A Design for Living
After Michael Graves fell ill, his business had one of its best years
ever. This great designer's greatest design may be his company.
From: Issue 85 | August 2004, Page 77 By: Linda Tischler
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.
cont'd
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/graves.html