The Necessity for Seeing

Abstract

in 1960 michael graves was awarded the American Academy in Rome’s prestigious Prix de Rome. Having just completed his graduate studies in architecture, he embarked on a Grand Tour that led to a lifelong fascination with the landscape, the culture, and the history of Italy. During his time in Rome, Graves participated in daily social rituals that had been rehearsed for hundreds of years. Meals of pasta, cheese, and Chianti around simple wooden country tables bathed in the light of Tuscany revealed to him humanistic and domestic connections between the architecture and the landscape, the sacred and the profane. He learned that certain picturesque hillsides covered with umbrella pines and poplars were not natural landscapes, but rather had been meticulously designed and cultivated by a single Italian family over centuries. Through these examples he was exposed to ideas about architecture that went well beyond his modernist upbringing. His drawings and photographs from this time focus on the connection between the architecture and the land of Italy itself—“wistful, luminous, plain, its grain and olive trees, the stones of its buildings in prodigal light.”1 Graves learned through recording his journeys, discussing what he saw with fellow travelers and scholars, and participating in Italian customs, how architecture and landscape affect our perception and connection to the richness of our surroundings, and how an architect may draw upon these lessons to develop his or her own personal design.