Architecture

10 Colorful Buildings You Need to Know by Michael Graves

AD rounds up a vibrant selection of the talent’s postmodernist architecture

February 12, 2016

Photo: Nikreates/Alamy
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In an architectural landscape dominated by steel and glass, Michael Graves’s postmodernist structures stick out from the bunch. The late American architect and designer and AIA gold medalist, who conceived more than 350 buildings and 2,000 product designs over the course of his 50-year career, was best known for his kooky, bright, kooky buildings and peppy product designs—a teakettle for Alessi, a toaster for JCPenney—that made inventive use of color, material, shape, and texture. From the twin triangle-topped Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport towers in The Hague to the cartoonish St. Coletta of Greater Washington, a school for students with disabilities in Washington, D.C., get an eyeful of the buildings and developments he dreamt up with firm Michael Graves & Associates and you can’t help but smile.
The Portland Building, located in downtown Portland, Oregon, showcases Graves’s signature mix of color, texture, and witty riffs on classicism.
Photo: Sebastiaan Kroes
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Graves completely renovated the 1960s Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport in The Hague, which had to be stripped down to its structural frames, the façade reclad and expanded vertically.

Photo: Peter Aaron/Esto
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Michael Graves’s postmodernist weekend retreat in the countryside outside Princeton, New Jersey, was featured in Architectural Digest in 2005.
Photo: George Rose
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For a project that consolidated Disney’s corporate offices in the 1980s, Graves created a postmodern interpretation of the Parthenon, with 20-foot dwarfs holding up the pediment that faces a pedestrian plaza.

Photo: Daria Scagliola
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For the De Luwte house in the Netherlands, Graves was inspired by the stone and brick craft traditions of a 16th-century Dutch Reformed church that dominates the riverside town of Loenen, where the home is located.
Photo: Peter Aaron/Esto
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Graves’s modern rendition of a cottage in western New Jersey has a pyramidal roof topped with a chimney that extends through the house.

Photo: Marvin Joseph/Getty Images MH
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The zany St. Coletta is a school for students with special needs in the Washington, D.C., area.
Courtesy of Michael Graves Architecture & Design
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This expansive project for Rice University’s Martel College in Houston comprises a 232-bed dormitory, classrooms, a library, a dining hall, apartments for advisers, and a house for the college master and family, all arranged around courtyards.

Photo: Tom Yee/Getty Images
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Graves created the Hanselmann House in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1967.
Photo: Philip Prowse
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Graves completely renovated the 1960s Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport in The Hague, which had to be stripped down to its structural frames, the façade reclad and expanded vertically.