Category: Southeastern United States

“The most exciting hotel on earth is open now in Atlanta,” proclaimed ads for the Regency Hyatt House (later Hyatt Regency Atlanta) in May 1967. ³

That wasn’t an exaggeration—when it first debuted, the fantastic Space-Age design of the Hyatt’s 22-story atrium was considered groundbreaking, and brought more press attention to Atlanta than the city had received in decades.

Seemingly overnight, the status of the hotel’s designer, John Portman (1924-2017), was elevated from that of a run-of-the-mill Atlanta architect to an internationally recognized architect, developer, and urban planner—whether that reputation was deserved is another matter.

As a product of Atlanta, Portman was, more than anything, a shameless self-promoter, and for years, he was widely credited as the inventor of the atrium hotel concept, which couldn’t be further from the truth.

Atlanta’s own Kimball House Hotel, designed by L.B. Wheeler and completed in 1885, centered on a seven-story central atrium,⁴ a concept borrowed from the previous Kimball House Hotel, built in 1870 and designed by Griffith Thomas of New York.⁵

In 1888 and 1892, G.L. Norrman replicated the Kimball House’s atrium lobby at a smaller scale in both the Printup Hotel in Gadsden, Alabama, and the Windsor Hotel in Americus, Georgia.

The Windsor, incidentally, is the oldest surviving atrium hotel in the United States, having opened two months before Denver’s Brown Palace Hotel,^{6 7} also built around an atrium.

Portman first used the atrium concept for the Antoine Graves Homes project in Atlanta’s Sweet Auburn neighborhood, which opened a year before the Hyatt.

However, he wasn’t even the first Atlanta architect of the 1960s to employ such a design—that was Wilfred Gregson of Gregson & Associates,⁸ whose Yarbrough Building at the Central State Hospital in Milledgeville opened in 1963^{9 10} and centered around a five-story indoor courtyard.

I’ll give Portman this much: the Hyatt was the first modern atrium hotel when it debuted, but that was 60 years ago. It’s not so modern anymore.

When I visited Atlanta for the first time at the age of nine, I saw the Hyatt atrium with most of its original 1960s elements still intact.

As a child, it was a revelatory experience: I was instantly obsessed with Portman’s designs and determined to someday move to Atlanta to become an architect.

Then I grew up.

My assessment of Portman’s work has drastically changed with age and experience: his narcissistic, inward-facing designs that shunned the urban environment have permanently maimed Downtown Atlanta, and his prioritization of spectacle and bullshit over substance and service is all too typical of the city’s hollow nature.

Portman’s reputation in the United States diminished from the 1980s onward, and like many of the 20th-century American architects who were much hailed in their time, his work is being rapidly—and justly—forgotten.

Atlanta gave lip service to Portman’s legacy in his later years, even as many of his works in the city were either demolished or gutted of their original character—the Hyatt among them.

The hotel’s atrium is now a bland, sterile shell of its former self, and the uninformed visitor would never guess it was once considered revolutionary.

Ironically, other cities have done a better job of preserving Portman’s work than his own hometown. San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center and Hyatt Regency, for instance, still retain their original flavor.

But in Atlanta’s relentless drive to be the newest and best—and it never succeeds at either—the city’s developers compulsively destroy every shred of fabric that even hints of being old.

Portman was among the worst offenders, so it’s only fitting that his work, too, is now being dismantled. No loss, really.

References

1. Portman, John C., and Barnett, Jonathan. The Architect As Developer. New York: McGraw-Hill (1976). ↩︎
2. “Regency Opens a Showplace”. The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution, June 25, 1967, 3-R. ↩︎
3. Advertisement. The Atlanta Journal, May 30, 1967, p. 5-A. ↩︎
4. “The New H.L. Kimball”. The Atlanta Constitution, May 1, 1885, p. 1. ↩︎
5. “The H.I. Kimball House, Atlanta, Georgia.” The Greenville Enterprise (Greenville, South Carolina), October 5, 1870, p. 1. ↩︎
6. “It Opens To-Day.” Americus Times-Recorder (Americus, Georgia), June 26, 1892, p. 1. ↩︎
7. Historic Downtown Denver, CO Hotels | The Brown Palace ↩︎
8. “Legal Notices”. The Atlanta Constitution, January 14, 1961, p. 17. ↩︎
9. “New Milledgeville Buildings To Be Dedicated Wednesday”. The Atlanta Journal, September 15, 1963, p. 40. ↩︎
10. Landry, George. “Governor Dedicates State Hospital Units”. The Macon Telegraph (Macon, Georgia), September 19, 1963, p. 1. ↩︎