The Necessity for Seeing
in 1960 michael graves was awarded the American Academy in Rome’s prestigious Prix de Rome. Having just completed his graduate studies in architecture, he embarked on a Grand Tour that led to a lifelong fascination with the landscape, the culture, and the
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in 1960 mic hael graves was awarded the American Academy in Rome ’s prestigious Prix de Rome. Having just completed his graduate studies in architecture, he embarked on a Grand Tour that led to a lifelong fascination with the landscape, the culture, and the history of Italy. During his time in Rome, Graves participated in daily social rituals that had been rehearsed for hundreds of years. Meals of pasta, cheese, and Chianti around simple wooden country tables bathed in the light of Tuscany revealed to him humanistic and domestic connections between the architecture and the landscape, the sacred and the profane. He learned that certain picturesque hillsides covered with umbrella pines and poplars were not natural landscapes, but rather had been meticulously designed and cultivated by a single Italian family over centuries. Through these examples he was exposed to ideas about architecture that went well beyond his modernist upbringing. His drawings and photographs from this time focus on the connection between the architecture and the land of Italy itself—“wistful, luminous, plain, its grain and olive trees, the stones of its buildings in prodigal light.”1 Graves learned through recording his journeys, discussing what he saw with fellow travelers and scholars, and participating in Italian customs, how architecture and landscape affect our perception and connection to the richness of our surroundings, and how an architect may draw upon these lessons to develop his or her own personal design. The sketches and photographs of Italy that Graves produced during this twoyear period visually imprinted themselves on his mind. The impact of his experiences is revealed throughout the extensive body of his work, a resume that encompasses painting, graphic design, and industrial design, and an architectural portfolio that ranges from pavilions to city plans. Graves’s drawings, paintings, and photographs illustrate the architect’s process, the means of translating experiences into design. In looking through this collection of impressions we see glimpses into the mind of one of the most significant and influential architects of the twentieth century. ⁄⁄ 1
2 ⁄ ⁄ mic hael graves
* like many arc hitect s before him, Graves traveled to Italy to further his education. “No one who has not been here can have any conception of what an education in Rome is,” Goethe wrote. “One is, so to speak, reborn and one ’s former ideas seem like a child’s swaddling clothes. Here the most ordinary person becomes somebody, for his mind is enormously enlarged even if his character remains unchanged.”2 B. T. Leslie writes, “At a time in the 1960’s when, under the flag of modernism, it was fashionable to reject the cultural traditions of Western Europe, Graves came to the American Academy in Rome to study the forms and language of architecture on the Italian peninsula.”3 His home there for two years was the American Academy in Rome, established on the highest point in the city, in and around the grounds of the Villa Aurelia. In the collegiate quarters of
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