Architect Portman’s design changed Detroit’s skyline
Architect John C. Portman Jr.— whose hotel, shopping and office complexes tower over the major cities of the world — will best be remembered for the cavernous atriums, replete with waterfalls, fountains, ivy and spiral staircases, that redefined the look of the modern hotel.
But in Detroit his legacy is the building that redefined the city’s skyline: the Renaissance Center.
Portman died Dec. 29 in Atlanta at the age of 93. His death was announced in a statement provided by the Edelman communications firm. No cause was cited.
He helped shape cities around the world with designs such as the Marriott Marquis in New York’s Times Square, the Embarcadero Center in San Francisco and massive complexes across Singapore, China, South Korea, India and beyond.
Included among his landmark designs is Detroit’s Renaissance Center, which was built in the late 1970s. General Motors purchased it in the 1990s and has substantially added to the structure by building the glass-enclosed Wintergarden retail and showcase space that opens onto the Detroit riverfront, as well as making other improvements.
Portman was perhaps most identified with Atlanta, where his architecture firm, John Portman & Associates, was headquartered, and where he burst to the fore in 1967 with the 22-storey Hyatt Regency, which popularized what would become his signature atrium concept.
“Before John Portman started designing them, hotels were not glass cylinders sitting on concrete bases,” read a 1986 New York Times editorial.
“Neither did their lobbies sport lakes and open upward into atriums; nor did glass elevators scuttle up and down like transparent beetles.”
To an arriving visitor, the effect of a Portman atrium was astonishing. Former Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young once remarked that “everybody became a country bumpkin when they walked into the Hyatt.”
Portman also was the principal architect and developer of Atlanta’s Peachtree Center, a 14-block district that features office space, shopping and dining, with Venetian-inspired pedestrian bridges connecting one structure to another.
His career coincided with the decline of downtown neighbourhoods as the locus of American social life. Through his designs, he sought to draw people back to the city centre.
“Architecture is a social art, not a private art,” he told Forbes magazine in 1982, explaining the overriding philosophy of his work. “A building sits out on the corner. So the most important thing is creating an environment that all of the people respond to, not just the highly educated aesthete but the man on the street.”