Makers & Designers

Born in Indianapolis, Indiana in 1934, Graves earned a Bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Cincinnati in 1958. He went on to obtain a Master’s degree in architecture from Harvard University in 1959. In 1960, Graves received the Rome Prize, and spent the following two years studying architecture at the American Academy in Rome. Upon returning to the U.S. in 1962, he began an architecture professorship at Princeton University, which lasted for 39 years. In 1964, he founded his own architectural firm—Michael Graves & Associates—in Princeton, New Jersey.

During the 1970s, Graves became known as one of the “New York Five,” a group of young, New York-based architects that championed a new and pure form of modernism, referencing the minimalistic aesthetic of Le Corbusier in the 1920s and ’30s. Alongside members Peter Eisenman (born 1932), Charles Gwathmey (1938-2009), John Hejuk (1929-2000), and Richard Meier (born 1934), Graves advocated this aesthetic in works like the Snyderman House in Fort Wayne, Indiana (1972)—a single-family dwelling that was celebrated by critics and architects as a refreshing and novel example of modernism.