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M+, Hong Kong, © Michael Graves Architecture & Design
Michael Graves 邁克爾．格雷夫斯
Drawing, Portland Public Service Building (1979–1982), Portland, Oregon, USA 美國俄勒岡州波特蘭公共服務大樓（1979至1982年）繪圖
1980
The American architect Michael Graves won a city-sponsored competition to design a municipal services building in Portland, Oregon, in 1979. Completed in 1982, the resulting structure, known as the Portland Building, was the first major realised example of architectural postmodernism. Like images of the controversial, widely published project, the style quickly spread, helping to define architectural aesthetics and conversations worldwide into the 1990s.
The squat, fifteen-storey building is visually divided into three parts: a dark green loggia base, a beige body punctuated by a grid of square windows and decorated with abstracted columns and other elements from Western classical architecture, and a roof topped with a series of smaller structures. Portlandia, a symbolic copper repoussé sculpture by Raymond Kaskey, stands above the entrance. Graves’s liberal use of colour and reference to past architectural forms—for example, oversized, ruddy red ‘keystones’ on the east and west facades—mark a definite shift away from modernism’s lack of ornament and emphasis on expression of structure. Playfully exaggerated mouldings and a consistent, earthy palette of paint carry Graves’s figural approach through to the offices inside.
The squat, fifteen-storey building is visually divided into three parts: a dark green loggia base, a beige body punctuated by a grid of square windows and decorated with abstracted columns and other elements from Western classical architecture, and a roof topped with a series of smaller structures. Portlandia, a symbolic copper repoussé sculpture by Raymond Kaskey, stands above the entrance. Graves’s liberal use of colour and reference to past architectural forms—for example, oversized, ruddy red ‘keystones’ on the east and west facades—mark a definite shift away from modernism’s lack of ornament and emphasis on expression of structure. Playfully exaggerated mouldings and a consistent, earthy palette of paint carry Graves’s figural approach through to the offices inside.
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