Michael Graves e il Mediterraneo. Intuizioni, interpretazioni e manipolazioni dell’architettura e dell’antichità italiana

The article reconstructs the formative years of the American architect Michael Graves (1934-2015), with a particular emphasis on his research experience in Italy as a recipient of the Rome Prize in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome in 1960-1962. The analysis of Mediterranean references is consistent in his career and starts, indeed, from Graves’s first discoveries of Greek and Italian architecture in the context of a modernist education at the universities in Cincinnati and Harvard, up to the thoughtful selection and interpretation of architectural references and models during his Rome Prize in Italy. Based on the analysis of unpublished archive materials and thanks to exclusive interviews and conversations with renowned scholars and collaborators of Graves, the ambition of the essay is to understand how Italian references are classified, interpreted, and manipulated by the architect. The analysis of a variety of graphic material produced during his Rome Prize – photographs, drawings, inks, etc. – would finally suggest possible keys to deciphering his work and his aesthetics. Therefore, the final objective of the paper is to outline the crucial influence of Italian architectural culture on Graves’ methodology and compositional approach in order to acquire historiographical and critical tools that can guide a deeper and less prejudicial reading of his works.