Michael Graves, hailed by a New York Times critic as “truly the most original voice American architecture has produced in some time,” discussed his illustrious career in architecture in a special guest lecture, “The Grand Tour,” Dec. 3 at the Texas A&M College of Architecture.
Graves, who designed the university’s new George P. Mitchell Physics Building on University Avenue, spoke at the Langford Architecture Center’s Preston Geren Auditorium.
Among his most well-known projects are the Humana Building in Louisville, Ky., cited by Time magazine as one of the 10 best buildings of the 1980s, the San Juan Capistrano Public Library, the Emory University Museum in Atlanta, The Newark Museum, various projects for the Walt Disney Company, the Denver Central Library, the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport in The Hague, The U.S. Courthouse in Washington, D.C., and the scaffolding for the 1999-2000 restoration of the Washington Monument.
Graves calls himself a “general practitioner,” designing not only the interiors for the majority of his projects, including furniture, lighting fixtures, even jewelry and dinnerware for companies such as Alessi, Steben, Disney, Phillips Electronics and Black and Decker.
His work is available to a wide range of consumers through his partnership with Target, which features his designs in a variety of product categories.
In addition to his diversified and prolific design work, Graves is an influential theorist; he taught at Princeton University for almost 40 years, and is the university’s Robert Schirmer Professor of Architecture emeritus.
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