Designing a Hotel’s At-Ease Feeling Is Hard Work : Architecture: Postmodernist Michael Graves tells a UCI crowd that he builds in a wide range of fantasy to fit varied clienteles. His most visible recent projects are the hotels at Walt Disney World.

Michael Graves figured he had two audiences for the hotels he designed for Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla.: people attending professional conventions and children who came to see Disney’s fantasy world. As he told a capacity audience at UC Irvine’s Beckman Center on Wednesday night, he realized the hotels “couldn’t be too jokey for the proctologists and couldn’t be too serious for the 8-year-olds.”

In a low-key talk peppered with amusing throw-away lines, the famous postmodernist architect--a dapper man of 55 with collar-length gray hair--ever so lightly breezed over his way of incorporating solutions from the past into buildings designed for people to feel at ease.

“Architects are capable of doing a lot of things,” Graves said. “The breadth is required of all of us, and the sense of choice is necessary if we are to have an effect on this varied land of ours.”

Heeding memories of such different moments of architectural and design history as the villa that Emperor Hadrian built outside Rome, Gianlorenzo Bernini’s 17th-Century Palazzo Barbarini fountain and early 19th-Century “gondola” chairs, Graves came up with a scheme tailored to the idiosyncratic terrain of the Disney site (with its crescent-shaped lake and maze of sinkholes) and dedicated to the notion that the buildings should “make you smile.”

Both the 750-room Swan Hotel and the 1,500-room Dolphin Hotel are enlivened by fanciful exterior designs (swans on the roof, dolphins in the front courtyard, wave patterns curling across the facade), as well as minute attention to details of the interior design: rugs, lighting fixtures, murals, furniture, guest-room doors (some are painted to look like beach cabanas) and even the china service in the restaurants.

There is a Fish Restaurant, with big images of tiger fish, dogfish, sunfish “so kids can point, look, marvel.” A restaurant called Palio sports banners bearing imaginary crests, after the family crests displayed during a sporting event in Siena, Italy. Even in what the hotel business calls “pre-function spaces” (Graves: “I’d rather be functioning the whole time”), a conventioneer’s wait for a doughnut and a cup of coffee is enlivened by lamps with dolphins clinging to them, palm tree ornaments and a carpet splashed with big, lazy flowers.

Graves had planned to place huge, three-dimensional dolphins in front of the Dolphin Hotel, he said. But the Disney people thought they would look too big. And on second thought, the architect himself realized that they would be too literal.

He remembered how odd it was when Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were no longer just flat figures in a cartoon but seemingly real-life figures walking around Disneyland. “It was a level of literalness I thought might scare a 6- or 8-year-old,” he said. So he made what builder John Tishman called “dolphin fillets,” three-dimensional outlines that gave just the basic idea of the warm-water mammals.

The same notion guided his treatment of bridges between the buildings, with boat, life-preserver and wave motifs. Boat shapes that were once drawn fully in the round became flat ideas of boats. “The more abstracted they became, the more whimsical they were,” he said. “It was so hard to learn that lesson.”

During the question period after the lecture--the first of a five-part series of design talks sponsored by Newport Harbor Art Museum--someone asked Graves what happened when he was asked to compromise his designs for a client. “He’s quite young, isn’t he?” Graves murmured, to the amusement of the design professionals in the audience.

“Whether you’re a novelist, a banker or an architect, you’re constantly asked to skin the cat another way. . . . I just don’t understand aesthetic compromise. There are so many ways to do it; none of them are the best. If somebody says, ‘I like all these parts but I’m still troubled by this,’ I race back to Princeton (where he teaches at the university). It’s a chance to design it again!”