Michael Graves, Portland Building

Erected in 1980, while construction was in progress on Philip Johnson’s AT&T Building, the Portland Building in the center of Oregon’s largest city was greeted with both derision and praise. In Michael Graves’s innovative design, the structure is tall but lacks the proportions of modernist skyscrapers. Graves favored the square’s solidity and stability, making it the main body of his composition (echoed in the windows), which rests on a wider base and carries a set-back penthouse crown. Narrow vertical windows tie together the seven stories on each side of the building. These support capital-like large hoods on one pair of opposite facades and a frieze of stylized Baroque roundels tied by bands on the other pair. A huge painted keystone motif joins five upper levels on one façade pair, and painted surfaces further define the building’s base, body, and penthouse levels. Modernist purists reacted strongly against the Portland Building’s ornamental wall, color painting, and historical references, and Graves endured a vocal backlash from the architectural community and the general public alike. Various critics denounced the building as “an enlarged jukebox,” an “oversized Christmas package,” a “marzipan monstrosity,” a “histrionic masquerade,” and a kind of “pop surrealism.” Yet others approvingly noted its classical references as constituting a “symbolic temple” and praised the building as a courageous architectural adventure.

Few buildings in the modern era have elicited such a dichotomy of opinions. Whatever history’s verdict will eventually be, the Portland Building, like the AT&T tower, is an early marker of postmodernist innovation that borrowed from the lively, if more-or-less garish, language of pop culture. The night-lit dazzle of entertainment sites such as Las Vegas, and the carnival colors, costumes, and fantasy of theme-park props, all lie behind the Portland Building design, which many critics regard as a vindication of architectural populism against the pretension of modernist elitism.^[1]