Design Icon: Michael Graves

A Manhattan transplant, architect Francine Besselaar and her partner Canan Akyuz, built her Princeton, New Jersey, home to showcase open, airy spaces and a kitchen that fosters conversation.

Internationally renowned architect and designer Michael Graves will provide an intimate portrait of his celebrated career and discuss the influences that shaped his thinking and approach to design - from his early days as a student and recipient of the American Academy in Rome's prestigious Prix de Rome to his distinguished academic career at Princeton University; from the development of his firm into a global design enterprise practicing architecture, interiors, product design and graphic design to the very personal inspirations that led him to challenge many of the arcane ideas that have shaped healthcare design in the past.

The presentation will be followed by a discussion moderated by Bill Moggridge, Director of Cooper-Hewitt.

In his 1931 Kahn Lecture at Princeton University, Frank Lloyd Wright posed the seminal question: “Now what architecture?” Over the course of his seventy-year long career, Wright taught his contemporaries how to connect time, place, and people through architecture. Today, fifty years after his death in 1959 and coinciding with opening events for the exhibition Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward, Wright’s question forms the basis for a two-day symposium that will feature debates among scholars, architects, designers, and cultural critics from around the world.