Michael Graves' new office building is dangerous Pop surrealism
The new Public Service Building in Portland, Ore., is nearly completed—on schedule and within budget. Yet the storm of controversy the building has raised is likely to rage long after its official dedication on Oct. 2. The issue is style. With this one brazen gesture, the architect, Michael Graves, 48, attempts to supplant modern architecture's heroic industrialism with postmodern architecture's heroic . . . what? Perhaps it might be called Pop surrealism that uses classic design elements the way Walt Disney cartoons used the physiognomy of a rodent to create Mickey Mouse. For all its playfulness, however, the Portland Building is dangerous. Modern architecture is ripe for a radical change, but Graves would replace Satan with Beelzebub.
The trouble is that Graves' zeal to overcome glass-box monotony has led him into the increasingly popular, mystic fantasy world that is populated by Tolkien's hobbits, Dungeons & Dragons, sundry comic-strip characters, and the likes of the rubbery movie star E.T. It is a world that is almost beyond beauty or ugliness; almost, because the Portland Building is ugly. Unfortunately, Graves' irrational games have electrified architecture students everywhere, and they are now imitating him. He has become their Pied Piper.
Weird, heavy and polychrome, the 15-story Portland Building might be Sarastro's Temple of Isis magically transposed from some second-rate set for Mozart's The Magic Flute into the shadows of banal skyscrapers along Portland's Transit Mall. It takes up the entire block between the Italian Renaissance city hall and the neoclassical Multnomah County Courthouse.
The tile-covered base of the temple is a muddy blue-green that looks gloomier on the street than it did in Graves' delicate pastel drawings. It contains arcades on three sides, which lead to a restaurant, bookstore and several shops. It also contains a rectangular entrance portal that will eventually double as the pedestal for Raymond Kaskey's Portlandia, a female figure symbolizing the city's virtues.
The concrete bulk of the building is painted pale yellow and dotted with even rows of square windows. It is decorated with seven-story-high terra cotta pilasters, set against mirror glass and capped by what looks like the metal spout of a sugar box. Above the pilasters, on the front facade, is a five-story-high keystone that is topped off by what Graves calls a baldachino, a sort of lookout. On two sides the building is garnished with masonry garlands. At first these garlands were to be metallic fluttering-in-the-wind affairs, but the city council vetoed them as frills far too inviting for pigeons. Portland Mayor Francis Ivancie, an enthusiastic booster of Graves' design, persuaded the council to dip into a building contingency fund for a $250,000 flattened and stylized version of the garlands.
Graves' original idea of placing a village of small, temple-like pavilions on the blue-painted top of his building has also been simplified. Still, in its overall effect, the completed building manages to retain the quixotic quality of Graves' early sketches.