For the public at large, Michael Graves first came to prominence with the considerable hubbub that surrounded his Portland (Oregon) municipal building—first the model, then the completed fifteen-story, blockfilling structure itself. The Portland structure was Graves’s first “big” commission to be completed. (The bureaucracy took possession of it in 1982, after more than a decade of well-publicized design activity.) The barest recital of its ingredients calls up issues central to Graves’s design. Moreover, given the building’s prominence just now, it calls attention to some important aspects of the present situation in architecture as well.

If the description of the Portland building reads more like a list than an amalgam, that is because the design stacks one entity or motif on another, much as a child might make a “building” of architectural blocks. As in much so-called postmodern architecture, the result is visual effects that are intentionally collisive.

The first four floors, containing an arcade around the building at street level, are clad in blue ceramic panels. They step back in three tiers (vaguely reminiscent of the stepping back of New York skyscrapers of the Twenties) to create a base for a chunky, cream-colored, eleven-story near-cube, which is laconically punched by square windows. This dumb wallpaper for the “typical” office building is overwhelmed in the center of each of its elevations by large, contrasting, banner-like fields in browns and reds, which blend with the smoky glass of the windows. On the two principal entrance fronts this banner is