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Michael Graves with the bathtub handle he designed to help handicapped and elderly people.
Michael Graves with the bathtub handle he designed to help handicapped and elderly people. Photograph: Mel Evans/AP
Michael Graves with the bathtub handle he designed to help handicapped and elderly people. Photograph: Mel Evans/AP

Michael Graves obituary

This article is more than 9 years old

Architect and designer of postmodern buildings such as the Portland in Oregon and of the ‘whistling bird’ kettle

Michael Graves: the architect’s best buildings and objects – in pictures

He adorned kitchen kettle spouts with whistling plastic birds, built municipal office buildings with cartoonish toy-town facades, and embellished the roof of a Disney resort hotel with a pair of 28-tonne swans. The postmodern American architect Michael Graves, who has died aged 80, injected more childlike exuberance into his buildings and product designs than any of his contemporaries – and produced some of the most divisive works of the period as a result.

Credited as one of the originators of postmodernism, Graves developed a style of sampling motifs from classical architecture and blowing them up to become theatrical billboard-sized props, clothing his buildings in historical fancy-dress costumes. It was an attempt to bring back wit, humour and meaning to architecture, as a reaction against the po-faced austerity of modernism. But to some the jokes fell flat.

The Portland Building in Oregon Photograph: Alamy

His Portland Building in Oregon, completed in 1982, stands as the seminal work of the postmodern movement. It is a boxy office block clad with oversized red pilasters and blue tinted windows, topped with a gigantic keystone and a pair of projecting corbels, all perched on a monumental turquoise plinth. It was unlike anything that had gone before, taking classical elements and flattening them into appliqued decoration in a bold graphical manner. The reception was mixed and the building continues to provoke debate. Now needing $95m (£64m) worth of repairs, it was recently threatened with demolition.

“It’s not architecture, it is packaging,” declared the Italian modernist architect Pietro Belluschi, while the local Oregonian paper described it as “something designed by a third world dictator’s mistress’s art student brother”. It was bestowed with an award by the American Institute of Architects in 1983, but went on to win the accolade of “one of the most hated buildings in America” in a 2009 travel magazine. As the architectural historian Charles Jencks puts it, “with all its faults it still is the first to show that one can build with art, ornament and symbolism on a grand scale, and in a language the inhabitants understand.” They may understand it, but whether they like it is a different question. Users complain of cheap build quality, mean windows and low ceilings – faults the architect blamed on a low budget.

Born in Indianapolis to Thomas, a livestock trader, and Erma (nee Lowe), a nurse, Michael studied architecture at the University of Cincinnati and then Harvard, graduating in 1959, followed by two hugely formative years as a scholar at the American Academy in Rome. In 1962 he returned to the US and began lecturing at Princeton, where he would live and teach for the rest of his career.

Establishing his practice in 1964, he was initially associated with the New York Five (with Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey and John Hejduk), a disparate group of architects who shared an interest in the stark white abstract forms of modernism. Graves was one of the first to break rank, going on to design a series of houses that revelled in their playful historical allusions. His Snyderman House, built in 1972 in Fort Wayne, stood as a deconstructed cluster of pastel-coloured rooms, while his Plocek House, built in 1977 in New Jersey, evokes an Italian palazzo, with a missing keystone that reappears as a pavilion in the garden.

Such formal games were cranked up a notch in the Portland Building, followed by his headquarters for the healthcare company Humana in Louisville, a 27-storey office tower clad in pink granite, fronted by a gigantic pedimented loggia and topped with a pointy hat.

Each project began with exquisite crayon drawings (many of which reside in New York’s Museum of Modern Art), but some of Graves’s most ambitious schemes would always remain on paper as his style progressively went out of fashion. His 1985 plan to extend Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum in New York was one such grand plan that was derailed, in no small part due to the critic Michael Sorkin’s damning verdict. “It is the most outrageous example of postmodern scorn for the values of modernism,” he wrote, “a Babylonian pile of stonework topped with phony colonnades, a cornice and something that looks like a suburban corporate headquarters.”

Graves with his iconic kettle for Alessi Photograph: Daniel Hulshizer/AP

It was a crushing defeat for Graves to see the project cancelled; but the same year he produced what would be perhaps his most enduring design, the 9093 “whistling bird” kettle for Alessi. The kettle has since become the company’s bestseller, with more than 2m sold to date. His whimsical jokes were better received in the kitchen than at the scale of the city block: he went on to design more than 2,000 consumer products, from colanders for Target to coffee-makers for JC Penney and a vegetable brush for Marks & Spencer, bringing design to the mass market in a way his modernist Bauhaus forebears had only dreamed of.

But his populism came at a cost to his reputation among his peers. “He chose to go populist and commercial,” said his friend Eisenman. “I think you pay a price for those kinds of things.” To Graves this mattered little. When he was asked in 2011 whether he worried about injuring his reputation, he replied: “Just the opposite. It was my hope to do that.”

Complications from a severe infection in 2003 left Graves paralysed from the waist down, after which he focused his attentions on design for healthcare and disability. He said his experience had made him a “reluctant healthcare expert”, leading him to redesign everything from bedside tables to entire hospitals. His quirky designs for bath-tub handles and walking sticks were “not there to get you well,” he said, “but make you smile and think life is not as bad as that operation you had”. In 2010 he produced prototype houses for wounded soldiers in Virginia, with rooms and furniture designed around wheelchair dimensions, and he took on a role within the Obama administration to develop accessibility design guides.

Graves was married twice, in 1955 to his high-school girlfriend Gail Devine, and in 1972 to Lucy James. Both marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his companion, Minxia Lin, two sons, Adam and Michael, a daughter, Sarah, and three grandsons.

Michael Graves, architect and designer, born 9 July 1934; died 12 March 2015

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