They’ve said the Portland Building is the world’s ugliest building! Writes “Bunny Wong,” who is bound to be a pseudonym:
In downtown Portland, OR, stands an imposing 15-story edifice that’s one of the most hated buildings in America. The façade is an off-putting hodgepodge of faux classical columns, strange and useless decorative elements, and penitentiary-like small windows, with a depressing color scheme of brown, pink, and white (throwing in some tacky blue glass for good measure). “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 been described as dark and claustrophobic.
Designed by famed architect Michael Graves, the Portland Building is an icon (for better or worse—mainly worse) of postmodernism, which was a major design trend in the 1980s, when the structure went up, but has since fallen from favor. And that’s a primary reason there’s not much enthusiasm for anything erected in that decade.
Personally, I was pretty smug about this building. In fact I thought it was one of the most amazing buildings in the world.
Nope. It’s ugly.
I can’t decide if it looks more like a late 80s sweater or an early 90s software manual. Both are horrible.
Ugly as hell: yes. Does it compare to the KOIN Center: not even close.
I have always thought that the strangest thing about the whole building is that the statue and main enterance is on the WRONG SIDE OF THE BUILDING. Clearly it should face the park.
Can we move the statue to the top of the White stag building or maybe to the top of the Beaverton side of the 26 tunnel to point that trident at people entering downtown?
Matt, I love the Portland Building, too. But if one considers “design” to necessarily include “use” when it comes to things like buildings, it has a lot of fail in it. I’m sure you’ve heard at least as many complaints about it from people who actually work in it as anyone. But if one separates “use” from the equation, yes I love the building.
It’s 80’s shopping mall kitsch. We should replace Portlandia with a huge statue of Tiffany and call it the 80’s building.
Bunny Wong sounds like the north end of a southbound horse. She claims that these penitentiary-style windows and darkened corridors are negative biproducts or simple overlooks. Does she not understand that these very intentional design aspects are there to symbolize the bureaucracy of Portland’s city government that lurks within the building’s walls?
City Hall: Policymakers, leaders and a grandiose, historic building.
Portland Building: Bureaucrats, bean-counters and, well, that thing.
@Bix:
“Matt, I love the Portland Building, too. But if one considers “design” to necessarily include “use” when it comes to things like buildings, it has a lot of fail in it.”
I love Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings and most of them have hideous design flaws. I see the Portland Building as truly aspirational in the vein of Wright. Most of what we put up in this town is limp architecture exuding puke, diluted with piss, groaning “accept me?”
This, on the other hand, is a solid, firm boner, jizzing mercury or perhaps liquid gold into the Rose City zeitgeist. It screams; “WHO CARES IF THE PEOPLE WHO WORK IN ME SUFFER FROM SICK BUILDING SYNDROME!”
Hence, je l’adore.
Ugly. Non debatable. Chutny, I never thought to use the 80’s sweater analogy before but by God, you are right. It’s like an homage to the Cosby show!
The Portlandia statue is a crying shame. Someone told me it’s something like the 5th largest bronze statue in the world and it’s all but hidden and plopped on that ugly “80’s sweater” like a stain of chocolate ice cream. A TOTAL CLASH.
Then there is the GRAND entrance on 4th Ave across from the lovely park, which should be a showcase but instead is a big gaping welcoming hole to the underground parking below it. Welcome to Portland, a mecca of sustainability, alternative transportation and an City building that says hello through a giant garage door. FAIL.
Finally, the building is truly ugly not because it looks like a reject Michael Graves toaster design from Target, but because the building is horrible as quality function architecture. The entrance on 5th is dark and unwelcoming, the lobby a cave, and the rest of the building a typical low light filled maze of an Office Space with slow clunky elevators, a badly florescent no natural light cafeteria and poor recirculating air throughout. Total Design Fail.
And this isn’t the first time a national publication has noticed. High end design Metropolis Magazine crowd source critiqued it in 2006 with several architects, professors and other professionals weighing in, in the negative: http://www.metropolismag.com/story/2006032…
The best thing about the building though is that I was once walking by really late at night and there was a group of hippie Wiccan ladies across the street having some sort of worship thingy/ritual in homage to Portlandia.
Can’t we just raze this building and buildin something not ugly? It’d be an awesome make-work project. Maybe we can get Gehry to do something that looks like the EMP.
Plus, that Thai place on the 4th side sucks. Hard. Saigon Kitchen is sooo much better.
Interesting and novel building, designed by/for architects, that is completely non-functional? Don’t tell Libby, he’ll put it on the historic monuments list…
Took a tour of the Portland Building back in college as part of a Postmodernism course… the prof introduced the building as spectacularly miserable architecture and mentioned increased HR reports of depression from its workers.
What do Brian Libby and the Friends of the Memorial Coliseum think? They know more about architecture and style than everyone else.
Don’t you people realize that is actually Optimus Prime waiting to transform? He’s just holding for the right time to “come out”………..
The building leaks on the sides when it rains. So the Portland City Council put a bunch of dirt and plants on top of it. Fail multiplied by fail is still fail.
Maybe we should tell Al Qaeda that it is the most loved building on the West Coast…then wait.
@Graham: “Can’t we just raze this building and buildin something not ugly?”
Coming soon: Crowd-sourced architecture!
I’ll send a link to @brianlibby and see what he has to say.
Actually in the piece the Portland Building is listed as the #7 ugliest world building, not #1. They merely used a picture of the building in the beginning of the article before going to the list itself.
That said, the Portland Building is admittedly QUITE ridiculous looking. My least favorite parts are the tiny windows and how awfully it interacts with the street on the ground level. Pity the retailers on the bottom of that building. And of course it looks like a wrapped birthday present on the outside with those fake ribbons.
At the same time, I’d argue that lots of buildings are worse than the Portland building. In the ugliest buildings list piece cited here, one expert they interviewed says the worst buildings are actually the bland, banal ones. I might have to agree with that.
I think of the Portland Building as a kind of noble failure. Unlike most Portland architecture, the design doesn’t simply try to fit in and be a nice but forgettable work of design. Instead, the design by Michael Graves tries to be something great. It may fail – it definitely fails, actually. But I admire the ambition this building had and the newness of it when it was built.
This is actually one of Portland’s two most architecturally significant buildings, because it was the first major postmodern building design in the United States. This building and the Equitable Building downtown (now called the Commonwealth) at 6th and Stark are the only two buildings that are in every textbook on the history of 20th century American architecture.
I liken the Portland Building to Andy Warhol’s Brillo Pad boxes: silly and kind of ridiculous, but historically significant and full of color and fun. Granted, nobody had to work 40 hours a week in the Brillo Boxes, though.
Actually, Matt and Graham, I would be against demolishing this building. People may think it’s ugly, but it’s part of Portland history. However, I would be very much in favor of a radical renovation. My suggestion would be to put a big atrium in the middle, so there’s a lot more natural light. Besides the funny look of the building, it has a higher rate of sick leave for employees working there, because of the lack of windows.
From this angle you can really appreciate the relationship between shapes in the building’s design. Granted it looks like you’d have to be bellydown in the grass to see it this way…
The building was a design competition. At the time, postmodern architecture was an attempt to break away from modernism epitomized by Mies, a director at the Bauhaus, Corbu and Gropius, the creator of the suburban ranch style home. When the Portland Building was built, modernism was 40-80 years old. In the end, while neo-modernism has returned, we have very successful forms which descended from postmodernism like the Disney Concert Hall and the Guggenheim Bilbao, Rem Koolhass Z Crisscross and Herzog and De Meuron’s Bird’s Nest.
The city had a skimpy budget and a specific square foot requirement – the only way to meet it required the architect to use small windows and camouflage the building’s squat unattractive proportions with the graphic elements. Look at it sometime with a squint to erase the graphics and you will see. That the architect could meet budget was a big factor in him winning. (I think he won twice after the losing architects protested, wearing buttons at the national architect’s conference stating “I don’t dig graves”)
So if you don’t like the building, blame the city budget, not the architect… It is certainly in the list of the top 5-10 internationally known Portland buildings.
The Portland Building keeps Portland genuinely weird (architecturally speaking), so we certainly can’t have that; it makes us nervous. Condo towers are much safer to our fragile Portlandia psyche.
Okay, here’s the thing. When the Portland Building was built, it was on the cutting edge of a design trend. Now that that trend has shot its wad, and nobody gives a fat fuck about Graves, Gehry, et al anymore, and postmodernism has lost its novelty, we can see the Portland Building for what it is: an interesting idea that ultimately begat an ugly building. Yes, it was a defiant boner in its time, but all the rhetorical Viagra in the world can’t help it now.
Tommy, do you recommend castration when the Viagra no longer works? That’s what tearing the building would amount to.
When the drugs don’t work, they just make you worse…
Sorry. The Verve are deeper engraved on one’s consciousness than one realized, evidently.
Definitely more “interesting” than the stack-of-pancakes Modernist snoozes that dominate Portland’s skyline from across the river, but definitely just as bad. “Post-Modernism” was hilarious–proof that contemporary architecture is all about trading out one absurd trend for another every few years, and immediately becoming vehemently opposed to anything that isn’t the current one. Only this sort of mindset could “engage with tradition” and end up with bullshit like this building.
Thank god that hidden behind this ugly mother and all the other erector set losers that stand close to the river, we still have so many legitimate buildings that don’t have to be “post-” anything and can simply be beautiful and functional and meaningful, because they’re from when architecture was a part of the culture, not vociferously and destructively spiteful toward it. Despite the best efforts of the Modernists to turn them all into surface parking lots or tabula rasa for their born-outdated, outsized sculptures.
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