Michael Graves by Ian Volner

Author:Ian Volner [Volner, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press
Published: 2018-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

Axonometric drawing of the Crooks House, 1976

Steven Harris worked on the house’s design, and, as he put it, Crooks marked “a transition”: the project found Michael midshift between “all these ideas of diptychs, flips, references to Juan Gris” on the one hand and on the other, his “more figurative work.” The grandiose fireplace, conceived in 1978, shows the extraordinary speed with which Michael’s practice was changing during the project’s rather lengthy lifespan.29 Running, as many of Michael’s schemes did, more than slightly over budget, Crooks was subject to constant changes, though in the end it was doomed not by cost but by a local property ordinance that made the area less attractive to development.

Development, in fact, was slowing all across America, as the economic downturn of the 1970s dragged on. What had been a general uptick in the volume of work coming into the office turned into another dry spell, and Crooks remained for some time one of Michael’s few still-active commissions. He produced countless sketches and resketches of it, imagining different configurations of the exterior patina and different perspectives of its interior spaces, where the approaches to its tomblike fireplace, set in the middle of the living room, terminated all the multifaceted confusion of the design in a single, monumental vision.

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