A Pied Piper of Hobbit Land

By Wolf Von Eckardt

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.

Graves is not the first architect to substitute stage-set design for architecture. He acknowledges the influence of Etienne-Louis Boullee and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, 18th century French architects best known for their drawings of visionary, mystic buildings. Their ponderous geometric forms, reminiscent of the funerary art of ancient Egypt, reflected a period given to the occult and secret societies like the Freemasons.

Boullee's and Ledoux's architectural visions served little functional purpose. They were symbols, feelings and ideas given form. Graves' shrine must accommodate a modern office and does so with little enthusiasm. The two-story entrance lobby has so much glossy blue paint that it looks like an empty swimming pool. In the second-floor meeting rooms and art gallery, there is conspicuous art deco decor, mainly thick pipelike chair moldings sprayed with glossy epoxy paint. The office space is distinguished only by windows that look like portholes on an ocean liner, except that they are square (the city council increased them from Graves' original 3 ft. by 3 ft. to 4 ft. by 4 ft.). Some frame splendid views of Mount St. Helens and the Willamette River.

Graves, who is a painter and sculptor as well as an architect, had never built a large building before. A professor of architecture at Princeton, he has won awards for houses and additions to houses, but his national reputation rests mainly on his drawings of architectural fantasies done in muted pastels, dusty pinks, cobalt blues and gray-greens. A Graves drawing sells for as much as $10,000.

He won the Portland job in April 1980. Explains Earl Bradfish, Portland's director of the office of general services: "We drew up exact specifications for the building and invited teams of architects and contractors to propose not only a design but also how it would be built and at what cost." It seemed like a commendably sensible procedure. There were eleven applicants. The jury of businessmen, officials and other interested local citizens took the proposals to New York City to consult Architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee on narrowing the choice to three.

The other two finalists, along with their contractors, were Vancouver's Arthur Erickson Architects and the Philadelphia office of Mitchell/Giurgola, both at least as prominent as and surely more experienced than Graves. Erickson proposed an upside-down ziggurat of reflective glass, and Mitchell/Giurgola came up with a half-glass, half-masonry building with a lofty atrium. Johnson leaned strongly toward Graves' design, calling it "a landmark from inception" that would be noted around the world. Said Mayor Ivancie, with a measure of civic hyperbole: "It will be our Eiffel Tower. It will put us on the architectural map."

"What finally decided the contest," says Bradfish, "was simply that the Graves building better met our specifications for space than the others. It was cheaper to build and, because of the small windows, more energy efficient."

But in Portland the citizens and city council were not convinced. "An oversized, beribboned Christmas package," said Pietro Belluschi, 83, a Portland resident who is one of the country's most respected architects. Belluschi, however, later relented and said he was getting used to it. Other objectors persisted, calling the building "a turkey" and "a giant jukebox." Graves was asked to simplify his design. He considered this a terrible setback and lobbied hard and semisuccessfully to get his garlands back. The Metropolitan Arts Commission held a competition for the Portlandia sculpture, to be paid for through the city's public art program.

Graves has since won other important commissions, notably a 27-story corporate headquarters in downtown Louisville, Ky., for Humana Inc., and an addition to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, designed by Bauhaus Architect Marcel Breuer. Yet it remains to be seen whether Graves' heavy-handed Pop surrealism--"a dash of deco and a whiff of Ledoux," as leading Postmodernist Architect Robert Venturi calls it--will influence workaday architecture. New inspirations are needed, but they should be inspirations that are real, joyful and charming.

-- By Wolf Von Eckardt

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