The Next Best Thing to Birds' Eye Maple - PVC Pipe!
Serving as a live-in laboratory for his ever-evolving ideas, The Warehouse is the Princeton, New Jersey, villa of architect Michael Graves, FAIA. Built in 1926 by the Italian stonemasons who erected many of the buildings on Princeton University's campus, the residence was formerly an abandoned warehouse liberally outfitted with cubicles. One of the ideas Graves conceived in its transformation put PVC pipe to what might just be one of its most innovative uses ever.
Converting one part of the building's north wing into a library for his 2,500-volume collection of architecture and decorative arts books, Graves selected 2-3-inch PVC piping for the colonnettes that would run up and down between the library shelves. The piping is treated with faux bois paint finish to match the similarly finished medium density fiberboard shelving, giving the entire installation the elegant look of bird's-eye maple.
An architect renowned for his "how can I do it better" approach to design, Graves concluded that the PVC pipe would be an economically superior solution to the question of how to construct the colonnettes, a significant element in Graves' architecture and therefore of the interior "street" that his library was designed to be. Controlling the consistency of the birds' eye patterning using a non-wood material finished with paint was critically important in achieving the final look - an effect that would have been hard to achieve using a solid wood.