• Rhodes, Marshall Scholars Announced
• Interview: For Michael Graves, Variety Keeps Work Interesting

Rhodes, Marshall Scholars Announced
Three seniors and a recent graduate receive awards for study in England
One senior has won a Rhodes scholarship, and two others have received Marshall scholarships for 1997. Additionally, a Rhodes scholarship was awarded to an alumnus who has returned to his native South Africa.
Davis McCallum '97, an English major, has been named a winner of a Rhodes scholarship, which provides full expenses and a stipend for two years of study at Oxford University. Two other seniors, Saj Cherian and Whitney Colella, have earned Marshall scholarships, which cover tuition and expenses for two years of study at any university in Great Britain.
Mompati Setlogelo '94, who majored in history while at Princeton, was awarded a Rhodes representing the scholarship's South African-at-large category.
With five of 32 recipients, Harvard produced the most Rhodes scholarships awarded to U.S. citizens. Georgetown University produced three, and Yale, Cornell, and Notre Dame universities each had two winners.
Harvard again topped the list of Marshall scholars; six were awarded to undergraduates, and one each to students at its medical and law schools. Stanford, Brown, the University of Chicago, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology each had two Marshall scholars.
All three Princeton seniors competed in regional interviews in December. McCallum, of Atlanta, Georgia, was selected in a competition held in Little Rock, Arkansas, while Colella and Cherian, both from Maryland, took part in interviews in Washington, D.C.
McCallum, the founder of the Princeton Shakespeare Company, spent last spring semester traveling with the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, a professional repertory company based in Shenandoah, Virginia. He is earning a certificate in theater and dance and writing a senior thesis that links media theory, Hollywood musicals, and Shakespeare.
At Oxford, McCallum will pursue a master's of philosophy in a course of study titled Shakespeare and the Drama to 1640. He hopes to pursue a career that will allow him to act, write, teach, and direct--all elements of theater he has enjoyed since he played Hamlet in a high-school production. "I love the ways in which language functions to create and preserve community," he said.
McCallum praised a university program that helps Rhodes and Marshall candidates evaluate their essays and prepare for interviews. He also took counsel from his father, a 1968 Rhodes scholar. "Dad offered me the same advice as the Princeton professors--try to be yourself."
Cherian, of Wheaton, Maryland, is a student at the Woodrow Wilson School, where he is working on a certificate in Latin American Studies. He is particularly interested in the study of emerging markets. Cherian plans to attend Oxford and earn a master's of philosophy, with an emphasis on development issues. His senior thesis explores the privatization of the petrochemical industry in Mexico. Last summer, while working at Celanese-Mexicana on a Shultz Fellowship, he saw at first hand the political fallout of privatization. "I'm looking at this as a case where the political costs far outweigh the economic benefits," he said.
At Princeton, Cherian helped found Challenge '97, his class's tutoring and mentoring project with Hedgepeth-Williams Middle School, in Trenton. Cherian also serves on the Undergraduate Student Life and Campus Center committees.
Colella, a mechanical-engineering major from Potomac, Maryland, will also receive a Woodrow Wilson School certificate. She is interested in renewable energy policy, particularly in Africa. She plans to pursue a Master of Philosophy at the Science Policy Research Unit of the University of Sussex.
For her senior thesis, Colella will design and possibly build a zero-emissions alternative to the motor scooters commonly used in the developing world. Last summer, she worked on an alternative vehicle sponsored by the European Union while studying engineering in Genoa, Italy, on a Metz Fellowship. "The population of Africa and Asia is growing rapidly, along with energy consumption and pollution," she said. "As these regions begin to build new infrastructure, now is a critical time to leapfrog to renewable-energy technologies."
Colella sings with the student a cappella group Shere Khan and founded the Princeton chapter of the Society of Automotive Engineers. She has also worked as a volunteer for U.S. Senator Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.), when the senator headed the committee handling federal funding of science, and for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
Setlogelo is currently a graduate student in the Department of African Literature at the University of Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg. While at Princeton, he wrote his senior thesis on 20th-century land-tenure changes in South Africa. He was elected president of the International Students Club his junior year.

For Michael Graves, Variety Keeps Work Interesting
Over the past three decades, Michael E. Graves, the Honorable D.F. Robert Schirmer Professor of Architecture, has built a reputation as one of the world's most influential architects. Despite his discomfort with the term, he's considered a leader of the "postmodernist" movement--a reaction against the stark, modernist style that predominated in the mid 20th century. Dozens of his eclectic buildings now grace cities in the U.S. and abroad--including the municipal building in Portland, Oregon, the Swan and Dolphin hotels at Disney World, and the new Denver library. Recently he spoke with PAW at his Nassau Street studio.

You've often been credited with bringing symbolism back into architecture. What does that mean?
I would say I was part of a group of architects that brought back symbolic language. It was assumed up to the beginning of the 20th century that architecture was a kind of language, in itself. Then the 20th century saw the advent of modernism, and that code was stood on its head. Architecture started embracing technology for its own sake, which had never happened before, and it began to take on political and social themes. Le Corbusier, for instance, thought modern architecture could help the working man: Prefabricated buildings would make construction easier and more economical, so workers could have better housing, and so on. Suddenly architecture was no longer an "elitist" proposal.
Unfortunately, these political causes aren't the great causes of architecture. Architecture is primarily an invented idea, in the same way that music or the literary novel is invented. You start with a symbolic language--but to make it into a literature, new forms then have to be invented, using that language.

And you've tried to reassert this idea of architecture as an invented form?
Exactly. Starting with Bob Venturi ['47 *50] and the late Charles Moore [*57] in the middle sixties, people began to say, "Maybe we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater ... maybe we have to look again at the formal language of architecture." And so a lot of us started to think more seriously about architecture as a historical continuity.
Many people see postmodernist architecture as a pastiche of the past, or as a way of reinserting nostalgia into architecture. But it's really an attempt to acknowledge and embrace the ideas and architectural symbols that have preceded us. People will say what I'm doing is "classical," or that I'm rejecting modernism, but there's more to it than that. Since my approach sees all architecture as a continuum, of course it has to embrace modernism as well as the Renaissance. This concept was first articulated by Venturi in his book Complexity and Contradiction.

You refer to "postmodernist" architecture--yet in the past, you've rejected that term. How do you feel about it these days?
Well, the term "postmodernism" is so misused by critics, I finally stopped fighting it. If the press wants to call what I and others do "postmodern," I can't stop them. They use the term because it's easy. I just think of myself as an architect. People ask me, 'What do you specialize in?' I don't specialize. The variety is what makes the work interesting. Everything is a different challenge.

Life magazine recently commissioned you to design its third annual Dream House [featured on the cover of the May 1996 issue]. What was that like?
The Life project was delightful. We loved the fact that they wanted something accessible. The challenge was to design a 2,000-square-foot house that could be built in the U.S. for an average cost of $200,000. We liked that cap--it really helps in making decisions. We had bids taken periodically along the way, to be sure we were in line with the target price.
It's amazing how many calls we got afterwards, from people who said, "The house is interesting and we'd like to build it, but we'd like to make certain changes to accommodate our own situation." When someone says, "I love the discipline of your plan," well, that's music to my ears. To me, designing a house is like scoring music--I'm bringing order to the work. The key questions aren't just 'How big is the kitchen?' but also how the kitchen relates to the dining room, how someone would move through the house, and so on.
I think several people are now building versions of the Dream House. One interesting project happened because we're designing a library for the city of Topeka, Kansas. As a fund-raiser for the library, they decided to build two Dream Houses in different parts of the city and auction them off. It's happening right now.

What's the state of architecture today, in your view?
I'm happy to say this is a great time to be practicing. These are inventive, competitive times. My colleagues are constantly prompting me to develop new ways of doing things. The key to what's going on is that there is no consensus today. Everyone wants to be different--these days the critics love fresh and new. It's hard to be fresh and new and have a consensus.
The down side of this lack of collective vision is that we're quickly destroying our cities. It's happening in Europe, as well, but it's worse here, because we never really had great cities to start with. Because land is now so expensive, we build monstrous towers that people drive to. The result is that our living patterns are dramatically different than if you or I had lived in Florence a hundred years ago. The cities become a place for the very rich and the very poor, while the middle classes move out to the suburbs.
A lot of people say that's the way it is now--we live in an automobile society. To me, this isn't much living. My interest is how to use cars and have pedestrian places. Ideally a city would be like a lot of Princetons linked together, each quarter with its own high street, and so on. London was invented like that--a lot of small towns strung together.

Are we ever going to see great urban architecture in the future?
There's no hope for the cities as long as land values are established by speculators. One of the problems with Tokyo--and with the whole Japanese economy--is that land became vastly overvalued. My firm just finished its last building in Tokyo. I don't expect to work there again for years.

To get away from buildings for a moment--you're also the designer of the famous cone shaped Alessi tea kettle, which has become something of a pop icon. How did that come about?
It happened in a convoluted way. The Alessi company has always been very well known in northern Italy. But in the 1980s, Alberto Alessi decided he wanted to bring the Alessi name out to the rest of the world, so he hired 12 well known architects and asked each of them to design a tea service in sterling silver--a tea pot, a coffee pot, a tray, and a creamer with spoon. Money was no object--they were automatically going to be pricey, since they used so much silver.
Alberto convinced a number of museums and galleries to show the collection. He didn't expect them to sell--the point was to capitalize on their reputation as museum pieces. But as it turned out, he got a lot of orders for mine. Alberto then came to me and said he wanted to do a mass-market tea service for England and America. We capitalized on some new technical ideas--they'd found that you could boil water faster by changing the shape of the kettle.
So we did it, and lo and behold, it sold quite well: at last count about a million sets have been bought, at around $125 each. The kettle is really well made--it lasts longer and boils water faster than any other kettle. Unfortunately, we wrote a very bad contract, so we didn't make out that well financially on the project, but every bit helps!
--Royce N. Flippen III '80