The Portland Building

Above is a photograph of the Portland Building, a 1982 construction that was labeled the first post-modern building in the country.  It houses 1,300 civic employees in Portland, Oregon, and now the city fathers have a decision to make about it -- whether to fix the darn thing or tear it down and start over again.

If you have seen the television show Portlandia, you have seen pictures of the building and the 35-foot copper statue that looms over its entrance, as seen in the photo below.

When the city council approved construction of the building in the early 1980s, Oregon's economy was shedding jobs and money was tight.  Following the design advice of starchitect Philip Johnson, the politicians approved the cheapest proposal, submitted by architect Michael Graves.  His vision was a highly decorated square box painted in unusual colors.  The cost was reported variously as $24 million, $25 million and $29 million.

Some people love the Portland Building.  It won an American Institute of Architecture Honor award in 1983.  In 2011 it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

But not everybody was pleased with the result.  Shortly after it opened, city workers began to complain about low ceilings and small windows that let in very little light, a constant concern in Portland's gray climate.  Entrances were small and dark, unwelcoming in a city that prided itself on its downtown pedestrian culture.  

Here, in the center below, is one of the finalists that was rejected.  It would have cost $1 million to $2 million more than the Graves project. 

The proposed building was modern, not postmodern, but it had large windows and was perched over a large pedestrian walkway area.  Its design came from the well-regarded Arthur Erickson of rainy Vancouver, B.C., whose native climate perhaps made him more sensitive to the light and foot traffic concerns of a city like Portland.

Then the problems began.

Functional Issues

In a 1997 the publication Architronic ran a critique called "Michael Graves's Portland Building and Its Problems."  Here is a short excerpt:

        User-unfriendliness, virtually all of which resulted from clear-cut design flaws, was 

        only part of the problem and in the long run, perhaps the least significant.  The con-

        struction problems that began emerging almost immediately after the building opened

        proved far more serious.  From the beginning, windows leaked, floor levels undulated

        so that office chairs rolled away rather than remaining in place, and salts leached from

        from the exterior tiles at both the street level and in the "pilaster" above.  In less than

        a decade after the building opened, the entrance had to be redone to render it more 

        visible; at the same time the lobby and other spaces were remodeled and circulation 

        improved.  Then, in the fall of 1995, a minor leak in the roof led to the discovery of

        major structural flaws.

Earlier this year, The Oregonian, the city's daily paper, reported that Portland faced a decision: to spend $95 million on an overhaul to fix the Portland Building, to sell it (to whom was not clear) or to tear the building down and build something better at a cost of $110 million to $400 million.

Among the issues:

        -- Water leaks "from just about every surface -- the roof, windows, siding, grout,"

        -- Structural deficiencies that would not have satisfied Portland's 1980 seismic codes 

            and that appear more threatening still as earthquakes have been judged more 

            likely in the Northwest in the intervening years, and

        -- A needed complete restoration of the building exterior.

City leaders seem to be favoring the expensive retrofits, perhaps to be financed by a bond measure to be repaid over many years.

Quotes about the Portland Building

". . . an imposing 15-story edifice that's one of the most hated buildings in America.  The facade is an off-putting hodgepodge of faux classical columns and useless decorative elements, and penitentiary-like small windows with a depressing color scheme . . . . 'It's all gaudy imagery with no tie to the location,' says Jason Fifield, an associate at Ankrom Moisan Architects in Portland.  The interior isn't much better -- it's described as dark and claustrophobic."

Bunny Wong,

"The World's Ugliest Buildings"

Travel and Leisure, Oct. 2009

"It's not architecture, it's packaging. I said at the time there were only two good things about it: 'It will put Portland on the map, architecturally, and it will never be repeated.' "

Pietro Belluschi,

1972 AIA Gold Medal winner

quoted by Rebecca Morris,

"30 Years of Planning

Produce City for the '90s"

The Oregonian, Feb. 19, 1990

"I can't think (of) that as being monumental.  I think (Graves is) a turning point, sort of a symbol of our discontent or of our superficiality.  You see, he has come to think in terms of our society nowadays, conditioned much more than we realize, by the television, by the communication media, and by all the advertising and all the fluffy, the fashionable forms which are today and . . .  disappear tomorrow.  It's part of our culture to have nothing lasting, nothing serious . . . . in fact, even our thinking in regard to buildings that are going to be there for a long time."

Pietro Belluschi,

Oral History Interview, 1984,

Smithsonian Archives of American Art

"It has not aged well.  To be more precise: it looked like shit. . . .  

"Meanwhile, across town, we have Pietro Belluschi's 1947, aluminum-clad Equitable Life Building (which) won the AIA 25-year award in 1982. . . . The Equitable Building looks timeless."

Alexandra Lange,

"Portland + Timelessness,' April 3, 2013,

The Design Observer Group