
Michael Graves (1934–2015)
SHORTLY AFTER THE DEATH of Michael Graves I visited one of his first important works: the Benacerraf Pavilion in Princeton, New Jersey. The project, completed in 1969 and one of two by Graves published in the book Five Architects, is modest in size but exuberant in form. It confirms John Whiteman’s assertion that “the pavilion is the essay form of architecture.” For Graves, this small commission was an opportunity to comment on the plastic language of Le Corbusier’s purist works of the 1920s. The subject matter of Graves’s built essay is the tension between plane and volume, abstraction and