Piazza | Tea & Coffee Set by Michael Graves for Alessi

Piazza Tea & Coffee Set by Michael Graves for Alessi

Michael Graves, 1981

Sterling silver, glass, plastic, enameled aluminum.

Dimensions:

• Coffee Pot: 9¾ h × 10 w × 4¾ d in (25 × 25 × 12 cm)
• Tray: 3¼ h × 16¼ dia in (8 × 41 cm)

A tray that is supposed to be a town square!! Alessi sent the commission out in 1979 — Graves, Hollein, Rossi, Venturi, Meier, Tigerman among them — tray as piazza, vessels as buildings, & past that almost no rules. Sterling, ninety-nine sets, four years in the making. Graves went straight at the neoclassical: fluted, boxy, deep ridges, real weight in the hand, & then blue knobs & cream handles, color placed exactly where a serious architect would have withheld it. The silver does the seriousness & the handles do the talking. Hoffmann was doing this in Vienna eighty years earlier without knowing you were watching. Graves lets you catch him. Alessi lost money on the whole program & called it research. The kettle everyone owns came two years later & nobody remembers where it came from.

-Keith Johnson