Word: portlands
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...