by Ian Volner
“A lot of things have changed,” Bunshaft told the crowd. “We used to give prizes to architects for doing buildings. Now we give prizes to architects for drawing.”70
Stunned as Michael was (to say nothing of the audience), Bunshaft’s barb hit close to home: Postmodernism wasn’t much more than yet another 1970s paper architecture. It had, however, scored one major victory. It had won the heart of Philip Johnson.
“The dean of American architecture,” as he was invariably called, Johnson had been omnipresent in the field for more than forty years. It was Johnson who helped coin the term International Style, the title of the groundbreaking 1932 exhibition he curated with the historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock at MoMA; it was Johnson who, in his decades-long association with the museum—interrupted only by an infamous fascist interlude in the late 1930s—had done as much as anyone to advance the Modernist cause in America.71 All this he was able to do thanks to a lucky confluence of extraordinary wealth (he was an heir to an aluminum fortune), excellent taste (he owned everything from Poussins to Warhols), and a genius for friendship backed up by immense personal charm. Already he had shown an adaptability that had seen his buildings change with the times, shifting gears more than once since the Mies-inflected elegance of his first and most famous project, the Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. The transparent pavilion that Johnson used as his country getaway had entered legend, along with its owner’s wit: a lady visitor was reported to have said that she thought it very beautiful, but she could never live there. “Madame,” Johnson replied, “I haven’t asked you to.”72
By the mid-1970s, Johnson had begun to feel that his work had grown unpalatably stale. He had been intrigued, in a noncommittal way, by Eisenman’s abstruse theoretics and had penned an approving afterword to the second edition of Five Architects. But he needed something more pungent, more optically stimulating. He had always been a history buff with a penchant for classicism, and in 1978 he emerged as a fully formed Postmodernist, with the first serious commission for a large-scale building in the new style, the AT&T Building on Manhattan’s Madison Avenue.
His overcoat thrown, Frank Lloyd Wright–like, over his shoulders, Johnson would appear on the cover of Time magazine, clutching a model of the masonry-clad tower with its distinctive, grandfather-clock broken pediment. But the building would take almost five years to complete, and in the meantime Johnson wanted to use his considerable clout to advance the cause of Postmodernism. He found his chance when he was approached to chair the selection committee for the Portland Public Service Building, a planned government office building in Portland, Oregon.
The project had already appeared on Michael’s radar after a brief visit to the city to speak at Portland’s local chapter of the American Institute of Architects. During a celebratory dinner following the talk, Michael found himself seated beside a local architect, Edward Wundram, who’d been agitating for Mayor Neil Goldschmidt to look beyond the Pacific Northwest and consider a national architect who could bring the planned municipal building to national attention. Turning to Michael, Wundram put it bluntly.
“What can we do to encourage somebody like you to do a competition for a city hall here in Portland?” he queried.73
“Ask,” answered Michael.74
Johnson and Michael were friendly but not quite friends, sympathetic by architectural happenstance, though unalike in almost every other particular. “My feeling about Philip is he was a marvelous cheerleader for architecture,” Michael said, though one “without any beliefs”: flippancy was the flip side of the Johnson charisma, and at the regular summits he convened at Manhattan’s Century Club, the privileged architect-invitees were expected to keep up a certain level of jousting repartee. Michael could dish as well as anyone, though with his sensitive nature he could rarely take, and at the black-tie soirees his host rarely seated him close to exchange barbed bon mots.75 But Johnson had Peter Eisenman for that, and others; what he appreciated in Michael was his talent. When John DaSilva, Michael’s future student, cold-called his illustrious New Canaan neighbor to ask him where he should go to school, Johnson replied with a question of his own: “Who is that young fellow at Princeton that is changing architecture right now?” That was all the advice Johnson felt the young man needed.76
With Johnson heading up the search, Michael had an ace in the hole, but the commission was far from clinched. The limited competition would see Michael pitted against a pair of major firms: Arthur Erickson Associates and Mitchell/Giurgola Architects. Mitchell/Giurgola’s scheme, a large concrete donut, was significantly over budget, though that didn’t appear to faze Romaldo Giurgola: over breakfast one morning, he told Michael that if the city couldn’t pay, they didn’t have to hire him. The one Michael worried about was Erickson. His proposal was stridently Modernist, a glass box on stilts with a plaza slipped under the elevated mass. Despite his recent PoMo conversion, Johnson had referred to the Canadian designer as “by far the greatest architect in Canada, and maybe the greatest on this continent”—high praise, indeed.77 (“I didn’t know if he meant it,” Michael added.)78
Staking their bid on a bold statement, the Graves team sought to answer Mayor Goldschmidt’s call for something that would bring a little Jane Jacobs–style street life back to downtown. The forty-thousand-square-foot site on Portland’s Pioneer Square was a prime location, one that seemed to beg for a monument, but the Portland city government was famed for its fiscal conservatism and would be sticklers about the skimpy budget of $22,420,000: “Not a penny more nor a penny less was the mantra,” recalled Karen Nichols.79 Michael and his associates would have to thread the needle, finding a sweet spot between the audacious and the down-to-earth.
Philip Johnson and his circle, in Dallas for Johnson’s AIA Gold Medal ceremony, 1978. Back row, left to right: Michael, Cesar Pelli, Charles Gwathmey, Peter Eisenman; front row: Frank Gehry, Charles Moore, Johnson, Stanley Tigerman, Robert A. M. Stern
How they did it is laid bare in referential sketches and preparatory drawings as remarkable as anything the firm ever produced, bearing the traces of everything—from Cubism to Krierism—that shaped Michael in the 1970s. Portland would be the first instance of his mature Postmodernist work, but the process behind it testified to all the potential yet latent in his practice.
Keeping the facade as its subject, the design began with the assumption of vertical symmetry and of a corporeal hierarchy, with a thick base, a regular shaft, and a roof crowned by a decorative border. But this was no Krierian archetype: punctuated by round, square, and rectangular windows, rigged out with oriels and corbels and recesses, Michael’s iterative drawings cast the elevation as a playground of forms, each motioning in a different direction, toward a different reading. Though freighted with classical elements, the appeal to anthropomorphism was so strong that the building might have had no easy typological classification. Seen together in the sketchbooks, the different versions of Portland appear to scuttle across the page like a swarm of mechanical insects [PLATE 30].
Reduced, for the purposes of the competition, to a more temperate outline, the scheme still preserved much of the madcap creativity that went into it. On the flanks, Michael imagined billowing garlands atop oversize pilasters; on the northwestern face, a statue of “Lady Commerce” would swing dramatically; and high above, a team of little aediculae—shrines or huts, each one different—would dot the roof, as though the top of the building had been colonized by a tiny trulli village. Historical allusion, civic character, and human scale would all be present, a fulfillment of the Postmodernist ideal more picturesque than Venturi’s “decorated sheds” and less facetious than Johnson’s corporate clock case for AT&T.
With Johnson’s sage counsel, the citizen jury opted for Michael Graves Architect’s proposal by a vote of four to one. They had been given further encouragement by their technical advisers, who assured them that Graves’s was the cheapest and the easiest to construct. He had kept most of his windows very small—a bonus during the
1970s energy crisis—and for all the exuberance of its exterior, the floor plan was reassuringly conventional. Johnson hailed the decision, announcing that the new Portland Building “would be a landmark from inception, watched and studied by the public as well as architects around the world.”80 All Portland had to do was build it.
VII
THE TOWER
THE DAY AFTER Michael Graves Architect’s winning bid for the Portland Building was announced, the public began to weigh in—heavily. Newspaper writers called the design “a fortress,” “ominous and inhumane”; letter writers lambasted it as “an experiment in architectural fad” and “an affront.”1
That was just for starters. All through the spring of 1980, architecture’s Battle of Portland raged on, a spat that would pit architect against architect, Portlander against Portlander. The citizen jury would have to be seconded by a city council vote, and the debate that ensued drew in two mayors, the national media, and the architecture community on both coasts, becoming a referendum on Michael’s design philosophy and Postmodernism as a whole.
Leading the charge was the elder statesman of Portland architecture, the man who had all but single-handedly established the Modernist tradition in the Pacific Northwest: Pietro Belluschi. The eighty-one-year-old Belluschi took dead aim at the Graves scheme in a case made directly to the city council, savaging the design as “a large jukebox or beribboned Christmas gift,” rife with “visual chaos.”2 Belluschi and Johnson had a long-running enmity dating back several decades, and in Michael’s proposal Belluschi saw an incursion onto his home turf by the dastardly easterner.
He wasn’t far wrong: Johnson had tipped the scales for Michael from the outset, bowling over the citizen jurors during an elegant luncheon in his Manhattan offices, where he’d praised the Postmodernist scheme as a radical break that could put Portland on the design-world map. (He took no payment for his advisory post, requesting only a couple of the Northwest’s famous Chinook salmon.) The Johnson name had carried the project thus far, but in the chambers of Portland’s government, Michael had only one real friend—his old Cincinnati acquaintance Robert Frasca, then practicing in Oregon. The Graves proposal was innovative and fresh, Frasca told the council, and such flaws as it had were the inevitable outgrowth of a flawed brief. “If the materials aren’t the best,” he averred, “neither is the budget.”3
Final perspectival of the Portland Building as originally submitted for the competition, 1980
Portland’s incommodious lobby, the source of much complaint from visitors and employees
The financial lid that had been placed on the project had been an issue from the start. Edward Wundram—also pulling for the Graves side—had cautioned Michael early to stay within the budget, and while the tip had been essential to the firm’s success, it was also the cause of much of the public outcry; in the eyes of many, the only thing recommending Michael’s scheme was its lowball estimate. For all the furor over the design’s aesthetic merit, the root problem was understood to be the penny-ante price tag insisted upon, with miserly resolve, by City Commissioner Frank Ivancie. Former mayor Neil Goldschmidt was no longer in a position to inveigle on the side of quality, having left Portland to join the Carter administration, and his replacement, Connie McCready, was struggling just to keep up with the byzantine process.
Muddying things further, the city council proceeded to make demands that would increase the cost of Michael’s proposal while attempting to offset these by corralling its more outré accessories. The garlands would have to come off, but the windows could be (slightly) larger; the exterior walls would have to be built of sturdy concrete instead of the cheaper stucco Michael had specified, and the lobby’s grand staircase would have to go. Greater provisions would have to be made for disabled access. The rooftop aediculae were nixed. In an additional twist, as Graves and company rushed to make these changes for a second-round review, they found they would not be alone. Arthur Erickson’s firm would have another shot as well, retooling its high-Modernist box so that the city of Portland could continue mulling its stylistic options.
“Threats of a suit and countersuits” followed, reports the historian Meredith Clausen.4 Michael’s contractor complained that Erickson’s plan had fallen short of the brief, while Erickson’s contractor said the same of the Graves submission. The standoff culminated in a second presentation before the city council, and while Michael entered the room with a definite advantage, he needed to make the case for a design that, notwithstanding Postmodernism’s notional populism, didn’t seem terribly popular. Warming to his theme, Michael explained that American architecture was embroiled in an argument—
an argument…about the direction of architecture. You find yourselves very interestingly in the middle of it. You find yourselves having to choose between schemes that represent on the one hand the human attitude, the way we see ourselves represented in our buildings, or on the other hand, the craft or traditions of making the building. It’s your choice. We feel, however, that to give the city its legibility, to give comprehension to the park and understanding of this particular and rather glorious site…we have an enormous opportunity here to not only say something about city government, but to say something about any building in the city.
His address, wrote Clausen, “was met by stunned silence.”5 The local politicos still didn’t understand it, but they were evidently impressed by the strength of Michael’s conviction. Moreover, they had an impatient Ivancie standing over them, eager to start work as soon as possible in order to lock in a favorable interest rate. After winning the original contest by the near-unanimous vote of the citizen jury, the commission was awarded to Michael effectively by default: construction on the Graves design started in Pioneer Square in July 1980, without the city council having ever bothered to declare an official winner.
SHORTLY AFTER PORTLAND was completed, Michael recalled attending the AIA national convention in New Orleans. The event organizers had printed up festive buttons with a picture of his building on them, and as a form of protest some of the membership had printed up buttons of their own that read “I DON’T DIG GRAVES.”6
Rarely in the history of American architecture has a building been met simultaneously with such cacophonous opprobrium and acclaim. An in-flight magazine on a major airline put it on the cover: “It’s the Building of the Future,” the headline read.7 Frank Ivancie—now Mayor Ivancie, having bested McCready in the 1980 election—reportedly declared that the building would be “Portland’s Eiffel Tower.”8 All three national networks descended upon the city for the building’s opening in 1982, and Michael appeared on all of them, surrounded by baton-twirling majorettes and a festive balloon launch. “Finally,” he declared from the podium, “architecture has come home.”9
For the Postmodernists and their sympathizers, the building’s debut was a vindication. Charles Jencks hailed it as “the first major monument of Postmodernism,” conclusive evidence that “one can build with art, ornament, and symbolism on a grand scale, and in a language the inhabitants understand.”10 The scholars Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman would laud it—“a truly civic building, permeated with dignity, scale, color, vitality.”11 And the New York Times’s Paul Goldberger, who had cottoned to the urbanist aspirations of the Postmodernist camp, greeted it with applause, calling it “a beacon, illuminating the distance we have come from the moment when the steel-and-glass vocabulary of orthodox modern architecture seemed the only way in which to make a large, public building.”12 Even before its unveiling, Goldberger had already baptized Michael as “the most original voice that American architecture has produced in some time.”13
The doubters were equally outspoken. “Why is this better than a Glass Box?” asked Architectural Record’s Douglas Brenner. “For all the messages it was meant to convey, the Portland Building remains eerily mute.”14 The distinguished architectural publication Skyline ran a special issue on the project, lifted mostly from an IAUS symposium during which Portland came in
for abuse from Alan Colquhoun, Kurt Forster, and, stunningly, Philip Johnson, who pronounced himself “disappointed.”15 Figures from the mainstream press were even less restrained: “a rather condescending exercise performed by a sophisticated academic on a culturally average community,” wrote Newsweek’s Carter Wiseman; Time’s Wolf von Eckardt ripped the project as “dangerous Pop surrealism.”16
More damning were the reviews from the projects’ users, the municipal employees of Portland. From day one, they complained that the low-ceilinged interiors and small windows made for a substandard office environment. Workers reported getting headaches and feeling distracted by the drone from the building mechanicals, and they groused about the narrow and dimly lit ground-floor lobby, which had to be renovated only a couple of years after the building opened. Ivancie finally relented on the garlands, which were added to the exterior in a flattened appliqué of glass and concrete, and in 1985 the statue over the door—created by the artist Raymond Kaskey, its title changed by Michael from the prosaic Lady Commerce to the more poetic Portlandia (whence the popular television show)—was finally hoisted into place [PLATE 31]. But while local Portlanders have long appreciated the building’s attempt to stand out in the streetscape, they’ve never quite made it their own. Over the past three decades, with the building increasingly suffering from structural failures and general decay, the city has continually vacillated between restoring it and demolishing it.
Looking back, Michael said, “The negativity was greater than I thought it would be.”17 His skin always had been somewhat permeable, and the vociferousness of the project’s detractors did not go unnoticed. Until the end of his life Michael voiced understandable ambivalence toward his most famous built work, wishing that the windows had been larger, the swags more detailed. Yet there were so many other parties to blame: the client; the brief; Emery Roth & Sons, the venerable New York firm that partnered with the Graves office as architects of record to counterbalance the Princetonians’ perceived lack of experience. Michael felt a good measure of pride in what he believed to be Portland’s successes, but with so many other chefs in the kitchen, he could ascribe its obvious failures to other people’s mistakes—and this, the building’s alibi, was to be decisive in what followed.
