Urban but Human : Architecture: Post-Modernist Michael Graves gives his office complex, Metropolis, a sense of place. ‘Unity is the key,’ he says.

Most modern office buildings, says Michael Graves, an architect and noted Princeton Post-Modernist, are monuments to Mammon. They are bleak, bland boxes, sleek obelisks thrusting skyward with no concern for the human ants swarming through their cold innards.

“Modern office buildings have little sense of identity or feeling of humanity,” Graves says. “A man walking down the street hand-in-hand with his son, past the tower in which he spends his weekday hours, should be able to point to a specific part of building and say with pride, ‘That’s where Daddy works.’ ”

Hoping to preserve that imaginary child’s sense of wonder and awe, Graves has designed the $600-million Metropolis project beside the Harbor Freeway with great care.

His first aim, he says, was to create a sense of place in the awkward site, which is between 8th and 9th streets and is bounded by the Harbor Freeway and Francisco Street.

The jarring contrast in scale between the freeway--with its noisy river of cars--and the quiet surrounding avenues tucked in a corner of downtown compelled Graves to focus his development inward on a long courtyard. It links three office towers with a hotel and a retail center.

Graves’ Metropolis design, which beat out more conventional skyscraper-in-a-plaza schemes in an international competition, refuses to enter the race for the West’s tallest tower, a contest that has obsessed so many planners of recent downtown office high-rises.

Instead, in his plan, the towers are kept at a moderate, uniform 30-story height to retain a humane scale.

As a public space, the internal courtyard is as crucial to the design’s quality as any of the surrounding buildings. Its importance is emphasized by a raised arcade running around all four sides at the third-floor level, linking and unifying the five separate blocks.

“Unity is the key,” Graves says. “The chance to build such a large complex as a unified whole is rare in today’s crowded downtowns. In this situation, the sense of the architecture as a total experience is more important than any individual building.”

In the individual buildings, Graves pursues his aim of making it easy to point out “where Daddy works.”

The towers, to begin with, are horizontally divided into clear segments, differentiated by bands of terra cotta tiles in varied colors. Their six-story bases are clad in turquoise tile. Meantime, the middle stories are covered in reddish earth tones; the tops are finished in a rich ocher.

Drum-shaped “party hats” cap the three office towers while providing the helipads required on all Los Angeles commercial high-rises.

Within these main divisions, Graves introduces lively vertical features that include oblongs of tinted glass and projecting bays capped by sun-shielding eyebrows.

Perky octagonal pavilions pop out from the rectangular towers--to mark the corner of 8th and Francisco or to overlook the freeway above the circular performance plaza on the courtyard’s west side.

As a whole, the Metropolis complex--described by City Centre Development, its owners, as a “City Within the City”--resembles a contemporary Karnak, a giant Lego model created by a playful Pharaoh.

Phase One, scheduled to break ground this fall, will include the first office tower on 8th Street and an adjacent section of the internal courtyard. The hotel, retail center and two more office buildings will be developed through the early 1990s.

Through its use of vividly colored terra cotta tiles (similar to those seen on such architectural landmarks as the 1929 Eastern Columbia Building on Broadway and the 1931 Wiltern Theatre tower on Wilshire Boulevard), the Metropolis, Graves claims, relates to Los Angeles.

“The light in Southern California demands strong colors,” he says. “Here the sun plays a major role in modeling the texture and surface of buildings, making them sparkle and dance. Glazed terra cotta--a material I’d hesitate to use in New York City--appealed to local architects before the fashion for the bland glass box overrode such sensitivities.”

Graves sees Modernism, as expressed in the glass box International Style exemplified by such local towers as the 1972 Arco Plaza, as a cultural aberration.

“Modernism is a momentary hiatus in the ancient continuity of the language of architecture,” he says, repeating one of the basic tenets of the Post-Modernism he helped popularize in the early 1980s with his radically unmodernist Public Service Building in Portland, Ore.

Labeled “The Temple” by the local press, the 15-story Portland building is a big square block with a dark green base and a body of colored stone. It has over-scaled Egyptoid modeling, capped with a sky-blue top intended as a series of celestial temples.

“Portland, like Metropolis, is a frankly reactionary design,” Graves says. “It reacts against the notion of an office building as a temple of technology rather than a human habitation.

“Modernist tower designers, obsessed with the concept of buildings as machines of commerce, seem to have forgotten that people come first. The result is that most of these buildings look like refrigerators left out in the rain.”

Graves, 56, began his career as a Modernist disciple of Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn. His Post-Modernist conversion came after he spent two years in Italy and after he won the prestigious Prix de Rome scholarship.

“Seeing Bramante, Brunelleschi and Borromini opened my eyes to the dimension of history,” he says of the works of the famed Italian architects.

“The raw Yank in me was startled by the richness of Renaissance and Baroque references I saw on every hand. Dimly it dawned on me that Modernism’s fervent ideologies papered over a great gap between what it intended and the shallow things it actually built.”

But the conversion did not occur overnight. Graves was still a Modernist when he returned from Rome to teach at Princeton. He first came to notice in the early 1970s as a member of the New York Five group of architects, which included dedicated Modernists such as Richard Meier, designer of the Getty Fine Arts Center proposed for Brentwood.

Tagged the “White” architects for their fondness for Cubist white surfaces, the New York Five developed a highly abstract late Modernism that is poles apart from the designs that have made Graves an international “starchitect.”

One critic described a Graves design of this transitional period as “a stucco building trying to spring out of a prison cage.”

Graves sprung himself from the cage of Modernism in the Portland building’s radical Post-Modernism. Unlike most undifferentiated International Style designs, the Portland building featured a clear base, middle and top--all in the Classical tradition.

“Modernist architects accuse me of being dishonest, of not expressing the building’s function as a machine,” Graves says. “They forget that one of architecture’s main functions is cultural, an expression of the human condition in that particular place and time informed by the continuity of human history. Recognizing that is my kind of honesty.”

The real weakness in Graves’ style is the danger of falling into historical pastiche, regional parody or just plain kitsch. And his recent designs for the Swan and Dolphin hotels at Disney World in Orlando, Fla., are considered pure kitsch by many critics.

Topped by giant swans and dolphins, the hotels are seen as all-too-literal metaphors in the service of Disney President Michael Eisner, who many architectural critics would consider to be a Grandmaster of Hokum.

On the other hand, Graves’ Post-Modern library at San Juan Capistrano verges on a parody of Mission Revival styles. Reflecting a superficial appreciation of the inner purpose of this popular Southern California style, Graves shows arcades that are too high to offer shelter from the sun and mini-towers too small to be taken seriously.

But in Metropolis, Graves gets the feeling just right, he believes. The project’s scale, its inward focus on an integrating, peaceful courtyard, its modest height and its playful colors are quintessentially Angeleno.

“Streets like Broadway, Spring and 7th belie the common wisdom that Los Angeles has no humane tradition of urban architecture,” he says. “In Metropolis, I’ve drawn upon these traditions to create what I hope will be the city’s first truly native Post-Modern commercial complex.”