Portland Building

Michael Graves’s office building for the city of Portland is a cube with façades like a giant poster: stylised pilasters, a cone-shaped keystone and bands of small square windows, in terracotta, teal and cream. It was the first major postmodern public building in the United States.

In 1979 the city of Portland launched a competition for a new municipal office building on a tight budget. Graves won with a design that was cheap to build but loaded with symbols: classical elements enlarged and simplified as in a drawing. The building was completed in 1982 and immediately became a symbol of postmodernism, loved and hated.

The criticism was not only about the form. The small windows made for dark offices, and the building suffered from leaks and poor air quality. In 2017–2020 it was thoroughly renovated with new cladding that preserved Graves’s design. Above the entrance stands Raymond Kaskey’s sculpture Portlandia from 1985, the second-largest copper sculpture in the United States after the Statue of Liberty.

• Postmodernism
• Michael Graves