‘Make it Something that Enhances Life’: The Architectural Philosophy of John C. Portman
John Portman thought deeply about the end users of his buildings, and he designed accordingly.
Whatever I do, it’s mine. —John C. Portman Jr.1
Few architects have had so profound an impact on a city as John C. Portman Jr. had on his hometown of Atlanta. In his fourteen-block redevelopment of the city’s downtown, he built two of the most spectacular hotels America has ever seen, revolutionizing hotel architecture in the process.
But Portman’s influence extends far beyond both Atlanta and hotel architecture. He transformed the downtowns of several American cities with his huge, interconnected developments before going on to create similarly impactful projects in Singapore and China. Throughout his seven-decade career, Portman exercised near-complete control over the design and construction of his buildings by going beyond the traditional role of an architect and working as the developer, financier, and marketer of his projects.
In so doing, he worked to implement his own ideas about how American cities should be designed through the planning of his buildings and the spaces between them. His maverick approach to architecture—and the nature of the buildings he built—attracted considerable criticism from his fellow architects and critics, yet the vast majority of his buildings were hugely successful and continue to attract visitors to this day.
‘The Architect as Developer’: An Integrated Approach
When Portman’s high-school technical drawing teacher suggested that he might be interested in architecture, Portman “didn’t even know how to spell it.”2 But he took the teacher’s advice, explored the subject, and rapidly developed an affinity for it. After a period in the navy during WWII, he studied architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, graduating in 1950 and going to work at the firm of Stevens and Wilkinson.
In the same year, he met one of his architectural heroes, who introduced him to a philosophic way of approaching the subject. Portman recounted, “I was fortunate to meet Frank Lloyd Wright in 1950. He turned me on to philosophy by saying, ‘Philosophy is a handmaiden of serious and meaningful architecture. Young man, go seek Emerson.’” Portman did. He recalled that over the following three years, “I poured myself into philosophy in my free moments.”3
The element of self-reliance in Emerson’s thought deeply affected Portman, who longed to produce buildings that were uniquely his. So, after obtaining his architectural license in 1953, he went into business with his former teacher, Griffith Edwards. “I opened my own office alone with no work, . . . and I struggled for three years with small commissions—houses, schoolroom additions, remodeling.”4 Portman longed to do bigger jobs, which would give him the chance to combine three elements from three of his influences at the time: the “humanity” of Wright’s “organic approach,” the grander-scale vision of Le Corbusier, and the geometric precision of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Leaving Edwards to handle the administrative side of the business, Portman began looking for opportunities to express himself architecturally.
None were forthcoming, so he created his own: He entered into an arrangement with a developer who would front the cash to buy a plot of land—at the time, the largest single plot ever bought in downtown Atlanta. In return, Portman would design and build an indoor wholesale market on the site to make back the purchase cost. Design in hand, he took out a mortgage, using the land value as capital to back a loan for the construction cost of the market.5 This was the genesis of the Atlanta Merchandise Mart, later known as AmericasMart, a huge indoor wholesale market that would ultimately total seven million square feet. Portman designed a twenty-two-story concrete cube filled with circular sales floors to maximize space for exhibitors to sell products and for buyers to move easily between displays. He worked with fellow architect Trammell Crow, who had pioneered the concept of a trade hall with a large atrium-like central space in his Dallas Market Center, built only a few years earlier in 1957. Crow and Portman would collaborate on numerous subsequent projects.
Externally, the Merchandise Mart is somewhat bleak, reflecting the influence of Corbusier’s and Mies’s utilitarian style on Portman at the time. Internally, however, it exhibited one of Portman’s distinctive architectural traits: a design approach focused on the comfort and convenience of the building’s intended users. He lamented the fact that architects, in their efforts to outdo each other with every new building, “forgot about the little guy who’s going to use it.”6
The original Merchandise Mart building (right), subsequently joined to a newer addition by an array of enclosed “skybridges” enabling easy movement between the two parts of the market at different levels.
In 1961, just as the Merchandise Mart was approaching completion, Portman visited Brasilia, the new Brazilian capital city then under construction. The experience radically changed his perspective on modern architecture. The bleak, unwelcoming design of the government-planned city with its windswept concrete plateaus punctuated by overbearing Soviet-style housing blocks shocked him. “I approached Brasilia with great anticipation, tremendous enthusiasm. Here was the largest thing done in the world by world-renowned architects and planners, and I just couldn’t wait to get there.” But the visit was a wake-up call. “I was never so shocked and disappointed in my life. It was as if someone had thrown a bucket of ice water in my face.”7 The city, he recounted, “was the most sterile, inhuman environment that I have ever witnessed.” The buildings “didn’t have life, and that bothered me very much.” Returning from the trip, he “began to think that architecture must have as its base and fundamental raison d’etre a function and a purpose for human existence . . . if it can’t exist as a beneficial effect on human life then it shouldn’t exist at all.” Reflecting on his own work, he thought, “I’ve got to make it something that enhances life.”8
That wasn’t easy to do. However much effort an architect puts into his designs, other parties in the development process (developers, financiers, operators, and city governments) can exert influence to water down his plans. Backers and stakeholders may even replace an architect if he is unwilling to compromise. Portman, intent on seeing through his vision for a more human-focused modernism, came up with an unorthodox solution based on his success with the Merchandise Mart: He could take on the roles of developer and financier as well as architect. As he explained, “I’m first an architect. I’m a developer because I wanted to be a certain kind of architect. I wanted to do things that I wanted to do, and I wanted to have a greater say-so in what I did and a greater control . . . over my own future.”9
This was a radical proposition—one that the architectural establishment was not ready to accept. Portman “incurred the mistrust of critics and his fellow professionals, in particular for combining the role of developer and architect,” remarks architecture commentator Rowan Moore. “He was dangerously conflicted, they thought,” because they held that architects should be focused on art, not on business.10 His fellow architectural renegade Morris Lapidus stated that Portman “extended the boundaries of the architect’s endeavor . . . beyond the imagination of most professionals trained in architecture.”11 But, to Portman, it was simply a means to an end:
I am . . . primarily interested in the design and the creativity of architecture. I have done all these other things [financing, real estate development, etc.] not because I enjoy them that much but because it was a price to pay in order to get in the position to do the things that I wanted to do and to do meaningful and significant things, and not just to be doing something that somebody rang me up on the phone and asked me to.12
Portman’s approach gave him the freedom to design his buildings his own way, and as a result, they do not reflect the “international style” of minimalist, rectilinear steel and glass common among other American architects at the time.
Shortly after returning from Brasilia, Portman made another trip, this time to Sweden and Finland, where he was impressed by developments that included elevated walkways that enabled pedestrians to move between the buildings without having to cross traffic. “While I was in the city square of Vallingby,” he recounted,
I saw a woman pushing a baby carriage across a bridge spanning a freeway coming into the city center. The rapid transit system was underneath the city center. Everything was separated, and you saw children in the city. . . . This seemed to be so humane. Here was a pedestrian village, and the housing was laid out in such a way that people could stroll into this city square. I was very impressed by the planning and the humanity of it all.13
He thought he could integrate this concept with high-quality architecture to create “a new kind of human environment” in American downtowns. Unlike the buildings of many modern architects, whom Portman considered “intellectually bankrupt,” he designed his for “the little man” who would use them daily. He regarded many in his profession as practicing “architecture without philosophy, architecture as collage, architecture as stage set, architecture as parasite of historical form, architecture as whimsy, fantasy, architecture as form not space, architecture as mannerism, architecture as pastiche absurdity.”14 Portman designed the Mart to avoid all these traps and instead be an original building designed around a principle of the ease of use, ease of movement, and comfort of the end user.
Portman had always intended the Merchandise Mart to be the first part of a wider project to rebuild, as one integrated development, a large chunk of Atlanta’s then-lifeless downtown. That project—which became known as Peachtree Center—would be his opportunity to implement his new ideas about urban design and pedestrian movement. Reflecting on Brasilia’s failings and his work on the Merchandise Mart, Portman reasoned,
We had just inserted into the community the biggest building in the southeastern part of the United States, and it didn’t make sense to stay focused on just that without thinking about what’s going to go on up and down the street and across the way. And that thinking came from raising my level of awareness from a building to a city and thinking in city terms and community terms as well as building terms.15
And so, Portman planned Peachtree Center as the Mart was being completed. Given Atlanta’s heat and humidity, he designed the complex—which would ultimately grow to span fourteen city blocks—as a network of interconnected indoor spaces joined by enclosed, elevated walkways called “skybridges.” The network included markets, hotels, restaurants, and 1.5 million square feet of office space, making Peachtree Center an exemplar of mixed-use development. Portman—in contrast to government planners, who favor breaking cities into zones of different uses—recognized that people actually prefer that a mixture of different activities be available within a walkable distance:
If you walk from seven to ten minutes and draw a radius, you will be amazed at what a tremendous area that would encompass and, within that radius—if it were properly planned in a way that would involve human life from every aspect [living, working, recreation, etc.]—we could have a more convenient, a more human, type of life.16
Portman designed the center’s buildings to sit atop mostly windowless “podium” bases with servicing and vehicle access at street level. The public entrances and lobbies are above these, joined by skybridges over the streets, creating an elevated pedestrian network.
One key reason Portman kept this network above street level was that during the 1960s, the city of Atlanta had proposed a radical plan to rearrange the downtown streets. Public transit, general traffic, and pedestrians each would flow on different levels. Portman designed his buildings with this in mind, leaving the street level for vehicles and putting all pedestrian routes at second-floor level, where he expected the public walkways to be. But the city government abandoned the plan, leaving Peachtree Center as an island of interconnected second-floor spaces without many points of connection to the surrounding streets. Peachtree also had no outward-facing units for businesses; aside from service and car entrances, the buildings present bare concrete walls to the streets at ground level. Critics attacked Portman for this design, including Georgia Tech professor Catherine Ross, who called his buildings “fortresses with concrete facades in downtowns that separate citizens from the city.”17
This disconnect meant that businesspeople and visitors used the center’s internal walkways instead of the streets, rather than—as Portman intended—using the two as a single, integrated network. As a result, the streets have little pedestrian activity. This, combined with poor maintenance, contributed to some streets becoming untidy havens for criminals, further deterring people from using them.
Indeed, a main criticism of Portman’s Peachtree design (and some of his later work) is that his building/street-disconnect led to unsafe streets by separating his wealthy clientele from the downtown poor and abandoning the streets to the latter. Whether and to what extent this is true, it disregards the fact that this disconnect was not Portman’s intention. Portman held that buildings should be integrated into a functioning city, not isolated in the way Peachtree Center became. His intention was to keep the downtown streets—which wealthier residents had left in their flight to the suburbs—active by bringing businesses and their customers back to them. “I just couldn’t see abandoning the cities to the poor. . . . I want to bring the middle class back.”18
As the Merchandise Mart and Peachtree Center grew and became financially successful, Portman started designing a new home for himself in Atlanta that would embody his emerging ideas. He named it “Entelechy,” referring to an ancient Greek concept from the writings of Aristotle, broadly meaning the realization of potential. The house had a ground floor consisting of one large space interspersed with several “exploded columns.” These look outwardly like regular columns, but each actually consists of four curved floor-to-ceiling supports, outlining circular spaces within them. Inside the “columns” are stairwells or small nook-like spaces for working, cooking, and so on. With this design, Portman sought to emphasize the column—which he regarded as the key element of architecture—and to create a home that is at once open plan and subdivided into units with a measure of privacy.
Portman’s Trademark: The Birth of the Atrium Hotel
By 1965, with the Merchandise Mart in operation, Portman found that the existing hotels in the area could not accommodate the two hundred thousand buyers and sellers traveling there each year. In keeping with his integrated approach, he decided to address this problem by going into the hotel business—but with a twist. At the time, hotel operators typically favored buildings with narrow walkways between densely packed rooms, leading to and from a compact lobby. They were designed to cram in as many rooms as possible. Hotel operators liked this established model, which they thought maximized their income, and they didn’t want to change.
But Portman had a different idea, based on his recent experience designing Antoine Graves, a public housing project in the Atlanta suburbs (the only public housing project Portman ever undertook). There, he had wanted to avoid the trend of designing public housing that was “just sort of warehousing people.”19 Rather, he looked at how those in the project’s target demographic (low-income elderly people) lived. Observing that they spent a lot of their time outside on porches and socializing with neighbors, he designed Antoine with a large interior atrium, similar to what Crow had used for the Dallas Market Center. He designed the apartments to face inward toward the atrium, fringed with balcony walkways circling the large, light-filled central space. Here, residents could socialize not far from their rooms but with the feeling of being outdoors. The atrium design also helped cool the building (no public housing had air conditioning at the time); warm air rose to vents in the atrium roof, creating a breeze that added to the outdoor feel. This design reflected Portman’s human-centric approach, evolving out of his consideration of the residents’ psychological as well as physical comfort.
For his new downtown hotel, Portman decided to employ the same atrium concept, but on a larger scale, to create a space that combined the benefits of indoor and outdoor environments. “We decided to explode the hotel—to open it up and create a tremendous interior volume, which would give the feeling almost of a resort even though it’s . . . on the busiest street of the city.”20 Whereas the atrium at Antoine served as a residential meeting space, the hotel atrium would serve as a commercial space for shops, restaurants, and businesses—like a public square but within the hotel. Because Portman thought that exposure to nature was important for mental health, the upper-floor balconies would be decorated with plants, and the atrium would even have an aviary, all giving the impression of an outdoor environment.
Creating such a grand atrium meant giving up a huge volume of the building’s interior to non-income-generating space, which many hotel operators thought would make it unviable. But Portman expected that the experience of being in the large atrium and the availability of a range of services within it would attract visitors and make up for the lost income. He was well aware of the need for architecture to be practical, remarking, “You can have the greatest vision in the world, but if you can’t marry pragmatics to it and make it a reality, it’s a daydream. So you have always got to somehow bring these things together . . . without denigrating the vision. . . . You have to think of it holistically.”21
Portman, in his characteristic manner, acquired the site for the hotel, convinced investors to back it, and oversaw the construction himself. But once it was finished, he struggled to market it to hoteliers used to traditional designs. At one point, Conrad Hilton toured the building and reportedly said, “This concrete monstrosity will never fly.”22 Portman refused to compromise by altering the building, but financial backers began to pull out, and it looked as though the project would become a white elephant. Fortunately, Chicago’s Pritzker family, who had recently acquired a little-known chain of airport hotels called Hyatt, saw in Portman’s radical design an opportunity to loudly announce Hyatt’s arrival into the downtown hotel business. The Hyatt Regency opened in 1967 and immediately became one of Atlanta’s most visited attractions, drawing fourteen thousand visitors in its first week and boasting an average 90 percent occupancy rate in the first three months. The Hyatt company adopted Portman’s design as a blueprint and proceeded to open twenty-six more atrium hotels over the next twenty years.23
Entering the Atlanta Hyatt’s atrium from one of the skybridges, one is immediately struck by the sheer volume of the twenty-two-story space, which was the largest hotel lobby in the world when it opened.24 Portman further emphasized its scale in several ways. First, the entrance walkways are quite small and have low ceilings, making the contrast with the soaring atrium more striking. Reportedly, the Hyatt staff named one of the entrances “profanity corner” in light of how visitors would regularly stroll into the atrium and exclaim in amazement as they looked up. But what really stresses the atrium’s height is something that would become a trademark of Portman’s buildings: Upon entering, one’s eyes are immediately drawn skyward by stylish, art deco elevators running up a prominent shaft right to the ceiling. These highlight the vertical nature of the space, connecting the upper levels to the atrium floor visually as well as practically. The elevators even go through the atrium ceiling, creating an impression of continuing out into the sky. In reality, they travel to a rotating, saucer-shaped restaurant above the hotel’s rooftop, which can be glimpsed through a circular window in the atrium ceiling.
In 1968, following the Atlanta Hyatt’s success and Edwards’s retirement, Portman founded his own practice, Portman and Associates. He ran the business with “no chain of command,” invited his staff’s criticisms of his ideas, and directly involved himself in all the company’s operations. Discussing Portman’s approach, one associate remarked that he “prefers to go to the part of the building where the work is being done rather than have the work brought to him.”25
As further expansion of Peachtree Center continued, hotel operators and other businesses across the country began to notice the buzz around the Atlanta Hyatt and the growing Peachtree Center complex connected to it. As a result, Portman began to receive more commissions outside Atlanta, including major downtown renewals in two other struggling American cities.
Reaching New Heights
In 1971, Portman began working on an urban renewal project markedly different from Peachtree Center: the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco. Once again, he planned the complex—spanning seven city blocks—as one integrated unit; and once again, a Hyatt Regency hotel would be one of the major components. However, San Francisco’s smaller block size, plus other site constraints, led Portman to design the hotel with a triangular footprint rather than the square layout of the Atlanta Hyatt. Whereas the Atlanta Hyatt’s atrium walls are vertical, the San Francisco Hyatt features floors stepping into the atrium on one side. Unlike the Atlanta Hyatt’s prominent elevators, those of the San Francisco Hyatt are tucked away in a corner. The result of all this is still a stunning space, with a sloping wall of balconies seeming to hover over one’s head, but the less prominent elevators and compressed dimensions of the atrium make it less impactful than the Atlanta Hyatt.
In connecting the Hyatt to the rest of Embarcadero Center, Portman decided to use open-air walkways rather than enclosed skybridges like Peachtree Center. San Francisco, with its more hospitable climate and more established downtown, already had an active street economy into which Portman hoped to connect Embarcadero Center. He intended the complex to function as a “little village,” combining public and private spaces at both ground and higher levels. Portman sought to change the typical American downtown, which he thought was disintegrated because of the dominance of the car and a lack of spaces just for people, like those he had seen in Sweden:
Our cities are dispersed and fragmented, caused by the wheel. Our cities grew up in the beginning with a one-story building and a crossroads. . . . Then it had a two- and a three-story building, then a four-story building—same sidewalk, same street. Then a fifty-story building, same sidewalk, same street. The infrastructure never changed. The density grew and grew and grew. The resulting effect: dehumanization. No place for people.26
Aiming to fix this, Portman conceived of a modern environment that would replicate the walkability of traditional European cities but in a way suited to a city of skyscrapers. He planned to make it easy for people to walk between business and residential areas by including public walkways and open spaces inside buildings on higher floors. Accordingly, Embarcadero Center includes a number of open indoor spaces designed to function as vibrant public squares, which he intended to be more active and attractive than the often-lifeless public squares—typically surrounded by car-dominated streets—found in many American downtowns.
The design of Embarcadero Center was somewhat influenced by David Rockefeller’s involvement in the project. In particular, the open spaces feature sculptures reminiscent of Rockefeller Center in New York, which led some locals to nickname the Embarcadero Center “Rockefeller Center West.” While planning the center, Portman and Rockefeller budgeted $1 million for artworks.27
As Embarcadero Center was built out through the 1970s, Portman took on several smaller, stand-alone projects, including the Fort Worth National Bank and a wholesale market in Brussels—his first major project outside the United States. Perhaps the most notable of these projects, however, was the Westin Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles. Although it was not part of a larger master plan, Portman designed the Westin to be connected to all four surrounding blocks by skybridges, showing that his pedestrian movement model could work even without the neighboring blocks being under common ownership.
The Westin was a significant departure from Portman’s previous architectural style. Rather than the cubic designs he had become known for, it features four cylindrical towers set around a larger central tower. The outer towers stand at the corners of the block, surrounding the central tower like the boosters of a rocket. At ground level, a glass-roofed atrium connects all five towers. Standing inside, one sees four elevator shafts erupting out of the atrium roof and gliding up between the central tower and each of the four outer towers. These, along with the atrium, connect the five towers into one integrated building and also enhance privacy by ensuring that there are no direct sightlines between rooms in adjacent towers—a further example of Portman’s attention to the needs of his buildings’ ultimate users.
Whereas much of Portman’s earlier work presented triumphant, awe-inspiring interior spaces within rather unassuming exteriors, the Los Angeles Westin marks the point when Portman’s exterior designs became just as magnificent. The “wow” factor one experiences in the Atlanta Hyatt’s atrium can be enjoyed from outside the Westin. Portman used a similar cylindrical design for the single tower of his 1976 Atlanta Westin (also connected to Peachtree Center). There, in order to fit a large ground-floor atrium and twelve hundred rooms into a small site, Portman placed the hotel rooms above the atrium. The atrium is dominated by support columns for the tower above, creating a sense of strength and a throwback to Portman’s focus on columns from Entelechy. Portman contended that his design was the world’s tallest hotel at the time.28
But he would also use the design of the Los Angeles Westin as the blueprint for a much larger development—his third large-scale urban renewal project.
When Henry Ford II teamed up with other Detroit business leaders to form Detroit Renaissance, a project to revive the struggling city’s nearly abandoned downtown, they settled on Portman to oversee it. For the $337-million complex, Portman created what is essentially a scaled-up version of the Westin Bonaventure, with the central tower extended to seventy-three stories (more than double the Westin’s thirty-three) and all five towers approximately doubled in diameter. He made the outer towers square in profile—albeit with rounded turrets in a throwback to the Westin’s cylindrical design—and spaced the towers out further, connected by lower-level buildings and walkways. To finish this “city within a city,” which would have its own walkway system and 5.5 million square feet of floor space, he added two additional towers next to (but still integrated with) the main five-tower cluster.
Upon opening in 1977, the Renaissance Center transformed the Detroit skyline and brought a host of conventions and other events to the city. The building, arguably Portman’s most outwardly impressive creation, appeared in a striking illustration on the cover of Transformations in Modern Architecture, a 1979 book published by New York’s Museum of Modern Art showcasing the latest modern architecture in America.29 Although the choice to put it on the cover drew some criticism, at least someone in the architectural establishment had finally recognized Portman’s contribution to the field.
Whereas in the 1960s large-scale “urban renewal” projects were typically funded and managed by the federal government, Portman refused government funding and delivered his American urban renewals—Peachtree Center, Embarcadero Center, and Renaissance Center—using private funding (although the land for Embarcadero Center was acquired at a discount from the government-owned San Francisco Redevelopment Agency). When his partners tried to pursue state funding for Peachtree Center, Portman instead found private backers, which gave him much more control over the development. Regarding the Merchandise Mart, Irene Way writes in Atlanta Studies:
Unlike with federal-funded urban renewal, Portman did not have to submit a federal application for a renewal project approval, nor did he have to wait for approval of preliminary or execution plans. Portman could also hire whom he wanted, without oversight from officials on the local, state, and federal level, and did not have to wait on disbursement of federal funding. Portman’s relative autonomy with the Mart construction meant that the Mart was completed much faster than the city’s three earliest federal urban renewal sites.30
The result was a much higher quality end product than those of federal urban renewal projects, and opting for private funding incentivized him to create developments that would remain viable on their own without government aid. Reflecting on Peachtree Center in 1982, Portman remarked:
It’s been what we call a “private enterprise urban renewal program.” There’s not one dollar of local, state, or federal funds involved in this development today. It has a value of over three quarters of a billion [dollars], and there’s not one cent of government aid involved. It’s all been done on a private basis and each building—even though it’s part of a master plan—has been developed as a free-standing economic entity.31
Following the completion of the final parts of Renaissance Center in 1981, Portman partnered with one of America’s most prestigious hotel chains to develop two new hotels—one fronting New York’s Times Square and the other in his native Atlanta. The former was a source of great trouble for him, but the latter would become what is, without doubt, the triumph of Portman’s career and one of the finest buildings of the 20th century.
Trouble in New York
Portman had long wanted to build in New York City, and he had been planning a hotel there since the early 1970s, when local real estate developer Robert Sharp approached him after he had “stayed up half the night looking around” during a visit to the Hyatt Regency Atlanta.32 Portman originally partnered with Westin to develop and operate the planned New York hotel, but he ran into a series of difficulties as local politicians and campaigners tried to block the project and preserve theaters on the site. A financial crisis in New York also froze the project for a while, but it eventually got going again in 1981, now partnering with Marriott instead.
Portman intended the building to be a breath of fresh air in the bustling heart of New York City, which, according to New York Times writer William E. Geist, was “the most claustrophobic city Portman had ever seen.”33 He initially designed it with a large plaza facing Broadway but removed it due to public opposition. The interior, however, retained Portman’s characteristic openness, with an atrium clearly modeled on the Atlanta Hyatt. That prospect was enough to secure the hotel three hundred thousand bookings ahead of its 1984 opening.34 In late 1983, businessman Edward Woodyard even booked a room for New Year’s Eve 1999, which he ultimately fulfilled.35 Portman ensured that he had a stake in the operation; he worked with Marriott to set up their jointly owned Marriott Marquis brand to run the hotel—a further example of Portman’s integration of business and architecture.
The New York Marriott Marquis is an exceptional building in its own right—it even contains a theater on its ground level—but its main value was in bringing Portman’s existing atrium concept to New York, although at the substantial cost of years spent negotiating with campaigners and city politicians. The Marriott’s atrium is also a little less open than the Atlanta Hyatt’s thanks to the inward-stepping floors on the upper levels, which create a sense of overhanging mass akin to the San Francisco Hyatt. The building’s exterior is also not especially attractive, perhaps a reflection of its traumatic birth in a mire of controversy and planning constraints.
Portman’s Masterwork
Not so for the Atlanta Marriott Marquis. There, the development was integrated into Portman’s existing Peachtree Center, and he had a much easier time building Marriott a suitably grand hotel in Atlanta’s much less regulated planning environment. The setting was perfect for Portman to design the most exceptional building of his career—a forty-eight-story hotel with a towering atrium running the entire height of the building—the world’s tallest atrium until beaten by Dubai’s Burj al Arab in 1999. Borrowing a little from Wright’s “organic architecture” approach, Portman designed the tower with a bulging base that curves into sloping upper walls, giving the atrium a flowing, cave-like quality. (The bulging form led locals to nickname the building “The Coke Bottle,” which is appropriate given that Coca Cola has long had its global headquarters in the city.)
He then subdivided the atrium into two parts by placing the elevators in the middle. He also created openings in the atrium floor, giving several lower levels a direct view into the towering spectacle above. This arrangement enables people shopping or attending events on the lower floors to stroll to the center and feel the sensation of open space above them—a welcome relief after hours spent in a conference room.
One of the most striking features of the Atlanta Marriott is the structure of the walkway bridges that branch out from the elevator core and merge into the balconies. These walkways and balconies resemble a rib cage with “bones” emanating from a central “spine” and wrapping around the space in graceful curves, getting smaller as one looks up the building. The experience of wonder upon entering the Marriott atrium makes the neighboring Hyatt almost look small by comparison. At virtually any time of day, one can find visitors wandering the lobby with heads craned up in bewilderment at the spectacle, following the illuminated glass elevators as they glide up the spine of this living building.
Riding on the success of these projects, Portman designed himself a new home—Entelechy II—in the picturesque environs of Sea Island, Georgia. This was much larger than the original Entelechy and featured a huge roof covering most of the site, supported by conical columns similar to those of Portman’s Midnight Sun restaurant at Peachtree Center. The building looks more like a showroom or conference center than a house, and its maze of hedges and high walls effectively insulates it from its surroundings. The building clearly embodies the kind of private yet expansive environment Portman himself wanted to live in, and its grandeur is a fitting celebration of his success.
However, fortunes began to turn against Portman following completion of the two Marriott hotels. A major earthquake in San Francisco in 1989 killed the city’s economy overnight. A hotel that Portman had just built there (and that had withstood the quake) consequently opened with virtually no customers, and Embarcadero Center’s income dropped to nearly zero. Almost immediately afterward, the 1989–1990 real estate collapse wiped out much of Portman’s other income, putting him in mounting debt. During the crisis, there was no demand for Portman’s grand-scale projects in America. To rebuild his revenue stream and get building again, he turned his attention east. But unlike his mentor Wright, who had gone to Japan after his own personal tragedy, Portman looked toward a huge country with a rapidly growing, increasingly deregulated economy: China.
Looking East
Portman had some experience in East Asia already. He had designed Singapore’s Regent hotel in 1982, returning a few years later to design the Marina Square shopping center and the Marina Mandarin, Mandarin Oriental, and Pan Pacific hotels. All these featured Hyatt-esque atriums and elegant elevators, giving Singapore a cluster of Portman’s grand atrium buildings in close proximity.
For his debut project in China, however, he designed his fourth “city within a city”—the Shanghai Centre. The three-tower complex includes the “Portman Ritz-Carlton” hotel, a theater, apartments, several foreign consulates (including the U.S. consulate), and an exhibition center. Each of the three towers—arranged with the taller central tower set back and the other two functioning like forward wings—widens slightly at the upper floors. In this way, the buildings, which were among Shanghai’s first modern skyscrapers, echo the design of traditional Chinese structures while bringing a new modernism to the city.
Getting the Shanghai Centre off the ground required a great deal of negotiating with the Chinese government, much of which Portman’s son Jack, who lived in Hong Kong at the time, undertook. Portman’s existing connection with Chinese reformer Deng Xiaoping, who had stayed in the Peachtree Center during a visit to Atlanta in the 1970s, likely helped in getting the necessary government permissions and approvals. Nonetheless, even with private funding lined up and land acquired, Portman and his team were still constantly uncertain about whether the government would let the project proceed. But it did proceed—and succeed.
In short order, Chinese developers were trying to book Portman to bring his style to their cities. He designed his fifth large-scale integrated development in the form of Beijing’s Yintai Centre and reunited with Marriott to produce the JW Marriott Hotel in Shenzhen. His most distinctive work in China, however, is probably Shanghai’s Tomorrow Square tower. Containing another JW Marriott hotel and 255 high-end apartments, the sixty-three-story building (the eighth tallest in a city bursting with skyscrapers) is certainly eye-catching. It has a square profile with the top half rotated forty-five degrees, ending in a knifelike spiked pinnacle. Resembling a rocket poised for launch, Tomorrow Square’s futuristic appearance makes it an outlier among Portman’s high-profile works. Whereas many of his 1990s projects demonstrate the 1960s vintage of his design aesthetic, Tomorrow Square is a step into the future and fits perfectly into the science-fiction-like skyline of modern Shanghai.
Though to a Western viewer many of Portman’s Eastern projects seem either similar to his American works or underwhelming by comparison, they were groundbreaking and transformative in the local context. Unlike the Western architectural mainstream, the Chinese welcomed Portman and treated him like a hero, holding exhibitions in his honor and writing books on his works and style. Despite his impact on the downtowns of Atlanta, San Francisco, and Detroit, he said, “The Portman name is better known in China than it is in the United States.”36
Portman continued to work in America later in his life, adding one more outstanding building to Peachtree Center in 1992: the Truist Plaza, which features ground-level covered walkways around the building’s perimeter that finally tie Peachtree Center’s skybridges into Atlanta’s streets (at least in one area). The Truist building makes a much more pronounced impact on the Atlanta skyline than much of Portman’s earlier work, with its almost digital-looking blocky pyramid rooftop and four surrounding turrets, lending it the appearance of a church tower rendered in Minecraft. This is clearly a Portman for the 1990s, moving away from his traditional concrete exteriors in favor of a glass-and-steel look.
But the bulk of his later work was in the East—particularly China, where such cities as Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Beijing were rapidly becoming hotbeds of skyscraper construction in the then-booming Chinese economy. He moved from city to city and undertook projects in neighboring South Korea and Indonesia. He rarely stopped long anywhere, remarking, “I spend life looking forward . . . Once I’m finished with something, I’m somewhere else.”37
Portman’s Life and Legacy
Portman thought deeply about the end users of his buildings, and he designed accordingly. This focus attracted customers and made his developments hubs for revitalizing downtown areas in America and abroad. Paul Spreiregen, writing in Contemporary Architects, provides a helpful reflection on the impact of Portman’s buildings—not on critics, but on the people who really matter—the buildings’ users:
His work is the epitome of a successful blend of high finance and high-style architecture. . . . People who would seldom go to see architecture visit Portman buildings and show them off to their visitors. . . . His atriums are latter day urban forums. They are outfitted with shops, restaurants and lounges to assure a continuous vitality and animation, and they are spectacular in their vertical dimensions. He also has a commanding knowledge of the fiscal process of building development [enabling him to] withstand the severest forces of compromise. . . . He is stylish without being superficial, and his lines, colors, materials and spaces are of great elegance. His buildings furnish a “sense of place” in many American cities that are otherwise lacking in such attributes of sociability.38
Despite being an outsider to the architectural profession for much of his life, Portman was a powerful influence on American hotel design. This can be seen in the way hotel operators began asking for Portman-style atriums in their buildings, leading many practices to emulate his work. A few examples—all widely mistaken for Portman designs—include the Twinbrook Hilton in Washington, D.C., the Holiday Inn Singapore, the Hyatt Houston, and the Hilton Atlanta Downtown (which is connected by skybridge to the Marriott Marquis). American hotels were never the same after Portman; an expansive atrium lobby had become the expectation, thanks to him.
But despite everything that Portman achieved, many critics still shun his work. One of his defenders, writer and journalist Tom Wolfe, feared that Portman “will be thrown down the ‘memory hole.’ He’ll be forgotten because the people who write the history are in the intellectual compound, and Portman [didn’t] know how to play their game.”39 Indeed, books purporting to index great works of architecture, such as D. M. Field’s The World’s Greatest Architecture: Past & Present, don’t mention his name once. Even many straightforward compendiums of architecture lack an entry on him.
In his native Atlanta, thankfully, Portman is still highly regarded for his role in reviving the city and growing it into a top-tier center of commerce. In 1992, the Atlanta College of Art awarded him an honorary doctorate in fine arts, and his alma mater, Georgia Tech, gave him an honorary doctorate in 2012. Now running along the north side of Peachtree Center is John Portman Boulevard. Until his death in 2017, he was regularly welcomed back to the city for celebrations in his honor, and Atlanta’s many civic organizations still maintain extensive records of Portman’s works and speeches. Late in his life, Central Atlanta Progress—a private nonprofit that had worked with Portman on Peachtree Center—teamed up with Ben Loeterman Productions to honor Portman in a documentary, John Portman: A Life of Building. The film, which features interviews with Portman, his family, and his associates, celebrates not only his work but also his fortitude in overcoming challenges without compromising his vision.
John Portman designed buildings that amazed visitors and provided businesses with flexible, practical, and impactful spaces. His pathbreaking developments helped revive cities, drew investment, generated wealth, and created opportunities for millions of people. As one memorial put it, his designs took “people away from the congestion of urban life to . . . spaces that are open and uplifting to the human spirit.”40