Too Busy to Hear Dirge to Modernism

While his peers are playing taps for postmodernism, architect Michael Graves has no use, or time, for such morbid discussions.

Graves, postmodernism’s most famous practitioner, is busy with projects all over the world: hotels, houses and office buildings in Japan, France, New York and California. He’s even doing two cartoonish hotels for the Disney Co. in Florida.

Last week, Graves was in San Diego to inspect his first local design, the $150-million Aventine at La Jolla near the University Towne Centre shopping mall. The project includes a 16-story Hyatt Regency Hotel, four restaurants, a fitness and health spa and three office buildings.

The hotel and restaurants are scheduled to open next month, with the offices to follow soon.

Postmodernism, a product of the 1980s, is generally seen by architectural historians as a reaction against the stark “modern” buildings that dominated architecture for more than 50 years. Generally, Graves and other postmodernists admire the bold, well-detailed buildings of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as some classical revivals.

By incorporating such elements as arches, columns and pediments, some postmodernists say, they are bringing much-needed warmth and richness back to architecture.

But Graves, one of the few postmodernists still getting big commissions, doesn’t see himself as simply recombining classical parts in new ways.

“I try to make rooms and places people can identify with,” he said when asked about his preference for the simple geometric forms typical of many classical buildings. “My intention is to give a sense of place to the buildings I do.”

Local architects, however, have given him a reception much less jovial than a handshake from Mickey Mouse.

“The hotel looks like a big chest of drawers,” said architect Chuck Slert, the designer of several glass high-rises near the Aventine project. “It’s oriented toward the freeway. From the other side, the views are mostly of nearby condo roofs. If he had turned it 90 degrees, all of the rooms could be slanted with views to Torrey Pines and La Jolla.

“He makes a nice grouping of buildings, though. He does that as well as anyone.”

Architect Ralph Roesling said he doesn’t like “the lie” inherent in the work: The appearance of the exterior isn’t related to the structure beneath it.

“I don’t think those buildings reflect the values I would like to see our culture represented by,” said architect Robert Mosher, who has practiced more than 40 years in San Diego and prefers the less-is-more approach of modernists such as Mies van der Rohe and Louis Kahn, designer of the Salk Institute in La Jolla.

“The best things that have ever happened in architecture have come from people who address human needs and problems, not just wrapping those problems in cellophane.”

Last week, as Graves looked up at the Hyatt, scheduled to open next month and resembling a ‘30s Art Deco table radio, he was asked whether postmodernism is dead.

“I didn’t know postmodernism was alive,” he quipped, sidestepping the question.

While there is bound to be controversy over Aventine’s colorful wrapping and prominent profile, the project is a smashing success in other ways.

From most vantages, the group of buildings is the most striking in the area, and not just because of its visual presence.

The richness of materials, including the sandstone base of the hotel and exquisite marble inside it, as well as the quality of workmanship, set a new standard for San Diego. Earthy colors tie the buildings to their setting, even if the forms have nothing to do with local history.

Graves and his assistant, Alexey Grigorieff, had control over minute design details and materials.

Graves designed carpeting, furnishings and art prints, and is the artist behind lithographs to be featured in several guest rooms. He even approved the unobtrusive fire sprinklers.

Is the small-windowed Hyatt suitable for sunny Southern California? The rooms seem to get plenty of views and light, while the small, square windows give them a comfortable sense of privacy.

The inside of the hotel quickly refutes any argument that Graves is concerned only with surfaces, not space-making. The compact entry lobby explodes into a huge, double-height volume at the back of the hotel, broken by several towering columns.

Colonnades, plazas, terraces and formal gardens will make the outdoors as important as the indoors, as it should be in San Diego.

A fourth restaurant has been added to the plans, and this has improved the project’s design. Instead of the three separate buildings depicted in a study model as cutesy combinations of classical elements, the restaurants will now be contained within a single building fronting Lebon Drive, east of the hotel. Though still under construction, this building looks like a more coherent, restrained solution that will support the hotel instead of competing with it.

Despite the cool reception in San Diego, the Aventine has many more pluses than minuses, and Graves’ work has often been received with more enthusiasm.

The Humana Building, a Graves-designed high-rise in Louisville, Ky., the Clos Pegase Winery in Northern California and a public library in San Juan Capistrano have received especially positive responses from critics.

His first major commission, however, a government headquarters for the city of Portland, Ore., completed in 1982, is visually arresting but said to be poorly built and a functional nightmare. Graves didn’t design the interiors and was hampered by a low budget.

Yet his habit of stretching the definition of a serious architect, which began when he designed a teapot and some tableware, continues to annoy some people.

One of his more recent commissions was to design new Swan and Dolphin hotels for Disney at the Epcot Center in Orlando, Fla. He came up with his most fantastic visions yet. The hotels will include large dolphin and swan statues, exterior walls in a pattern of waves and banana leaves, and a waterfall that tumbles down the front of one hotel into a giant clam shell.

Progressive Architecture selected the project as the winner of a design award last January, with some qualification.

“This is the one location where I think his architecture is contextual,” wrote a juror. “To me it’s fantasy architecture, and it belongs in Disney World.”