Contract - January/February 2013 - (Page 56)

photography: courtesy resorts world sentosa one of graves’s most recent projects is the resorts world sentosa (this page and opposite), which is a resort of four hotels—each with a different theme—on the island of sentosa off singapore’s southern coast. Kentucky (1985). Graves was deeply immersed in the 1980s critical conversation around the proper use of history in contemporary architecture, and his work is considered critical in what coalesced into postmodernism. No work of Graves’s became more whimsical than the 1,514-room Dolphin and 758-room Swan hotels, both opened in 1990 for the Walt Disney Company outside Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. Graves attached a 27-story triangular slab or flattened pyramid, reminiscent of the 18th-century French Enlightenment architect Etienne-Louis Boullée, to a long, low volume festooned with fountain urns and a pair of 63-foot-high Dolphin statues waving their tales. Stepped seashell fountains descend to a circular plaza. The Swan, with more giant statues and curling waves scribed in its stucco façade, is accessed across a pond via a pedestrian causeway lined with arcades of striped tent fabric. The hotels delight visitors but the “entertainment architecture” trend unleashed by Disney’s CEO Michael Eisner seemed to confine architects to spinning fantasy stories in stucco. Architectural critics lambasted the skin-deep effects as unserious, and Graves’s cheerful wit didn’t translate well to other building types. “A school board in Indiana asked us whether we intended to put a dolphin on its building,” says Nichols, “as if that was something we would always do.” In recent years, Graves has largely refined the language he had developed in the 1980s. He continues to assemble primary geometric volumes and deploy a bravura palette of 56 saturated colors. But the most whimsical elements largely disappeared, even in resort projects, where Graves has consistently been successful, designing both the buildings and their interiors. Ensuing years have brought a new sobriety as Graves was commissioned to do institutional projects, including the Denver Central Library (1995) where a cylindrical rotunda rises to a copper-clad braced roof that seems a wistful relic, evoking the massive timbers that framed Colorado mines in pioneer days. In Castalia, the Dutch Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (1998) in the Hague, Netherlands, Graves re-clad a 1950s high-rise in brick and added two tall peaked roofs that recall traditional Dutch architecture while making a powerful silhouette against the skyline. Drawing to convey a story Throughout his career in architecture and design, hand drawing and painting has been critical in Graves’s work. “For me, drawing is an immediate hand-eye-brain relationship that I can’t do without,” Graves says. “I’m fascinated by drawing upon drawings. I want to see the cross-outs, the writing in the margins.” He continues to draw and paint in studios in the Princeton office and in his home, and he says he was touched by the hundreds of letters he received after writing a September 1, 2012 op-ed article in The New York Times “Architecture and the Lost Art of Drawing” that advocated for the primacy of drawing in design (see page 128 contractdesign.com january | february 2013 http://www.contractdesign.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Contract - January/February 2013

Contract - January/February 2013
Contents
Editorial
Industry News
Product Briefs: Lighting
Product Focus: Bonaire and Buxom
Designer of the Year
Legend Award
34th annual interiors awards
Large Office
Small Office
Hotel
Restaurant
Healthcare
Education
Public Space
Showroom
Entertainment
Sustainable
Adaptive Reuse
Retail
Student
Designers Select: Tables and Desks
Sources
Ad Index
Public Interest Design
Perspective: Michael Graves on the Lost Art of Drawing

Contract - January/February 2013