Michael Graves (PDF)

Michael Graves the extraordinary experience of two years at the American Academy in Rome in the early 1960 s transformed how I looked at the world around me. In that rich and marvelous city, I came to understand architecture as a continuum from antiquity to the present day, and thus as a language. I discovered new ways of seeing and analyzing both architecture and landscape. I also developed an urgent need to record what I saw and created hundreds of photographs and drawings. It has been a great joy to work with Brian Ambroziak on his ambitious project to publish many of them in this book, accompanied by his insightful commentary. I have always been fascinated by drawing. In fact, it was my ability to draw that led me to a career in architecture. Until I went to Rome, however, I had created dr- ings only in my studio, never in the street or landscape. While there, rather than searching for a single manner of drawing, I experimented with multiple methods that I thought might express the architecture. I made large, elaborate sepia and black ink washes of important baroque churches, 40 x 28 inches in size; quick notations in fine ink or crude pencil in a hand-sized notebook; and pencil sketches on a wonderful cream-colored clay-coated paper, with fluid lines that captured just the essence of a profile. No matter what media I chose, my drawings were always analytical.