FEBURARY 2006 » book review

Drawing From History

Michael Graves: Images of a Grand Tour
by Brian M. Ambroziak, with a foreword by Michael Graves
Princeton Architectural Press, New York, NY; 2005
272 pp.; hardcover; 210 b&w illustrations, 90 four-color plates; $29.95
ISBN 1-568-98529-0

Reviewed by David Mayernik

The thread that connected the Classical architects of the early-20th century with those of the later-20th and early-21st centuries was thin, frayed and fragile. Not a single office in the United States (unlike Raymond Erith's in England) sustained and passed on the tradition from one half of the century to the other. The American architects who were interested in recovering the Classical tradition in the 1970s – like John Blatteau, Alvin Holm and Allan Greenberg – needed to be autodidacts in every sense, and between old books and old timers, who had a thing or two to convey, they cobbled together a remarkably credible beginning to a new renaissance.

For those of us of a slightly younger vintage, we had their example, but also we inevitably found our way though the intellectual fog of something called Postmodernism. The leaders of that movement were busy reconnecting Modernism with history, but in ways that were, given their own intellectual background, inevitably tentative and often ironic. Nevertheless, they found fairly fruitful ways of reconnecting that Classical thread, and sustained, however imperfectly, the possibility of a Classical comeback. Many among them are still ambivalent about those of us who "went all the way," but their engagement with history meant that the past could have life again in a world where Modernism threatened to eradicate it entirely.

Sadly, we find ourselves in a similar state in most architecture schools today, and so it is welcome and timely that we now reassess the carriers of that thread. Of them, none perhaps had a greater impact than Michael Graves, and the collection of his drawings from his time in Rome as a fellow of the American Academy are valuable testimonies to both his sense for great buildings of the past and the role of that remarkable institution.

The American Academy in Rome was founded by a group of well-heeled Americans in 1894 with the inspiration and guidance of Charles Follen McKim. It was the only academy in that city not created under the auspices of a national government, but was instead sustained by private philanthropy; the Academy aspired to emulate the venerable French Academy, destination of Prix de Rome winners for centuries. Even though J.P. Morgan helped the Academy find a home on the Janiculum hill in part so that its higher prospect would allow the Americans to look down on the French in the Villa Medici across town, the French Academy furnished in a very real way the model for ours.

For the first several decades of its existence, the American Academy's fellows documented the great buildings of Rome and Italy in accomplished wash renderings, just like their French counterparts. All this changed after World War II, as Modernism caught up with the Academy as it did elsewhere, and no longer did the painters, sculptors and architects study the past systematically in sympathy with the resident scholars. However, the allure of Rome even then (unlike now, sad to say) was so strong that Academy fellows felt compelled to draw what they saw, and some of these took the experience seriously enough to begin to question their commitments to the ruthless tenets of Modernism. Graves was one of them.

Graves' drawings and photographs from his time at the Academy have now been collected into a voluptuous volume by one of his former students at Princeton, Brian M. Ambroziak. While the temptation to make the connection with the Grand Tour as it was experienced in the 18th and 19th centuries couldn't be resisted by the author, Graves' work really can't be understood in that context. The culture of those earlier centuries was not intellectually hostile to what Rome represents in any way like the 1960s were, and the architects who traveled to Rome on the Grand Tour in the 18th and 19th centuries were steeped in the craft of drawing classically, while Graves frankly was not. What makes Graves' drawings notable was how they stand out in the light of their time: as passionately engaged with all manner of Roman architecture, as sympathetic to the material form of buildings as much as their intellectual import, and as capable of both representation and analysis.

The drawings can be divided into two categories: those that with a bold combination of pen and wash attempt to represent what he sees, and those purely in a quivering line, with occasional tone, that suggestively hover between being analytical diagrams and naïve views. The former type is mostly "new" to our understanding of Graves' work, because the technique effectively disappeared from his repertoire as his renown increased through the 1970s and '80s. The latter, however, portend much for the signature Gravesian drawing style that the architecture world now knows, and speak volumes about how he was able to reconcile the great buildings of the past with Modernism: at the level of archetype, or of the diagram, the historical buildings take on a raw power and a dream-like abstraction that begin to build a bridge to Graves' early Modernist architecture, which was informed by the example of Le Corbusier. As Graves says in the Foreword, "By their fragmentary nature, [drawings] are inherently speculative and therefore contribute to the very conception of architecture."

Le Corbusier, too, could only apprehend antiquity by reducing it to its totemic essence in notational drawings; ornament and color for him got in the way of whatever power he perceived in the past. It is worth recalling what Le Corbusier said about sending students to Rome in his manifesto Towards a New Architecture, since it is precisely his aversion to the city that recommends Rome as an antidote to a Modernist anti-historical program: "To send architecture students to Rome is to cripple them for life."

In Graves' Roman experience, on the contrary, he says that there he "came to understand architecture as a continuum from antiquity to the present day, and thus as a language." In his drawings from those years, he was in fact liberated from the crippling effects of an anti-historical Modernism; and later, as a renowned teacher as well as practitioner he helped to do the same for others. His essay found near the end of the book, "The Necessity for Drawing: Tangible Speculation," is a cogent, suggestive argument about how drawings work in the design process; with the onslaught of digital drafting it is all the more relevant today than it was when first published in Architectural Design (June 1977).

This book is a worthy documentation of the clear-headed courage of Graves' engagement with the past, and a subtle articulation of the value of drawing by hand for architects of any stripe – not to mention a defense of the value of studying in Rome, if one were needed. TB

David Mayernik is an architect, urban designer, fresco painter and professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame. A Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, he is the author of Timeless Cities: An Architect's Reflections on Renaissance Italy (Westview Press, 2004).

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