Michael Graves being interviewed in Portland, October 2014 (photo by Brian Libby)
BRIAN LIBBY
In the late 1970s and early '80s, Portland was in the midst of an identity crisis and the beginning of a transformation. And Michael Graves, the renowned architect who died yesterday at 80, helped share that transformation with the world.
If his landmark Portland Building would turn out to be as problematic as it was bold, an icon with unhappy occupants, it nevertheless expressed a quirky exuberance that fit the city well. Even today Graves's Portland Building is probably the city's most controversial work of architecture, and certainly its best known. Even the nickname "Portlandia," which has become a sort of shorthand for a whole segment of the population, comes from the statue sitting atop his building.
After the '70s had seen a host of tall but banal office towers constructed downtown (but seemingly made to fit interchangeably into any city), we were ready to start rethinking the city from the ground up — literally — with a focus on the pedestrian experience, mass transit and public space. Waterfront Park had opened in 1978, for example, and plans were already underway for what would become Pioneer Courthouse Square. And when the city began a design competition for a new municipal office building next to City Hall, the candidates reflected that desire to embrace the public realm. Finalist Arthur Erickson's building, for example, stood on stilts in order to allow an extended open-air plaza on the ground floor. Similarly, Michael Graves's submission offered a covered loggia around the first floor of the building on three sides, a way for people to gather outside but protected from the rain.
Yet the winning Graves design for the Portland Building ultimately was about something more. Although the architect had first gained notoriety as a member of the New York Five (including Peter Eisenman, Richard Meier, Charles Gwathmey and John Hejduk), who professed allegiance to a pure form of architectural modernism, Graves would ultimately break ranks to join with architects like Robert Venturi in embracing a kind of new classism, or post-modernism, that drew heavily from architectural forms of the past even as it equally embraced a colorful, almost cartoonish playfulness.
Michael Graves's Portland Building would become the internationally-known symbol of the postmodern movement in architecture. While Venturi and others had been designing this way before Graves, the Portland Building would become known as the centerpiece of the movement. Even today, if one opens virtually any textbook history of American architecture, the Portland Building is one of only two local buildings likely to be chronicled inside, along with the Pietro Belluschi-designed Equitable Building. And Belluschi, as many remember, was at the time the Portland Building's harshest critic, calling Graves's design a jukebox and questioning whether it was even true architecture.
Portland Building (photo by Brian Libby)
Belluschi would certainly not be the only one to lob criticism at the Portland Building, and much of it was well deserved - although in a way the city could take blame for as much or more than Graves. As has been well documented, the building's tiny windows made it a dreary place to work from 9 to 5. Graves's design was about the aesthetics of its exterior packaging, to which the honeycomb windows seemed to be a part. Yet amidst the '70s energy crisis it was the client's stipulation that the windows be undersized.
When significant structural problems and leaks became evident last year, necessitating a restoration that could cost some $90 million (although half of that coming from relocation costs during construction), the Portland Building became front-page news again, particularly as members of City Council called it a "white elephant" and questioned the prudence of throwing so much money at a poorly constructed building with scarcely any natural light.
It was into this setting that an ailing, wheelchair-bound Graves traveled across the country last year to come back to Portland. Graves participated in a sold-out talk with Randy Gragg at the Portland Art Museum that brought the opportunity not only to look at the broader context of the architect's career, but to revisit the ideas and inspirations that gave birth to the Portland Building.
The crowd was positive and respectful that night, and Graves seemed to enjoy the applause. Anthony Belluschi, son of Pietro and an accomplished architect in his own right, even met with Graves at the end of the talk and invited him to dinner the next time he should visit the city. Yet Graves also clearly still felt stung by the criticism, too, joking to the crowd that a produce vendor he'd seen outside before the talk had probably sold out of tomatoes, to be used as projectiles hurled at the stage on which he spoke.
The fact that Graves still carried the wound of the Portland Building's detractors may have been more than just sensitivity. In his break with the New York Five and his embrace of postmodernism, Graves had seemed to want not just to switch styles but to embrace a kind of populism that was the antithesis of academic criticism. He would go on to design many buildings for Disney, unafraid to make playful, even ridiculous moves like shaping Greco-Roman columns into the bodies of the Seven Dwarves, for example. (New York Five to Seven Dwarves could almost be the title of his biography.) And Graves would gain even more notoriety designing housewares for Target. Ultimately his teakettles may be the most famous of Graves' designs. This wasn't just a matter of making money off mass-produced items, but bringing design to the masses. I may find a lot of it unbearably trite and ugly, but I appreciate the spirit and inspiration behind it.
Portland Building from 2nd & Main (top) and street-level view (photos by Brian Libby)
The same intent was clear when Graves, after a 2003 infection left him paralyzed from the waist down, embarked on a new chapter of his career in recent years designing user-friendly and happily colorful products for hospitals. Quite simply, he wanted to create designs that made people smile. Indeed, despite his decades long career as an architect and an equally long tenure as a Princeton professor, there was something child-like about Graves and his inclinations: not in the sense of being simplistic or naive, but in retaining an uncomplicated, guileless desire to make people happy.
While some might have construed the Portland Building as a cautionary tale, given not only the deficiencies of its construction and habitability but the long absence of design competitions held her as well as the relatively short-lived arc of postmodernism, it still seemed to have an effect on local architects and architecture. In the years after the Portland building would come postmodern and neoclassical local works like the KOIN Center and Pioneer Courthouse Square, which like Graves's design embraced historical forms in a more restrained but still playful manner. And slowly, we've started to see a renewed sense of color in our architecture. In a sense, the city has grown into its role as host for the Portland Building, with a quirkiness to its culture that in some respects matches the faux garlands and oversized historical tropes. There's something strikingly silly about the Portland building, just as there is about the culture that "Portlandia" lovingly mocks.
I'm so glad that Graves came back to Portland five months ago. It's a unique situation for any architect to have a building in his or her portfolio that is at once so iconic and so reviled, and the architect was willing to join in the debate about his building even as his health declined. Despite his condition, Graves remained as passionate as ever.
I remember interviewing him the morning of his public talk here, and being charmed by his generosity and passion. At the beginning our interview, for Architect magazine, an overzealous PR representative had told me that there was only time for ten minutes of conversation. I'd been planning for a half-hour's worth of questions and answers, and felt a bit panicked. But then ten minutes went by, and when the PR rep started to call time, Graves would have none of it. He was enjoying the conversation, he told her, and had plenty of energy for more. I got the longer interview I wanted, but I also got the sense that he wasn't just doing me a favor. He wanted to keep talking architecture and bandying about ideas until he took his last breath. And while it's sad to know that that fire has now died out, I think highly of Graves for his bravery, passion and compassion.
Today Portland is a very, very different place from the city of the early '80s a young Michael Graves found: teeming with energy and as far from banal as an American city gets. While it's doubtful that his landmark Portland Building will ever have universal acceptance, nor should it, many of history's most enduring works of art don't achieve that distinction either. Perhaps it is a final sign of coming full-circle that city officials recently announced that the Portland Building will be restored and not torn down. Should it have bigger windows? Should it have been built less cheaply and shoddily? Absolutely. But there's a dangerous tendency for societies to often reject 30 or 50-year-old buildings even as they embrace the century-old ones. I'm no lover of postmodern architecture, nor am I an apologist for the Portland Building's deficiencies. But I say it's too soon to let the building go, and it's a fitting tribute to Graves that we keep working to make this iconic work of architecture be all that it was meant to be.
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Graves had a great talent for image making: (billboard architecture) He also brought color to the forefront of architectural design. These ideas will live on. However, experiencing his spaces in person always gave me a cold feeling.
Posted by: john | March 14, 2015 at 12:33 AM
The challenge with the Portland Building is that it's not necessary Graves' best work, but his - and Postmodernism's - first major/public work, that makes it most historically significant. When viewed in context of all that followed (and largely catalyzed by the Building's clearly marking this form of Postmodernism as an established movement), it's less successfully materially, sculpturally, technically, spatially.
That it enabled and heralded a fleeting movement is indisputable. But is being first enough, particularly when a) there are so many extant and stronger buildings of his and b) it's clearly and continually so fundamentally technically flawed?
While it's now time to herald Michael's genuine and profound contributions, I do look forward to the continued debate about the building as icon v. architecture, and the ensuing discussion around the purpose of preservation that this work raises in a unique way..
Posted by: Jeff Joslin | March 14, 2015 at 09:27 AM
Jeff,
That discussion, Icon vs Humanitarian based approach to architecture is sorely needed. Those buildings and environments that sustain human beings deserve respect and preservation. Portland Building's respect for human beings is severely limited.(note photos rarely show the experience from the user experience but only the view from an adjacent buildings 10 floor up.
Posted by: john | March 16, 2015 at 10:51 AM