GRAVES, MICHAEL

born July 9, 1934, Indianapolis, Ind., U.S. American architect and designer, one of the principal figures in the Postmodernist movement. Graves trained to be an architect at the University of Cincinnati and at Harvard University, earning a master's degree in 1959 at the latter school. He then studied in Rome from 1960 to 1962 and upon his return took a teaching position at Princeton University, becoming a full professor there in 1972. Graves began his career in the 1960s as a creator of private houses in the abstract and austere style of orthodox Modernism, his compositions being influenced by the work of Le Corbusier. In the late 1970s, however, Graves began to reject the bare and denuded Modernist idiom as too cool and abstract, and he began seeking a richer architectural vocabulary that would be more accessible to the public. He soon drew remarkable attention with his designs for several large public buildings in the early 1980s. The Portland Building in Portland, Ore. (1980), and the Humana Building, Louisville, Ky. (1982), were notable for their hulking masses and for Graves's highly personal, Cubist interpretations of such classical elements as colonnades and loggias in them. Though somewhat awkward, these and other of Graves's later buildings were acclaimed for their powerful and energetic presence. By the mid-1980s Graves had emerged as arguably the most original and popular figure working in the Postmodernist idiom.