In 1982, the Architectural League presented a lecture by Michael Graves about his just-completed Portland Building. His first built public project, the Portland Building immediately put Graves on the map, simultaneously eliciting praise and generating controversy for its combination of innovation and tradition. Critiquing modernism, Graves’s early postmodern project engaged the street and played with architecture’s associative and mimetic qualities, offering a new, yet not unfamiliar, monumentality. His 1982 lecture reveals the challenges of winning the competition, as well as realizing the project, which was constrained by a remarkably strict budget. His meticulous attention to material, dimension, and language would mark the rest of his career.

Graves will revisit this 1982 lecture, as well as the Portland Building in general, in this conversation with Stan Allen, Dean, School of Architecture, and Sarah Whiting, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture.

A video podcast of this event, as well as the audio recording of Graves’ 1982 lecture, will be made available online as part of “Revisiting Postmodernism,” a multi-part series of digital podcasts from the League’s Digital Archive. The Digital Archive Project is a major ongoing initiative to make available online selections of the League’s historic archive of more than six hundred audio and video recordings from the past thirty years. A complete list of digital podcasts in the “Revisiting Postmodernism” series will be announced in @theLeague in September.

Seating is first come, first served. Reservations are not accepted.