Design: A Pied Piper of Hobbit Land

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But in 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 art program.

Graves has since won other important commissions, notably a 27-story corporate headquarters in downtown Louisville, Ky., for Humana Inc., and an addition to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, designed by Bauhaus Architect Marcel Breuer. Yet it remains to be seen whether Graves' heavy-handed Pop surrealism—"a dash of deco and a whiff of Ledoux," as leading Postmodernist Architect Robert Venturi calls it—will influence workaday architecture. New inspirations are needed, but they should be inspirations that are real, joyful and charming.

— By Wolf Von Eckardt