This postcard depicts the interior of the McCain Library at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia, designed by W.J. Sayward of Edwards & Sayward and completed in 1936.
Published by the AH Company, the card was postmarked in Decatur on November 5, 1942, and addressed to Miss Caroline Lorry of 124 E. Harrison in Maumee, Ohio.
The following note fills the back:
“It is always good to have news of you + your job + I am so happy you are liking your work. We have a larger school this year then last. Sarah Massey was promoted to Asst. Buyer for one of the depts. at Richs + soon after became very sick. She is critically ill with double pneumonia probably – they thought once it was typhoid. Miss Mac is working on the index of [?] it is about to get the best of her – she is so anxious to get it finished.
Love, Bee Miller“
Bee sounds like a busybody.
Midway Elementary School in DeKalb County, Georgia, was built in 1957 and designed by John Portman (1924-2017), a decade before he achieved fame for his soaring atrium hotels, of which Atlanta’s Hyatt Regency Hotel (1968)3 4 is the prototype.
Midway School was the first of many school buildings Portman designed in and around Atlanta through the 1980s.
Most still stand, and most are unremarkable—the casual observer would never guess they were from the same firm that produced many of Atlanta’s landmark towers. Look closely, though, and you’ll find they share the same core concept.
Born and raised in Atlanta, Portman made millions off the very Atlanta idea that instead of solving the problems of a dysfunctional city, you could just turn your back on them and pretend they don’t exist.
This idea was central to Portman’s development of Peachtree Center in Downtown Atlanta, consciously designed to present blank, faceless, hostile exteriors to people on the street, while concealing dramatic, cavernous (and privately controlled) spaces for customers inside.
Portman replicated this concept for San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center, the Westin Bonaventure hotel in Los Angeles, the Renaissance Center in Detroit,5 and the New York Marriott Marquis6 hotel—among many other large-scale projects— enjoying widespread acclaim from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s as a master of urban renewal.
By the 1980s, however, Portman’s designs had rapidly fallen out of favor as it became apparent that they ultimately destroyed the lives and fabric of the cities he claimed to be saving. Atlanta suffered the worst: its central core remains a depressing void, largely because of Portman’s sprawling concrete fortresses.
You can see the beginnings of Portman’s inward focus in his early work, like Midway School. The solid brick walls at the front of the building seal off the interior from the outside world—through the narrow clerestory windows, you only glimpse the ceiling.
The entrance courtyard spanned by beams is particularly notable, as Portman would repeat this design in later projects like the Dana Fine Arts Center (1965) in nearby Decatur.7 8 9
There, he lined the courtyard with brick walls, effectively creating an exterior room. Two years later, the courtyard design evolved into the landmark Hyatt atrium.
