A Design for Living

Maybe it was the stack of screaming yellow Hazmat buckets in the corner that gave Michael Graves the will to live. Or the big gray barrel emblazoned with the warning: ambulance waste. Or possibly the view of the Soviet-style concrete parking garage across the driveway from the hospital.

All Graves remembers from one terrible afternoon last December was that as he lay, critically ill, on a gurney in the University Medical Center at Prince-ton's ambulance bay waiting to be transported to New York, one overpowering thought gripped him: "I do not want to die here, because it's so ugly."

Graves delivers this line to an audience of staffers sitting around a conference table in his Princeton, New Jersey, office. They laugh merrily, although the joke has a practiced feel, as if it had been trotted out regularly to mute the painful reality of Graves's current situation. In late February 2003, the man who helped rescue architecture from the chilly geometry of midcentury modernism, and revolutionized product design with his affordable creations for Target Stores, began a struggle with an illness that, if it didn't kill him, threatened to rob him of the very thing he lives for: his work. Eighteen months later, Graves has emerged, disabled but still in command of his craft and his two firms, Michael Graves & Associates and Michael Graves Design Group. What's more, his companies have had a wildly successful year, with a flurry of new product-design deals, a slew of new architectural commissions, and the gala celebration of the fifth anniversary of their partnership with Target.

Much like Tom Sawyer's delicious glimpse of his own funeral, Graves's near-death experience has given him something few of us are afforded: a first-hand taste of his own legacy. If he ever doubted it before, he must know now that he is a seminal figure in architecture and design, and that his career stands as a testament to the value of a lifetime well spent on good work. But the catastrophic events of the past year have revealed an even more remarkable achievement. Graves has built something larger and more enduring than himself -- a team that will carry on his life's work without him. That's highly unusual for any leader whose unique creativity and vision are the essential life force of an organization. Think of Martha Stewart Living's prospects with Martha in jail, or Apple's years in the wilderness without Steve Jobs. But far from faltering in his absence, Graves's firms have thrived. This great designer's greatest design may turn out to be collaborative organizations that could replicate, amplify, and extend his genius.

True, a mere 105 architects and designers will have a tough time matching the accomplishment of a single Graves, whose witty creations -- from a singing teakettle for Alessi to the Dolphin and Swan hotels at Disney World -- have become true American icons. It's a remarkable record of achievement that dates back to a childhood in Indianapolis, when Graves's mother told her drawing-obsessed child that if he wasn't as good as Picasso, he'd starve. She suggested he become either an engineer or an architect. When he discovered what engineers did for a living, he picked the alternative. He followed that calling from architecture school in Cincinnati and at Harvard to the American Academy in Rome, to a professorship at Princeton, to an array of brilliant buildings, to the National Medal of Arts in 1999, and the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal in 2001 -- the highest award the 63,000-member body can confer on an individual.

But now, strapped in a bulky wheelchair, dressed in a cable-knit sweater in his trademark slate blue, and shadowed by his beloved yellow Lab, Sara, Graves is confronted daily with his losses, both large and small. There is, for example, no wheelchair access to his book-lined former office at 341 Nassau Street, a charming old yellow-brick building that dates back to the late 1700s and once served, he loves to tell visitors, as the town brothel. Instead, he has had to relocate down the block to a functional but prosaic building that can accommodate his chair. An inveterate globe-trotter, he now finds travel difficult and exhausting. An urbane, cosmopolitan man who loves being around people, he is now dependent on others reaching out to him. And an avid golfer, he's now forced to find a way to practice his sport from the seat of a golf cart.

Still, Graves is grateful to finally be back at work full time. And to those who would try to write him off because of his condition, he has one defiant message: Don't count him out. He notes the array of citations and tributes he has received this year with rueful ambivalence. "In the last six months, I've been getting an award a week," he says. "You're made to feel that this is a lifetime achievement award, and you haven't finished living yet."