If the whole world is a stage, then architecture is a scenery. The buildings we see, in which we live and work every day, are a tangible public monument of historical aesthetics and values.
In the early 1980s, a new movement sought to inspire modernism, the century’s dominant architectural style, which valued functionality and minimalism over decoration and variation. Followers of the movement believed that modernist structures had become cold and inhuman, but they also saw new possibilities for the style of steel, glass, and reinforced concrete slabs. Their challenge was to revitalize the urban landscape with a less strictly functional building by adding some interesting elements and design features that allude to, but don’t match, past architectural styles, thus bringing a sense of irony to architectural art. This new movement is called postmodernism.
In 1982, architect Michael Graves introduced an exciting new look for postmodern office buildings. The Portland Civic Building (or simply the Portland Building), with its ornate decoration and combination of styles and materials, is now recognized as an important contribution to 20th-century architecture and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Unfortunately, the Miners have to travel to Oregon to see him (although Graves-designed homewares are now sold at local Target stores).
In our Portland we have the Charles Shipman Payson Building, colloquially known as the Portland Museum of Art, completed in 1981 and designed by Henry Nichols Cobb, a founder of IM Pei & Partners, who’d previously designed Modernist landmarks like the John Hancock Tower in Boston. In our Portland we have the Charles Shipman Payson Building, colloquially known as the Portland Museum of Art, completed in 1981 and designed by Henry Nichols Cobb, a founder of I.M. Pei & Partners, who’d previously designed Modernist landmarks like the John Hancock Tower in Boston. В нашем Портленде есть здание Чарльза Шипмана Пейсона, в просторечии известное как Портлендский художественный музей, построенное в 1981 году и спроектированное Генри Николсом Коббом, основателем IM Pei & Partners, который ранее проектировал модернистские достопримечательности, такие как Башня Джона Хэнкока. Our Portland has the Charles Shipman Payson Building, colloquially known as the Portland Museum of Art, built in 1981 and designed by Henry Nichols Cobb, founder of I.M. Pei & Partners, who previously designed modernist landmarks such as the John Hancock Tower. in Boston. In our Portland, we have the Charles Shipman Payson Building, commonly known as the Portland Museum of Art, built in 1981 by Henry Nichols Cobb, founder of I.M. Pei Architects (Henry Nichols Cobb), who previously designed modernist landmarks such as John Hancock. Building in Boston. The expansion of the museum represents the transition from modernism to postmodernism and could serve as an argument in favor of its inclusion in either camp.
Noted postmodern architecture theorist Charles Jencks has said that the Cobb building for the PMA marks “a kind of postmodern classicism [that] has become the hallmark of large corporations and has been euphemistically called a prestigious committee.”
On the one hand, the large circle at the top of the façade and the narrow and windy colonnade below can be seen as decorative rather than purely functional. On the other hand, the uniform brick cladding of the façade and the fact that the extension was one of the last “urban renewal” projects in the country (a decidedly modern undertaking) make it look like a century ago. In fact, the project has produced not one, but two failed plazas: the perpetually cold space on the north side in front of the museum entrance (the reconfiguration has now become another architectural disaster) and Capitol Square Park across the street, which is the Civic. activists rescued it years ago after the city attempted to sell much of it to a nearby hotel, citing the open, brutalist, sunken concrete design as a temptation to vice.
Another transitional building is the number two downtown building, across from the Nickelodeon movie theaters, at the corner of Middle Street and Temple Street. Its postmodern elements are rather restrained, and it complements the style of neighboring buildings, much to the delight of Portland urban planner Alex Jaegerman, until local architects pointed out its “unprovoked arch”, Jagman found this comment faded. “I’m guessing he’s a devout modernist,” Jagman joked to critics. It was an ideological struggle of that time.
Modernist architecture won the war. In Portland and the rest of the country, modernism is present in almost every school, office building, mall, and fire station built between 1950 and 1980, as well as many of the fiberglass towers that emerged in the 1980s and 1980s. 90s. Today, the latest examples of international contemporary architectural style—flat surfaces, unremarkable industrial building materials, no frills—include the city-owned Ocean Gateway ferry terminal and East Waterfront facilities, as well as the glass-fronted WEX globe around the world. headquarters street.
Postmodern architecture flourished more on the west coast and in major cities before dying out in the 90s. What is left of this movement in Portland? Protected buildings are not officially considered landmarks by local conservationists until they are 50 years old. Will any postmodern architecture in Portland be honored? Are there any historically or culturally significant examples of postmodern styles worth celebrating and preserving, or are they just dead end antiques?
It’s hard to say whether the building, located two streets across downtown, with a spacious TD Bank branch on the ground floor, is a postmodern project or an attempt to design a contemporary art building in the postmodern era. The Art Moderne style (a variant of modernism popular in the 1930s) is characterized by rounded corners; the arched, rounded entrance to One Portland Square reflects this aesthetic, as well as the city’s maritime heritage. Long horizontal streaks of windows are also a hallmark of contemporary art architecture, as this building also has them.
A faux-stone cladding at its base extends to the top story on this ledge, above which is a segmented (circular) pediment surrounding a (somewhat banal) Art Deco-decorated dial. Elsewhere in the artificial stone base, the façade is clad in red brick, presumably to integrate the office building with the rest of the city centre.
The faux Art Deco theme continues in the wood-paneled lobby of One Portland Square. Glossy tubular brass railings surround the central stairwell under an art deco metal and glass light fixture suspended from the dome; the second staircase has an ornate Chippendale-style balustrade.
The design, by Boston-based firm Sasaki, garnered a 1990 Honorable Mention from the presumably esteemed National Association of Industrial & Office Parks. The design, by Boston-based firm Sasaki, garnered a 1990 Honorable Mention from the presumably esteemed National Association of Industrial & Office Parks. Boston-based Sasaki’s design received an honorable mention in 1990 from the supposedly respected National Industrial and Office Park Association. Designed by Boston-based Sasaki, it received an honorary award from the respected National Industrial and Office Parks Association in 1990. Its neighbors, Two Portland Square, at the corner of Four and Temple Streets, are architecturally similar but stylistically more modest.
This waterfront mixed-use community symbolizes Portland’s transition to a late capitalist economy in the 1980s, when commercial fishing and small-scale manufacturing were replaced by tourism and luxury real estate.
The building’s main red-brick façade tries to blend in with the rest of the old port, although stone buildings were rarely seen on the waterfront before. Its architects, from local firm Winton Scott, strove for believable design and used postmodern elements, including luxury items such as turquoise doors and balcony railings (at the time, the Miami Police Department ran the cultural landscape), favoring a traditional style.
For example, on the side facing Long Wharf (DiMillo’s home), the complex is divided into several different sections to reduce the overall quality of the complex. From the landward side, the two-story, slender gabled roofs of the three five-story apartment complexes resemble historic New England homes, but the roofs are out of scale, and their inclusion seems to favor rambling variety. unifying concept of style or purpose. At the end facing the sea, terraced balconies make the project look like a giant ferry, and the façade overlooking the customs pier, less visible from the street, is faceless and austere in comparison.
The Glickman Family Library on Forest Avenue on the University of Southern Maine Portland campus is perhaps the most prominent example of postmodern architecture in Portland. Originally built in 1919 as a bakery, the building housed industrial supply companies and shoe manufacturers after World War II. Given its ability to support heavy equipment, the design was considered sufficient to support the large library loads. To this end, USM purchased the property in 1991.
The library’s design, featuring an overlapping grid of colored façades and innovative use of building materials, sparked controversy when the plans were unveiled three years ago – suggesting the architect, using colored pencils on a piece of graph paper, had stumbled upon it.
The building is a triple structure (classical façade organization), with a red brick plinth reminiscent of its industrial past, the central part is covered with bright panels, and the capital stands out with its green cladding and characteristic windows. suggesting castle towers. The translucent cladding is a product called Kalwall, insulated fiberglass panels designed to evoke the marble grid of Gordon Bunshaft’s Modernist masterpiece, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, at Yale University, and to serve a functional purpose by allowing light to diffuse inside. The translucent cladding is a product called Kalwall, insulated fiberglass panels designed to evoke the marble grid of Gordon Bunshaft’s Modernist masterpiece, the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, at Yale University, and to serve a functional purpose by allowing light to diffuse inside. The translucent cladding is a product called Kalwall, insulated fiberglass panels designed to resemble the marble mesh of Gordon Bunshaft’s modernist masterpiece, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and serve a functional purpose by allowing light to diffuse inside. The translucent cladding is a product called Kalwall, a fiberglass insulating panel designed to evoke the marble mesh of Gordon Bunshaft’s modernist masterpiece, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and allows light to diffuse inside for functional purposes. Unfortunately, recent inspections have shown that fiberglass cladding does not withstand these elements. (The Graves Building in Portland also suffered from structural and design problems requiring costly repairs and alterations.)
The Glickman Library is still deeply loved or hated, but it’s actually a visual landmark of the university (especially Interstate 295), as are the Gabrecht Law Books of the University of Maine Law School. no.
Across the street from the larger building that houses the Portland Stage, the century-old industrial building, after its façade was renovated in the late 80s, gave the designers of the architecture firm SMRT, who used to be here, the opportunity to showcase their backyard. muscles of modernism. Originally built as a garage or perhaps an early car dealership, the structure’s large windows were greatly reduced in the renovation and the front door was moved to one side and oriented diagonally from the street. Each of the three sills now includes tile strips between the original brick pilasters, and you’ll also find white tile geometric mosaics, green metalwork, round turquoise medallions, beige paneling, and pink grout. Overall, it was a successful facelift and, as with the Maine Law Library, a good wash can still be used.
The 16-story Back Bay tower on Cumberland Avenue is heavily clad in red brick to fit downtown, largely because it is one of the tallest buildings in Maine. Again, Sasaki took inspiration from the city’s seafaring history to give this luxury Titanic apartment complex a striking rounded corner.
The façade is largely broken up by failures and their associated bulges, with gables surrounding windows in the middle and at the top hinting at a series of small gabled roofs. The rest of the tower is made up of glass bricks, green metalwork on the balconies, stripes of light brick and green tiles along the top of the building’s base.
Gateway Garage is the city’s only true example of postmodern sophistication, seemingly a conscious response to the bleak, drab, modernist extension of the venerable Eastland Park Hotel (now called the Westin Portland Harbourview) next door.
The garage itself is unremarkable, but along the High Street, along Cumberland Avenue, along the woods, the parking structure is wrapped in a one-story structure, a veritable orgy of unrelated, if not conflicting, elements, including green metal and multiple bricks. facings (mostly red, but there are also glazed bricks with green inserts, as well as unorganized black and white bricks). There is even a classical portico (non-classical proportions).
The circular structure includes a passage in the middle of the block, accessed through a Doric-style arch adorned with plastic-coated faux marble spheres (now in a different state of disrepair), branching off to an air duct that leads to the modern hotel building. style (embarrassingly) connecting the back door to a rather elaborate Japanese garden. Unfortunately, despite his best efforts to appeal to the streets, the packaging failed. Commercial premises are not shops and cafes, but offices that are not accessible to the general public.
This Pearl Street parking lot in Old Harbor is a great example of what architecture critic Michael Sorkin calls “modernism in a hat.” Brick stair towers with gabled green metal roofs (hinting copper oxide, which they are not) have (yet another) arched rounded corners at their intersection with Front Street. The design of the project is more cohesive than the Gateway Garage’s hybrid style, but the dark glass façade protecting the anonymous office space is equally unable to blend into street life, a far cry from one of the goals of postmodern architecture.
At first glance, this sturdy brick box to the west of the customs garage seems to be just another building in the background in the old port. But the undulating roofline (which hides the roof decking and echoes the balustrade of the small balcony below) and the crosses etched into the sides of the entrance suggest that the architects were trying to remain calm, at least in part. Environmentalist Julie Larry said the inspiration for the dynamic roofline may have come from the energy consulting company that once owned the address. Still, it’s a worthy urban upgrade.
Located in the traffic triangle where Washington Avenue and Auburn Street diverge, Lib’s Dairy Treats is a living relic. What could be considered an urban dead zone has become a time capsule, preserved not in amber, but in sugar.
Lib is an example of what can be considered “folk postmodernism”, in which the eclectic arrangement of forms is the result of ad hoc decisions rather than grand designs. Six columns support an open gabled corridor with a gabled roof perpendicular to the main building. Columns broke almost every rule of form, proportion, and style established in the classical era, thus subverting the very definition of a column. Their bases are clumsy redbrick rectangles in which projecting turquoise steel rods (“Hey Crockett and Tubbs, your milkshake is ready!”) lead to a (very) roughly Doric capital. Naturally, the entire building was covered in pink chewing gum.
The review is bound to be incomplete, given the amorphous definition of postmodernism, which can include anything from restaurant chains to pseudo-classical malls. Consider two older buildings that underwent major facade renovations in the postmodern era: the Bayside Learning Center at 26 Portland Street (near the resource center formerly known as Preble Street), and the Convention, a large building bordering oak at 562 Street , Congress Street, and Liberty Street (home to retail stores such as The Sock Shack and Electric Buddhas on the Congress side, as well as Diversified Communications on Free media agency).
Both buildings feature an unconventional mix of materials, as well as distinctive pink and turquoise elements that once showed lightness. Ironically, both seem pretty mundane today, but for different reasons. The structure of Portland Street will always be just a decorated cake box. The building at Congress 562 was once a beautiful, almost ecclesiastical Victorian castle – Francis H. Fassett (the leading Portland architect of his time and teacher of John Calvin Stevens) – but now it’s dirty, pink, and imitation stucco cladding is its former glory.
Historically, Portland’s architecture has leaned heavily towards a vernacular or “context” style rather than expressive buildings. This homogenization effect makes it difficult to identify later buildings of stylistic significance when considering candidates for historic preservation.
However, the Glickman Library stands out for its inventiveness and for being an exemplar of the modern Potter period. The others listed here are not enough. Some, such as One Portland Square and 40 Portland Pier, are not so overtly postmodern. Others, like Gateway Garage (which has a lot of post-modernity), contribute nothing to Street View other than their terribly flashy bells and whistles. And these postmodern buildings are sitting there, slowly disappearing from conscious awareness, like the B-side of an old single.
Modernism has never died. As long as real estate development is in the hands of people whose imagination is as limited as their budget, the modernist box will continue to be built.
However, postmodernism also continued, perhaps most strongly in a happier approach to exterior wall design, thanks to the availability of new siding products such as fiber cement boards, panels, and shingles from the James Hardy catalog. New building materials (and new building design software) ushered in an era where versatility is not only possible, but standard, and the planning committee continues to sing the refrain: “Can you break the façade?”
Playful imitation of architectural elements has become so common these days that it can hardly even be called a style. While some recent projects resemble the original postmodern architecture, they lack the (admittedly problematic) philosophical underpinnings of their predecessors, which rejected the dogmatism of modernism in favor of a subjective pursuit of beauty. What is left is an architecture that is neither traditional nor innovative, pandering to meaningless symbols, contextless references, and a streetscape where language makes no sense, which is perhaps the most important achievement of the postmodern movement.
Modern architecture is based on the belief that technology and rational thinking can be used to provide a better and healthier life for more people. Postmodernists argue that modernism (especially the Bauhaus and International Style) is not only aesthetically inhuman, but also philosophically untenable, like all other metanarratives and theories that try to define universal truths or make sense of our chaotic world. The answer to postmodernism is to destroy (sometimes literally) the structure of modernism and deny the integrity of the whole effort.
The postmodern movement is closely related to another “post” school of thought, poststructuralism. Structuralist theory provides a means to understand art and culture by “reading” almost everything as “text”, thereby defining a coherent language of signs and signs, while poststructuralism treats this discourse as subjective, not universal, and tries to minimize it. this language is shit. For example, structuralists can “read” a person’s physical characteristics to determine their gender; post-structuralists deny the existence of significant gender differences and may take a non-dualist perspective. The legacy of post-structuralism is complex: on the one hand, it elevates marginal discourse, and on the other, it opens the door to “alternative facts” and other forms of nihilism.
Postmodern architects have attempted to refine their work of identifying metaphors, opting instead for allusions, imitations, and even incoherence, which some see as the only correct response to a world without meaning. But, as is the case with any intellectual movement, these concepts dissipated over time, eventually becoming derivatives of frivolity, burdened with their own set of themes – pink stone, green metal structures, transformable windows, conflicting juxtapositions and reinterpretations of classical elements – suggested the architect and writer Neil Blass. in conclusion: “Postmodernism is a restraining modernism.”
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