem more muted and integrated with their surroundings in this gilded architectural age of the Bilbao effect. Graves bemoans the agony of modern architecture’s need to shout above the tonality of an existing skyline and demand individual attention to the exclusion of the streetscape. “People want signature buildings to go with their signature lives filled with touristy snapshots and spectacle,” he says. “The shared sense of space and the rituals of simply living well are lost. Architecture is no longer about rooms where people live. It’s about the spaces where buildings stand.”

Graves’s initiation into the medical products world was swift. It began the moment he was in the hospital. He likes to tell the story about how during the worst days of pain and uncertainty he pleaded to anyone who would listen not to let him die amid so much ugliness. After a lifetime of seeking beauty in everything he designed and obsessively making sure every detail in his physical space was selected to be purposeful and beautiful, he was suddenly trapped in a world of ­mundane medical objects. “Everything was ugly,” he says. “Nothing was designed. It seemed as though the makers of these objects never had to use them. There was no color, no style; nothing about any of the objects said that a human had made them. It was outrageous.” Graves said he once had his doctor come into his hospital bathroom, where he was trying to shave from his wheelchair: “ ‘Who designed these bathrooms?’ I asked him. He said, ‘Experts.’ I said, ‘Oh, really,’ and I had him sit down and look at himself in the mirror, which was too high, and then turn on the water, which was out of reach. It took him two seconds to get it.”

Graves’s health problems have had little impact on his diverse businesses. One of his best years was 2004, the year after his illness, when he had $800 million worth of projects under contract. There’s a special enthusiasm for this medical line, to be manufactured by Drive Medical Design & Manufacturing, of Port Washington, New York. Graves and designer David Peschel demonstrate how simple additions to standard safety items transform and humanize them without increasing costs. “Here we can make a soft tub-rail cover with a pocket molded into its surface, and it becomes a place for a cell phone in case someone needs to call for help,” Peschel says. “A few strategic grips and the cover becomes a much safer aid for transferring from chair to bath.” All of these improvements were developed from careful observation of people using existing devices. “I can’t wait to take notes on how you load your chair back into your car,” he says to me. Watching people lose the lock button on telescoping walker legs inspired a simple redesign of the legs of a bath seat—making the telescoping aluminum tube elliptical rather than circular so they can’t drift out of alignment. “See, you never lose the lock button; it’s always right in line,” Peschel says, snapping the tube in and out in a single efficient move.

Tremendous effort has been made in the few prototypes to standardize color and function. “This orange here says adjustability on all of our products,” Peschel says, pointing to a locking pin on an adjustable tub rail. “The shades of blue indicate our brand and also show the user that some care was taken in making these.” He demonstrates an ergonomically designed handheld shower with snap-on brushes in two shades of the Graves signature blue. Peschel believes the medical field has been so neglected by design that it is a wide-open opportunity for a brand like Michael Graves Solutions to project health, functionality, independence, and beauty. Still in development are prototypes for walkers and a Rollator, both of which contain design improvements gleaned from stroller advancements, Japanese rolling shopping carts, and state-of-the-art caster technology. All have Graves’s human and playful rules-be-damned quality. Something about being a part of this community of users has freed him to be utterly unself-conscious about his identity as an iconoclast.

“We’re changing the rules here, period. I want people to look at these objects and immediately get a message,” Graves says, after pointing critically to a rubber grip end of a new folding walking cane to indicate that it still looks too institutional. “The message I want is, ‘Made by us for us.’” He points to his own chest.

Graves is certainly one of “us,” and I am grateful to have him on my team; however, any disabled person might ultimately prefer to have his former life restored. Graves has said that he would like to walk again, if only to play golf like he used to. But three years after the onset of his paralysis he is going to make the best of what he can do, and that includes using design, as he always has, to make things better. Graves’s passion reminds me of my own frustrations over badly designed wheelchairs and other tools when I was first injured decades ago. I made plenty of prototypes and improvised improvements. Some worked; some didn’t. Most disabled people have closets full of their own solutions to bad design as well as failed devices that were too much trouble to use and so were tossed aside. Graves is determined that his solutions not end up in any closet unless he designs them explicitly to go there.

He says it all comes back to the choice of whether to make something beautiful or to tolerate something ugly. Allowing something to be simply ugly leads to permitting something that’s not functional, that doesn’t work right, that can be unsafe. “It’s all the same,” he says. “It all begins with thinking about beauty. Look around you: people can tolerate a lot of bad design,” he says with a twinkling smile to his staff, who have heard it all before. “I can’t tolerate any of it, of course. And I won’t.”