Michael Graves was born on 9 July 1934 in Indiana, United States. He died on 12 March 2015 in the state of New Jersey, United States, at the age of 80. He was an American architect and, at the same time, a furniture designer. Michael Graves was a member of the New York Five, the group in which five of New York’s most important architects were identified. Graves was a postmodernist architect and designer.
Michael Graves was educated at Broad Ripple High School in Indianapolis, Indiana, where he was born and raised, receiving his diploma in 1952. Graves, who completed his master’s degree at Harvard University, won the Rome Prize in 1960 and spent the following two years at the American Academy in Rome. He served as architect of buildings such as the Portland Building and the Denver Public Library. He took on the architecture of the hotels at Walt Disney World and many other buildings. He wrote his name into the New York Five, alongside famous architects such as Peter Eisenman and John Hejduk.
The bird kettle:
His designs for household goods began with a kettle he designed for an Italian company, featuring a bird figure on its spout. This kettle became the best-selling product in the Italian company’s entire history.
In 2000 he designed a scaffold for the restoration of the Washington Monument in Washington. The scaffold’s most notable feature was that it was rustproof.
After becoming paralyzed, Michael Graves began living his life in a wheelchair. The wheelchair turned the designer, however reluctantly, into a healthcare expert. This unfortunate event pushed Michael Graves to focus on the design of wheelchairs. Along with this, Michael Graves began working on hospital equipment, furniture, devices for people with disabilities, and their design.
The designer and architect Michael Graves received the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects in 2001. In 1999 he won the National Medal of Arts. On 22 November 2014, the Architectural League of New York organized a symposium in Graves’s honor.