Portland, Oregon, October 1982. In the city centre a fifteen-storey administrative building opens that resembles no other municipal building of its kind in America. It is not a prism of reflective glass, like any modern city hall of those years: it is a massive cube in peach and turquoise, with a painted rusticated façade, an enormous stylised keystone running down from the roof to mid-height, and a row of small decorative columns supporting nothing. The Portland Public Service Building — known as the Portland Building — is the first major public work of American postmodernism, and its author, Michael Graves, becomes overnight the most discussed architect in the United States.
From the New York Five to colour
Graves is born in Indianapolis in 1934, studies in Cincinnati and at Harvard, and in 1960 wins the Prix de Rome, which takes him to spend two years at the American Academy in Rome, where he studies Renaissance and Baroque Italian architecture up close. Back in the United States, he teaches at Princeton for his whole career. In 1972 he is one of the New York Five, alongside Eisenman, Meier, Gwathmey and Hejduk, and in those years he designs white, abstract houses close to Le Corbusier's language. Then, in the second half of the 1970s, he changes course: he introduces colour, references to classical and Egyptian history, softened forms, and becomes one of the leading figures of postmodernism alongside Robert Venturi and Charles Moore.
The competition for Portland's city hall is in 1979, and it is Graves' first major public commission. The brief is strict: a reduced budget (about 29 million dollars, much less than average for a building of that scale) and a request for maximum usable floor area. Graves responds with a compact volume, almost a cube, which minimises structural costs and frees up budget for the façade's decoration. The result is a building whose offices, inside, are anonymous and have small windows — much of the criticism will come precisely from those who work there — but whose exterior façade becomes a manifesto.
The façade as manifesto
The Portland Building's façade is painted, not sculpted: bands of colour — beige, peach, turquoise, dark red — imitate a classical rustication and entablature, with a large abstract keystone running down from the cornice to a third of the building's height. Small columns, with no structural function, run along a decorative band. It is architecture literally painted over an entirely conventional reinforced-concrete structure, and this is precisely its provocation: the decoration does not arise from the construction, as the modernists wanted, but is superimposed on it, like a garment.
Reactions are immediate and opposite. The magazine Progressive Architecture calls it a historic event; the critic Paul Goldberger, in the New York Times, hails it as America's first major postmodern public work. But the city employees who work there complain from the start of windows too small and offices too dark, and over the years the building suffers real technical problems, from water infiltration to maintenance costs, so much so that in 2020 the city begins a deep structural restoration, while keeping the historic façade, by then recognised as a landmark of the discipline, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 2011.
From concrete to kitchen objects
After Portland, Graves builds the Humana Building in Louisville, Kentucky (1985), a pink granite tower with a suspended loggia and a panoramic terrace, judged by many his most successful project, as well as hotels for Disney, in Florida, that openly quote Egyptian and classical architecture in a playful key. But the wider public knows him for something else: from 1985 he designs objects for the Italian company Alessi, including the «9093» kettle, with a small red plastic bird that whistles when the water boils — one of the best-selling design objects of the twentieth century, and proof that the same sensibility that had coloured a city hall could also sit on a stove.
Swans, dolphins and seven dwarfs as columns
In 1990 Graves designs for Walt Disney World, in Florida, the twin Swan and Dolphin hotels, meant to face each other across an artificial lake and together answer the resort's demand for convention space. Graves describes the Dolphin, the larger of the two, as «a mountain coming out of the Everglades»: a truncated pyramid in coral and turquoise, crowned by two huge stylised dolphin statues fifteen metres tall, while its twin, the Swan, carries pairs of equally giant swans on its roof. Graves does not design only the building: he also signs the lamps, the chairs, the carpet pattern and even the restaurant china, applying at a tiny scale the same decorative sensibility as the Portland façade.
The following year, in 1991, he completes the Team Disney Building in Burbank, California, the Walt Disney Company's administrative headquarters. His first design is rejected by Disney executives, and Graves comes back with a different idea: using the Seven Dwarfs from Snow White as caryatids, the sculpted figures that in classical architecture replace columns. Six metres tall, they literally support the entrance pediment, in a gesture that sums up Graves entirely: quoting the history of architecture — the caryatid is a Greek invention as old as the Erechtheion in Athens — with an irony that only a company like Disney could commission.