Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman and Downtown America 9781472581204, 9781472581198, 9781474251228, 9781472581228

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INTERIOR URBANISM

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INTERIOR URBANISM Architecture, John Portman and Downtown America

CHARLES RICE

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

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An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC 1B 3DP UK

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2016 © Charles Rice, 2016 Charles Rice has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the authors. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN : HB : PB : ePDF : ePub:

978-1-4725-8120-4 978-1-4725-8119-8 978-1-4725-8122-8 978-1-4725-8121-1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the US Library of Congress. Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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CONTENTS

List of illustrations vi Acknowledgements x

Prologue: The atrium effect

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1 Transformations in modern architecture

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2 The business of architecture and development 3 Atlanta, new American city

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4 The geometry of interior urbanism 5 Urban studies on the street Epilogue: On hollow forms

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Notes 123 Bibliography 147 Index 157

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I LLUSTRATIONS

0.1 0.2 1.1

John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Exterior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Interior view.

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Installation view of the exhibition ‘Transformations in Modern Architecture’. MoMA , NY, 21 February to 24 April 1979.

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Edwards and Portman, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, ca. 1967. View from 230 Peachtree Center building, showing the recently completed Hyatt Regency Hotel and Gas Light Tower under construction.

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John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, ca. 1970. View of Gas Light Tower and South Tower, with plaza containing Midnight Sun restaurant and other amenities, and skybridge linking to Hyatt Regency Hotel.

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John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, ca. 1975. View of Peachtree Plaza Hotel under construction.

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2.4

Aerial view of Atlanta, 1976.

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3.1

Diagram of strategy for parking reservoirs to intercept inbound traffic, enabling motorists to change to different transit modes to reach different parts of the central area.

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Rendering showing proposed people mover system connecting parking reservoirs with downtown.

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Sectional rendering of Peachtree Street showing grade separation envisaged in Peachtree Promenade proposal.

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Rendering showing pedestrianized cross street proposed as part of Peachtree Promenade proposal.

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Victor Gruen & Associates, rendering from ‘A Greater Fort Worth Tomorrow’, 1956.

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2.1

2.2

2.3

3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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4.1

Edwards and Portman, Entelechy, Atlanta, 1964. Diagram showing the distribution of hollow columns across the two levels of the house. 71

4.2

Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Diagram showing organization of hotel room slabs in pinwheel formation around atrium.

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Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Diagram showing folding of façade into atrium.

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Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Sectional diagram showing folded-in façade and tunnel-like entry from motor lobby.

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Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Diagram showing outline of atrium space and objects and settings within.

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Edwards and Portman, Midnight Sun, Atlanta, 1968. Diagram showing arrangement of restaurant around courtyard, and adjacent bar.

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John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, 1961–2009. Diagram showing major buildings developed as part of the center.

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John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, 1961–2009. Diagram showing major interior spaces, vertical cores and pedestrian connections.

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John Portman and Associates, Hyatt Regency, San Francisco, 1974. Diagram showing outline of atrium space with interior elements.

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4.3 4.4

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4.6

4.7

4.8

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4.10 John Portman and Associates, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, 1971–89. Diagram showing center in its urban context.

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4.11 John Portman and Associates, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, 1971–89. Diagram showing pedestrian surface.

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4.12 John Portman and Associates, Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Diagram showing hotel in its urban context, with pedestrian skybridges linking to adjacent podiums.

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4.13 John Portman and Associates, Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Diagram showing formal organization of hotel.

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4.14 John Portman and Associates, Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Diagram showing interior walkway structure.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

4.15 John Portman and Associates, Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Diagram showing circularity and enclosed organization of interior walkway structure.

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4.16 John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Diagram showing center in its urban context.

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4.17 John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Diagram showing formal organization.

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4.18 John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Diagram showing interior walkway structure.

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4.19 John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Diagram showing organization of interior walkway structure.

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5.1 5.2

Philip Johnson and John Burgee, Crystal Court at IDS Center, Minneapolis, 1972.

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Alison and Peter Smithson, Golden Lane, London, Deck. Perspective photomontage with Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, Peter Ustinov, etc.

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Plates 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

John Portman and Associates, Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Exterior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Interior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Interior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Interior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Interior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Interior view.

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Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Reflected view of exterior.

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Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Interior view.

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Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Interior view.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

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Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Interior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, 1961–present. Pedestrian skybridge.

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John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, 1961–present. Interior of pedestrian skybridge.

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John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, 1961–present. Pedestrian skybridge.

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John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, 1961–present. Interior of pedestrian skybridge.

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John Portman and Associates, Hyatt Regency, San Francisco, 1974. Interior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Hyatt Regency, San Francisco, 1974. Interior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, 1971–89. Exterior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, 1971–89. Exterior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, 1971–89. Exterior view of above-grade pedestrian surface. 67

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John Portman and Associates, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, 1971–89. Exterior view looking towards Hyatt Regency.

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John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Interior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Interior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Interior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Interior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel, Atlanta, 1976. Exterior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel, Atlanta, 1976. Interior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Marriott Marquis, Atlanta, 1985. Interior view.

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John Portman and Associates, Marriott Marquis, Atlanta, 1985. Interior view.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The moment I started to think seriously about the work of John Portman was sparked by an odd sense of serendipity, the likes of which have been driving this project ever since. Robert Craig was kind enough to show me through Atlanta’s atrium hotels on a visit in 2007, and to share his own insights into Portman’s work. Later that year my colleague at the University of Technology Sydney, Adrian Lahoud, invited me to contribute a lecture on postmodernism and space to his undergraduate urbanism course. I obliged, promising a lecture on Fredric Jameson’s account, upon trying to negotiate the atrium of Portman’s Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel, of the emergence of ‘postmodern hyperspace’. The lecture was contextualized with my own experiences and images of some of the Portman atriums I had visited (though not at that time the Bonaventure). Around the same time I had also reconnected with Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 masterpiece, The Conversation. I was intrigued by a kind of spatial sense the film developed through its trope of acoustic surveillance, and the protagonist Harry Caul’s own sense of spatial anxiety concerning his domestic environment. After the publication of my book The Emergence of the Interior, I was looking to develop an account of interiority that could move between the domestic and the urban. The film’s final scene of Caul’s systematic destruction of his apartment in search of an elusive bugging device seemed to suggest the idea of the domestic interior being superseded by what might be called the interior of surveillance, one whose spatial form was not necessarily to be found within buildings. In order to develop this idea, I thought I would use the platform the lecture allowed to make this suggestion in terms of Jameson’s spatial argument regarding postmodernism. The day before the lecture, as I was cueing up some key scenes, I realized that the office block, which was home to the nameless corporation in whose conspiracy Caul was becoming entwined, was in fact one recently completed as part of Portman’s Embarcadero Center development in San Francisco. Here was a material setting for an argument that was to that point only advancing theoretically. It prompted me to look more closely at Portman’s work, especially his urban spaces which he described in terms of how they accommodated (or perhaps even structured) people’s desire to watch other people. Looking more closely into that film has revealed more questions, developing into a strand of research in its own right. x

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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If this book is anything, it is an attempt to work through this initial serendipity of association, or to put it more formally, the relation between the architectural production of the late 1960s and 1970s, and the elaboration of concerns that surrounded it, and which did not necessarily connect to it in a substantial or satisfactory way. That a film might spark this project is perhaps testament to a kind of lack within architectural history and theory around what is inadequately called the ‘commercial’ production of this period. The book also attempts to address this lack, not in order to ‘recover’ Portman as an architect in need of approbation, but rather to assess why the discipline’s relation to large-scale commercial development remains such a difficult issue. I must make clear at the outset that this is not a monograph on Portman. Portman’s work appears much as it did in The Conversation, exerting an influence on the mood within which the action takes place, slowly becoming more significant than may first be realized. The research has been pursued independently, though I am grateful to John Portman and Associates for welcoming me on several visits to the office in Atlanta. John Portman graciously gave his time to meet me. Andy Wallace and Alex Duval were very helpful in answering questions and discussing the work of the office, and I should like to thank Mickey Steinberg for his candor in responding to some of my arguments and positions. Though we would not necessarily share the same outlook, his criticisms have sharpened my own sense of why this project is important. The initial phase of research was made possible by a grant and a period of research leave from the University of Technology Sydney. Andrew Toland and Alina McConnochie were thorough and genial research assistants. Andrew’s memos remain landmarks of the genre, and Alina’s digital modeling and drawing have been pivotal in my own understanding of the architectural questions inherent in Portman’s work. I am grateful for her willingness to return to the project to finalize the drawings for the book’s publication. During my time at Kingston University London, the Modern Interiors Research Centre provided further funding, and a collegial intellectual environment. I should like to thank Penny Sparke in particular for her support of the project. During trips to Atlanta, Robert Craig, Richard Dagenhart and the late Douglas Allen were generous with their time and advice. In Detroit, Lolita Hernandez, Jerry Herron and Jason Young were wise and inspiring guides, and in San Francisco Mitchell Schwarzer shared with me his abundant knowledge of the city. I am grateful for invitations to present seminars and lectures on the work in progress, and for the feedback I received on these occasions. Particular thanks go to Annmarie Adams and Katherine Fischer, Lynn Chalmers, Mark Dorrian, Jan Geipel and Nathalie Pierron, Sandra Kaji-O’Grady and Lee Stickells, Sylvia Lavin and Michael Osman, Sarah Lichtman and Ioanna Theocharopoulou, and Jackie Stacey. Many more colleagues have influenced my work directly and indirectly. Barbara Penner deserves special mention for her judicious advice and critical eye, and for her continued

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encouragement. Pier Vittorio Aureli, Maria Giudici, Tarsha Finney, Sam Jacoby and Adrian Lahoud have shown me why architecture is an urban concern. I am grateful for their insights, even if I have often departed from their framing of questions. At Bloomsbury, I am grateful for James Thompson’s enthusiasm for the project, and for his judicious advice. I thank the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for a Publication Support Grant to fund the final phase of research and to bring the book to completion. I am indebted to Desley Luscombe and UTS again for supporting the project with a period of leave in order to finalize the manuscript.

A note on images I have used photography as a particular practice of documenting the atrium spaces, but also of loitering in them, making a few security guards nervous in the process (though I thank the hotel operators Hyatt, Marriott and Westin for allowing me to photograph). The estrangement this process precipitated was akin to but also quite different from Fredric Jameson’s postmodern epiphany in the Bonaventure Hotel, and it has, I hope, led me to my own interpretation of Portman’s architecture. It is clear – as would always be the case – that the photographs don’t ‘capture’ the space; one can’t read them as an index of experience. If anything, they are kinds of incidents, prompts to further investigation of a condition that I had first tried to grasp experientially. The photographs are used as intervals between the chapters, rather than illustrations in them, and in this way I intend them to be the appearance of the ‘now’ of the atrium in the midst of its historical analysis. The photographs also prompted another kind of documentation. Drawings taken from specially constructed three-dimensional digital models show the underlying geometrical order of the architecture, and the organizational relationships within the atrium spaces and across the associated mixed-use developments. These are ‘partial views’ of another kind, aids to analysis, and interpretations in their own right. Archival images have been used where these could be obtained to illustrate aspects of the content and argument that might otherwise be unknown to the reader. Original plans and photo documentation are abundant in the published articles and books on Portman’s work, and should be referred to as an aid to this book’s analysis and argument.

PROLOGUE: THE ATRIUM EFFECT On the cover of the catalog of the 1979 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition, ‘Transformations in Modern Architecture’, the towers of John Portman’s Renaissance Center in Detroit rise from the mist surrounding early-morning commuter trains, as if beckoning the city’s workforce toward a gleaming new future. The effect of Timothy Hursley’s photograph is filmic. The towers appear in the middle distance, somewhat miraculously, not unlike the first appearance of the Tower of Babel in Metropolis, or the Tyrell Corporation in Blade Runner.1 The image crystallizes the fate of Detroit as ‘capital of the twentieth century’;2 the progress of the modern industrial economy, running on rails, here meets its end. There is no mediation; the trains disappear as if right into the core of Renaissance Center, swallowed whole by a building over which the light of a new day gently breaks. And the building certainly swallowed things whole.3 Inside the MoMA catalog Renaissance Center’s vast atrium is revealed in another spectacular photograph by Yukio Futagawa. The cylindrical central tower defines the circularity of all elements in the atrium. From circular walkways descend spiral stairs to pod-like seating bays. Within this curvilinear world a veritable garden of earthly delights flourishes, an Eden outside of which it would seem nothing else need exist. This is a garden city, its circularity making real the ideal diagram of Ebenezer Howard’s utopian projections. The concrete columns supporting the structure appear like towers themselves, arising out of the canopy of green to form a skyline all of their own. The atrium of Detroit’s Renaissance Center is Atlanta interiorized. The lush canopy and skyline of the sunbelt city are transported, in miniature but fully formed, to the downtown of the rustbelt. The commission for Renaissance Center came with the backing of Henry Ford Jnr, thanks to the commercial success of Portman’s Peachtree Center in Atlanta,4 a multi-block, mixed-use development. There, in 1967, the same year as the race riots which spurred the commission in Detroit, Portman completed the Hyatt Regency Hotel, its twentytwo story atrium redefining the architectural, developmental and experiential possibilities of downtown, and in the process becoming his architectural signature. By the mid-1970s, Portman atriums were on the drawing board or in 1

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Figure 0.1 John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Exterior view. Photograph by Timothy Hursley, 1978. © Timothy Hursley.

construction as part of urban developments in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fort Worth, New York, Brussels and Cairo. Portman’s 1976 book, The Architect as Developer, co-authored with architect and urban designer Jonathan Barnett, gave its title to what was making him so successful in that period: the operational structure that would link architecture and property development. As it emerged via Portman, and soon proliferated through the work of countless architectural firms in cities across the globe,5 the atrium became the

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Figure 0.2 John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Interior view. Photograph by Yukio Futagawa, 1980. © Yukio Futagawa/GA Photographers.

characteristic architectural space of this period. Yet the time between its emergence in the Hyatt Regency Atlanta of 1967 and its apotheosis in the fortyeight-story void of Portman’s Atlanta Marriott Marquis of 1985 frames what is commonly viewed as an extended period of crisis in the American city, and especially its downtown. At this time, crisis came to be understood as a turning point, the city held in the balance between ‘death and life’, a sense presaged by

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the title of Jane Jacobs’ classic 1961 chronicle of New York City urbanity.6 In this period, it was not clear according to whose terms the city’s death or life might be established. If the life inherent in squares, streets and ‘small urban spaces’7 could be shown to be the essence of urbanity, the infrastructural violence of highway systems and other architectural grands projets might be banished; yet if the growth of cities could not effectively be planned at the regional scale, was not the idea of the city dead anyway?8 Was the only viable architectural option a retreat into the boudoir?9 Or was it a task of communicating in tune with a roadside vernacular?10 Was there architectural knowledge to be generated in mythologizing a hyper-capitalist urban delirium,11 or in a more historically fundamental (read ‘European’) refiguring of the ground of urban experience?12 And if these questions point to the key investigations and polemics of the period across architecture and urban studies, what lay everywhere around them was social and racial inequality and violence.13 The atrium as Portman imagined it and brought it to life might seem peripheral to these very well-known positions and debates, its period of flourishing perhaps only symptomatic of the massive expansion of a commercial imperative in architecture highly visible by the middle of the 1970s, the time Federal Urban Renewal programs effectively ceased.14 Yet, to dismiss this kind of architecture as an epiphenomenon of other, larger-scale forces is to miss precisely what it brought to the American downtown, and to architecture, at this time. The atrium, and its attendant spaces such as pedestrian links and concourses (above and below the street), emerged as a distinct way of conceiving and constructing the city. The atrium enveloped, encompassing the city’s exteriority within architecture’s spatial and organizational repertoire. This repertoire, itself transforming along with the emergence of the atrium – the moniker ‘megastructure’ was routinely applied to such projects – combined with an ordered and strategic process of intervening in and thus remaking the city. Emerging in this combination, interior urbanism galvanized action as well as critical debate, and arrayed architects, city planners, politicians, financiers, theorists and critics around downtown as the urban problem of the period. In examining the field of action and debate construed as interior urbanism, this book focuses on projects by John Portman and Associates, yet it is far from a conventional architect’s monograph. In the context of the discussion it lays out, other architects and projects would be seen as equally significant. The importance of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta would be matched, for example, by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo’s Ford Foundation in New York City, also of 1967, where an institutional building is arranged around a vast glasshouse enclosing a mature garden, exemplifying a moment in the architectural creation and management of ‘natural’ environments.15 The book’s focus on Portman, however, is strategic. As well as being significant in its spatial effects, the work quite simply provides a consistent frame of reference for an encounter with the cross currents that mark

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this field of action and debate. This partly has to do with the work’s literal internal consistency; the success of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta led to a remarkable consistency of operation, as well as a formal and material consistency, governing all of the firm’s major projects through the 1960s and 1970s. This consistency provides a point of leverage against an image of the period which appears unresolvably fractured and disparate.16 This is not to suggest that Portman’s work somehow transcended the exigencies of its time; indeed, the work can be seen to map these exigencies in a unique way. With such a focus, the book touches on the ever-vexed question of architectural agency: the techniques architects deploy to intervene in cities and affect their urban development. This was a significant issue through the 1960s and 1970s and remains so today. As a developer as well as an architect, Portman represents one explicit, and, at the time, novel approach in terms of how architects could initiate, control and execute projects which had significant impacts on cities. Yet the aim of this book is not to declare this approach triumphant, nor is it to reject it for an overtly commercial focus. Rather, the book discusses why architectural agency, in the context of urban transformation, is not reducible to a binary model which has dominated recent thinking on the subject: the ‘realist’ architect on the one hand, versus the ‘critical, questioning’ architect on the other. Instead, this book reaches toward an account of urban transformation understood not through architectural intentions, however critical or well-financed, but as an ordered set of processes and actions circumscribed by a range of intersecting and sometimes conflicting forces that are social, political and economic, as well as spatial and architectural. A consistency of focus allows that complexity to be discussed in a manageable and, it is hoped, instructive way, with claims about architectural practice developed from a close attention to examples, their conditions of possibility and their effects.17 One important claim the book makes is that the atrium emerges precisely as an effect, a kind of proliferating force beyond intention, producing a mode of architectural practice and an urbanism, rather than being produced by them. In engaging with urban transformation, the book treats its material as historical. Though the office of John Portman and Associates is still active today in an international arena, the projects the book focuses on, and the themes with which it engages, are specific to the American downtown in the 1960s and 1970s. In the way that these projects become material to think with, they can be seen to become ‘live’ again, illuminating a current context of debate, whereby historical circumstances, as well as the concepts we have for understanding them, are the subject of renewed interest and importance. The book commences in Chapter 1 by laying out two sets of problems with respect to how the architecture of the 1960s and 1970s has been understood both within the discipline and in broader cultural discourses. The first occurs in

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the context of the ‘Transformations in Modern Architecture’ exhibition. Curator Arthur Drexler struggled to present a coherent narrative about the diversity of architectural production in these decades, especially as he saw in that work the loss of a clear grounding in guiding principles, and noted instead the proliferation of ‘tendencies’ or ‘workable solutions’ – large-scale atrium spaces significant among them – which became mediocre and diluted through constant reapplication. Drexler presented the architecture of these decades in a manner that failed to make a claim for exemplary work, confounding his critics in the process. Portman, and the atrium, are marked out after the exemplary has vanished as a way of accounting for invention within the discipline. If Drexler himself was somewhat bewildered by what he presented in the exhibition, the chapter goes on to discuss how literary critic Fredric Jameson would take his own sense of spatial bewilderment, experienced on his visit in the mid-1980s to Portman’s Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel (1977), as the symbol of postmodernism as a new cultural dominant. This would in turn spark a debate about how to understand the spatial as part of the critique of urban development. Yet this symbolic reading of architecture, which became ascendant into the 1980s, is seen to be insufficient for an account of architecture’s effects within urban transformation. Taking up the question of architecture’s instrumental rather than its symbolic value, Chapter  2 concerns itself with the internal organization of Portman’s practice of architecture and property development. In focusing on Portman’s book The Architect as Developer, the chapter discusses how a business-minded approach intersected with the emergence of the mixed-use development as a new strategy for investment in downtowns. It examines how the exuberant effects of the atrium, much praised in the architectural and wider press at the time of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta’s appearance, emerged from within a tightly constructed approach to design and property development, the project phases of which were linked at every step. Chapter 3 then discusses the way in which this organization met its ‘outside’ in the political context of planning and development. Atlanta is presented as a key case study in the understanding of public–private partnerships that became a significant strategy in urban development. It looks in particular at an urban visioning project undertaken jointly at the turn of the 1970s by the City of Atlanta’s Department of Planning and Central Atlanta Progress, a downtown business leaders’ forum of which Portman was president. The chapter explores the tension between the image the visioning project forwarded of an integrated, pedestrian-connected downtown replete with multiple layers of transportation, and plans for the continued expansion of Peachtree Center as an internally connected private development. Politically, this kind of tension is usually seen in terms of a clash between public and private interests that are deemed to be separate and opposed; yet in the way that the future form of the city remained unresolved in the aftermath of this visioning project, a certain kind of political

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operation came to the fore. An informal governing coalition, operating across public, private and racial lines, was held together through, and because of, the tensions of urban development. Architectural proposals were developed not solely in terms of how they might meet urban challenges, but in how they presented propositions, as well as problems, which engaged the political workings of this governing coalition. Chapter  4 turns inward again, analyzing the geometry, form and material resolution of a selection of Portman’s major projects from the 1960s and 1970s. Rather than account for a signature style, the aim is to investigate what Drexler thought of as tendencies, solutions or motifs that proliferated across architectural projects. The atrium and the urbanism it encoded are understood as tendencies in this way; not as the perfection of an idea through iteration, but as the proliferation of a specific formation whose internal codes met different external circumstances. The enveloping condition of the atrium is understood to develop an urbanism sui generis. Yet this interior urbanism is not simply the inside secured against an outside; its urban dimensions arise from a constant phasing of interior and exterior sensibilities and experiences within and across projects. Interior urbanism also proliferated through publications, and these shifted the selfunderstanding of the profession of interior design, which was understood as a way of acting at the urban level, being integrated with, though distinct from, architecture. Chapter 5 investigates what interior urbanism has been seen to displace: the street as the element that organizes the exterior environment of the city and secures its public spaces. The chapter discusses the discourse on the street as it developed in America in the 1960s and 1970s, looking at the work of individuals, including Jane Jacobs, Bernard Rudofsky and William H. Whyte, as well as a team of architects and sociologists engaged in research with New York’s Institute of Architecture and Urban Studies. These studies indicate that the street became entangled with its supposed interior ‘other’, pointing to the way in which public space, and its politics, was held in tension between two kinds of urban transformation: that to do with the politics of governance, as discussed in Chapter 3, and that to do with processes of urban and architectural development, as discussed in Chapters 2 and 4. The circumscription of this field of action and debate as historical, marked as the American downtown of the 1960s and 1970s, is in some ways an ‘atrium effect’ all its own, the demarcation and enclosure of a specific temporal and geographical territory. In this way it might be seen as restrictive, omitting as much as it includes about relations between architecture and urban transformation in a postwar, or postmodern, context. But the boundary is necessary to understand what will be discussed, in the epilogue, as the force of Portman’s work. Understanding the historical conditions of the work’s emergence means imbuing what today seems marginal or outmoded with an

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instructional value. This value is not claimed in terms of projects read as exemplary architecture; rather, it emerges from the way in which architecture’s instrumental role is understood in relation to processes of urban transformation. In this way the designation ‘interior urbanism’ is analytical, claiming that the transformation of the American downtown at this time had a specific architectural character, one where relationships between inside and outside were reformulated at the intersection of social, political and economic upheaval. To see this context historically is to see how the city can be understood as the subject of propositions whose effects, and whose contestations, are oriented toward a future in the making.18

Plate 1 John Portman and Associates, Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Exterior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 2 John Portman and Associates, Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 3 John Portman and Associates, Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 4 John Portman and Associates, Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 5 John Portman and Associates, Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 6 John Portman and Associates, Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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1 TRANSFORMATIONS IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE In 1979 Arthur Drexler, Director of the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, declared that John Portman had constructed ‘among the few buildings of the last two decades that can claim to have a genuine popular following’.1 After his own tour through Portman’s Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel (1977) in the mid-1980s, literary critic Fredric Jameson thought that accounting for why crowds might be drawn to the hotel’s vast atrium was, however, not so straightforward. Popularity dissimulated a more bewildering condition. Jameson declared that the Bonaventure put one ‘in the presence of something like a mutation in built space itself’.2 Drexler’s approbation of Portman’s work was not so straightforward either. He made his remarks in the catalog for his MoMA survey of the 1960s and 1970s, ‘Transformations in Modern Architecture’. Defending it from accusations of cacophony, Drexler perhaps dug a deeper hole for himself, stating that the exhibition was meant to be ‘an analogue of the real world: bewildering, profuse, overloaded, contradictory, inconsistent, largely mediocre. The devaluation of once lofty and supposedly profound ideas.’3 For Drexler, and for Jameson, Portman’s work stood forth at the moment architecture was situated in terms of broader cultural problems. Drexler was concerned about what role architecture should take after the loss of a certain cultural authority, and ‘against the background of traumatic public events’;4 popularity with the public was one kind of response. For his part, Jameson would glimpse in the Bonaventure’s atrium the need for a new kind of mapping, however impossible, of what he would call ‘Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’. This chapter will discuss the appearance of Portman’s work in these two situations: the discipline of architecture in its public presentation, and the emerging cultural problematic of postmodernism, especially its urban dimension. To encounter the work in this way is to encounter the emergence of a symbolic reading of architecture, one in which architecture stands for the ungraspable nature of the conditions to which it is tied: the social, political, economic and aesthetic conditions of the city. 15

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‘What do these two pictures have in common?’ Drexler set his decidedly downbeat assessment of the architectural output of the 1960s and 1970s against what might be called architecture’s excessive cultural presence: he noted that ‘there are now more architects practicing their profession than ever before, and the number of students in training exceeds both the number of architects and the capacity for even the most productive and well regulated society to employ them’.5 With this swelling in architecture’s ranks came a fracturing between the profession and the discipline of architecture. The overt academicization of the discipline changed the balance in terms of who says what about architecture, and from where: Critical discourse has shifted away from the profession. The most instructive commentary no longer comes from practicing architects who incidentally teach, and whose comments are interesting because their work commands admiration, but rather from academics who may or may not be architects, or architects who build, and for whom critical discourse is regulated by its own laws of production and distribution.6 While these comments marked a reality Drexler perceived by the end of the 1970s, they were also prescient of the kind of culture that would solidify into the 1980s and beyond. At this time, however, Drexler meant to show that the built work of the ‘profession’ proliferated without the backing of earlier modernist principles, or a renovated sense of a critical discourse dedicated to the evaluation of built work. Through its visual organization, ‘Transformations’ simply, perhaps guilelessly, intended to represent this proliferation of built work. Drexler assembled around 400 projects, each one represented by one or two photographs (there were no drawings or other visual material on show). These photographs were presented as a kind of enveloping wall surface, where each image could only be seen in a comparative context. This arrangement was directed at a particular kind of viewer, and a particular kind of viewing experience. The viewer was to be the ‘public’, a constituency that Drexler would understand differently from his MoMA predecessors in terms of the museum’s educative role. Rather than heralding the new and showing the never-before seen, Drexler brought into the museum images of those built works that people might experience on a daily basis: ‘the public is left with what has been built – actual buildings – for which theory or the promise of revolution is not always adequate consolation’.7 To look through the images included in the exhibition’s publication (which includes around 350 of the exhibition’s images) is to come to a startling realization about the diversity of production in the 1960s and 1970s. As he would explain in

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Figure 1.1 Installation view of the exhibition ‘Transformations in Modern Architecture’. MoMA , New York, 21 February to 24 April 1979. New York, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ). Photographer: Mali Olatunji. Catalog number: IN 1250.3. © 2015. Digital image, The Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence.

an interview published in the magazine Skyline, responding to criticism of precisely this mode of exhibiting, Drexler argued that ‘The density and juxtaposition is precisely what makes it work for the layman [and architecture students, clearly the main audiences]. It’s rather like an intelligence test: what do these two pictures have in common? And that question infuriates architects.’8 Rather than select work on the basis of exemplarity, Drexler was looking to trace tendencies in order to come to an understanding of the proliferation of architectural ideas through built work. In this way Drexler selected buildings rather than architects: [I]t is reasonable to suppose that there will have been produced during the last 20 years not 10 or 50 but 400 or even 4,000 buildings that illuminate the exchange of architectural ideas through their primary statement, their adaption to normative use, their hold on our sensibilities, and their rapid devaluation. It is also reasonable to expect that among 400 buildings will be most of the major achievements of the period.9 While Kenneth Frampton criticized Drexler for the isolationist tendency of the photograph, the sense that buildings would be perceived as objects rather than as part of urban ensembles10 – indeed, the fact that many of the buildings could be photographed in isolation was testament precisely to how the urban problems of these decades could be understood – Drexler countered rather sarcastically: ‘My priority was to include as much material as I could cram into the gallery; if

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I hadn’t run out of money, there would have been more pictures on the ceiling.’11 Rather than being anti-urban in Frampton’s sense, this strategy pointed to a different kind of urban experience: that of the lay person, the exhibition’s notional public. If it was not possible in cities to appreciate recent architectural production in terms of its relationality, then the gallery could usefully allow the opportunity for visual comparisons. Where urban conditions and urban experience had become fractured, the gallery could provide an artificial synthesis that actually broke down the distinction between different buildings, and the attendant drive towards distinctiveness. But Frampton was correct in one sense. Between MoMA’s exhibition ‘The New City: Architecture and Urban Renewal’ of 1967,12 and ‘Transformations in Modern Architecture’, the urban had slipped off the agenda.13 In ‘Transformations’ it was replaced by a sense of the ‘city’ as a visual, everyday environment. For this sense to be conveyed, connections between buildings – if not exactly the urban as a connected system – needed to be artificially produced. The exhibition’s enveloping effect offered a kind of synthesis, while still working within the mode of perception that would isolate buildings visually, and understand them as exterior forms.14 In its commitment to the photograph as the exhibition’s medium, ‘Transformations’ was clearly different from Drexler and Colin Rowe’s ‘in camera’ exhibition and critique a decade earlier of selected work of the group that came to be known as the New York Five, and out of which came, in 1972, the publication Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier. While photo-documentation was important to the communication of the built works in that publication, it was the role of the drawing that was central, Rowe remarking that the five architects ‘sometimes seem to regard building as an excuse for drawing rather than drawings as an excuse for building’.15 All bar Hejduk appeared in ‘Transformations’, represented by built houses grouped together under the heading ‘Sculptural Form’, where the catalog text repeated Rowe’s assertion from the Five Architects publication that these architects ‘found in French and Italian architecture prior to World War II intentions they believed still valid and still susceptible of development’.16 While most of the so-called ‘Whites’ were in evidence in ‘Transformations’, of the ‘Grays’, only Charles Moore and Robert Venturi were represented, the latter with a named section in the catalog (along with Louis Kahn and James Stirling), their projects, though, without greater visual presence than any others. One of the criticisms of ‘Transformations’ was that all of these architects could be lumped together (and some missed altogether) without making evident distinctions that were solidifying within the discipline; Portman has about as much presence in ‘Transformations’ as Venturi and the New York Five. Yet this confusing juxtaposition turns out to be a particularly postmodern form of relation, one that had a specific analytical function for Drexler.

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In this way it should be recognized that ‘Transformations’ was a particular kind of retrospective. Perhaps more controversially, Drexler had curated ‘The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts’ at MoMA in late 1975, an exhibition that, together with Charles Jencks’ publication of The Language of Postmodern Architecture of 1977, put postmodern historicism firmly on the architectural agenda.17 By the time of ‘Transformations’, stylistic postmodernism had been enacted within architecture, and this made the work exhibited in ‘Transformations’ all the more shocking. In its ‘devalued modernism’, the work represented the preoccupations of architectural practice largely outside of what was dominant in the architectural debate. ‘Transformations’ revealed these concerns, particularly the battle between the ‘Whites’ and the ‘Grays’, to be a small component of a much larger picture, however much this picture lacked a coherent code.18 The bulk of the work exhibited in ‘Transformations’ was what was being built when no one was really looking. In the way he infuriated architects, Drexler was revealing the sense of a broader modus operandi at work in the profession, that of absorbing workable solutions and proliferating them. He made this clear in a statement that linked a lay person’s visual analysis to the training of architects: No one studying painting is taught to paint Picassos, nor are imitation Picassos highly regarded. But architectural ideas are models. Part of their value is that they can be imitated, varied, ‘improved’. No matter how strongly the modern movement stressed the idea of approaching each problem without prior commitments – as if the wheel had to be perpetually reinvented – any successful solution to an architectural problem embodies a previous success, and is itself successful in that it can be imitated. [. . .] Now that imitation is not as focused on the work of three or four great, pioneering figures, the movement of ideas is less from father to son and more brother to brother. Competition and the ambivalence architects feel about originality make it awkward to discuss an individual’s use of a shared idea – but not necessarily the limitations of the idea itself.19 In the exhibition and catalog, the organizing logic that supported Drexler’s analysis of this broader modus operandi had the strangeness of the fabled Chinese encyclopedia: ‘Sculptural Form, Structure, Hybrids, Louis Kahn, James Stirling, Robert Venturi, Elements, Vernacular, Fragments: The Usable Past, Historicizing’.20 Portman’s hotels, including the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, the Detroit Renaissance Center, as well as the Hyatt Regency San Francisco and the Bonaventure Hotel, were included in the ‘Structure’ category, under the subheading ‘Greenhouses and Other Public Spaces’.21 These works sat alongside atrium and glasshouse buildings by well-known contemporaries, including Cesar Pelli, Philip Johnson and John Burgee, Kevin Roche and John

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Dinkeloo, I.M. Pei, Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum, as well as largely unknown architects from across the globe, including Estudio Sanchez Elia – Peralta Ramos; Teodoro González de León, Abraham Zabludovsky, Jaime Ortiz Monasterio and Luis Antonio Zapiain; Bregman & Hamann and Ziedler Partnership; and Sachio Otani. All projects by these architects, exceptionally in the context of the rest of the catalog, were represented by interior views. The dominance of commercial practices, and partnerships between practices, was perhaps not unusual considering the scale and nature of the work, but, once again, it did serve to emphasize the distinction, and also the relation, between those architects who would be widely known to an architectural audience, and those who would be largely unknown, but who constituted the broader profession. In this subsection in particular, there was no consistency of genre. ‘Greenhouses and Other Public Spaces’ included hotels, office buildings, government buildings, housing, a school, a church, an art museum, shopping centers, an exhibition building, a leisure center and a tropical garden. Thus a spatial condition proliferated, not even via conscious influence, through all buildings that would make the contemporary city. And even though Drexler would encourage the lay viewer to ask ‘what do these two pictures have in common’, this was not the didacticism of the International Style, which, to be sure, was directed at a professional audience.22 Yet, while Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson’s ruling values of volume, regularity and the avoidance of ornament were replaced by Drexler’s more dizzying categories, the underlying argument about proliferation these categories organized indicated both the success and failure of the earlier professional didacticism. Architects were directed to copy the work of European modernists, yet the codification and ‘internationalization’ of that ‘style’ led to what Drexler called its devaluation: one can’t be taught to paint Picassos. Indeed, Drexler wryly included in the ‘Transformations’ catalog essay Mies’ entirely unironic description of the beginning to a working day in 1960: ‘ “I get up. I sit on the bed. I think ‘what the hell went wrong? We showed them what to do.’ ” ’ 23

Mapping postmodern hyperspace If ‘Transformations in Modern Architecture’ produced (or perhaps reflected) a bewilderment in the discipline, Portman’s atrium would produce a concomitant experiential bewilderment, one that was, however, particularly productive in generating critical discourse about the city, albeit the kind Drexler saw as academicized.24 In losing his sense of orientation in the atrium of the Bonaventure Hotel, Fredric Jameson formulated one of the classic passages of cultural criticism. It is as bewildering in its own way as his experience appeared to be, and through it Jameson articulated what Drexler had struggled with: the drive

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towards the mapping of a condition – be it space or discipline – in which one is immersed: this latest mutation in space – postmodern hyperspace – has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment – which is to the initial bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities of spacecraft to those of the automobile – can itself stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma, which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communication network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.25 One might wonder whether it was really that much of a struggle to navigate the Bonaventure’s atrium, but certainly the significance Jameson accorded his moments of spatial disorientation enabled him to articulate his broader argument: that there was a spatial manifestation of postmodernism that set the terms of its cultural significance. Further, this manifestation in the Bonaventure atrium signaled postmodernism’s material and immaterial effects: it was not something one could avoid, nor was it something to which one had direct access. One would not simply experience the atrium as a different kind of urban space, and the building did not simply fail to function properly. Rather, the building reorganized categories: of experience, and of the cognitive ability to locate oneself in space and time. To date, Jameson’s account stands as one of the most striking analyses of the space of Portman’s atrium and the way in which it secures itself as a total world. Part of Jameson’s experiential bewilderment had to do with a literal difficulty in entering this world. Recognizing the lack of the traditional porte cochère, he remarked that the entryways, some from the street, others via above-ground walkways from adjacent building podiums, were ‘lateral and rather backdoor affairs’, never quite delivering you where you needed to go: What I first want to suggest about these curiously unmarked ways in is that they seem to have been imposed by some new category of enclosure governing the inner space of the hotel itself (and this over and above the material constraints under which Portman had to work). [. . .] In this sense, then, ideally, the minicity of Portman’s Bonaventure ought not to have entrances at all, since the entryway is always the seam that links the building to the rest of the city that surrounds it: for it does not wish to be part of the city but rather its equivalent and replacement or substitute.26

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This bewilderment set the tone for the kinetic pleasures of the atrium, in particular the gondola elevators: [I]t seems to me that the escalators and elevators here henceforth replace movement but also, and above all, designate themselves as new reflexive signs and emblems of movement proper[.] . . . Here, the narrative stroll has been underscored, symbolized, reified and replaced by a transportation machine which becomes the allegorical signifier of that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our own[.]27 Jameson was, however, ‘more at a loss when it comes to conveying the thing itself’ – the atrium: ‘the language of volume or volumes seems inadequate’.28 Space became ungraspable at the moment one was fully immersed within it; coordinate systems were not simply inadequate, they had nothing to do with what it was to be subject to (or a subject within) Portman’s atrium. One didn’t stroll, purposefully or not, one simply milled about. As Jameson put it: ‘to this new total space, meanwhile, corresponds a new collective practice, a new mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of a new and historically original kind of hypercrowd’.29 It should be made clear that Jameson’s interest in the space of the Bonaventure’s atrium was strategic for the way in which his larger argument about postmodernism took shape. In particular, it enabled him to deploy the concept of cognitive mapping, derived from Kevin Lynch’s 1960 book The Image of the City, where it described the way in which urban space was thought to become memorable, and hence navigable. Jameson used this concept to articulate postmodernism’s particular dilemma: the very unmappability of ‘the great global multinational and decentered communication network’ of late capitalism.30 Jameson’s account of the Bonaventure, and the way it couched his larger argument about postmodernism, touched off a debate that would define the contours of a critical urban studies, especially as it sought to come to grips with a spatial reading of the American city. In this context, Jameson’s invocation of Lynch was incongruous, as the problems critical urban studies engaged were those that Lynch’s analysis did not appear to want to tackle.31 However, what occurred here was a particularly postmodern move: the extraction of a concept from earlier, positivist urban studies, its refashioning via an architectural effect at odds with the very concept itself, and its insertion into a debate couched, however ambivalently, within the postmodern. Mike Davis in particular was directly critical of Jameson’s immersive reading of the atrium. Davis saw the kinds of urban forms in which the Bonaventure was implicated not as symbolic of late capitalism, a figure for understanding, however negatively, a higher stage of its integral functioning. Rather, these kinds of

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developments were instantiations of a capitalist system in crisis, products of speculative investment practices that fundamentally shifted relationships between large-scale investment in the city, and the urban role of the resultant built forms. The Bonaventure Hotel’s atrium was not part of the ‘semi-autonomy’ of the aesthetic level, as Jameson would have it,32 but a direct result of those processes that constituted the fabric of the city, and that could be seen to reinforce its fault lines.33 For Davis, spatial unmappability was directly linked to systemic failure in the capitalist system. His criticism of Jameson in this respect was a counterpart to Frampton’s criticism of Drexler: it hinged on what he perceived to be Jameson’s undue focus on the ‘thing itself’, the Bonaventure as spatial artefact separate from the actual urban processes that brought it about. Edward Soja has given a kind of ‘participant’s account’ of this debate, one that brought to a head an ongoing struggle about the relationship between historical and spatial processes as they have been understood in social theory. Soja had taken a stroll through the Bonaventure with Henri Lefebvre and Jameson in 1984, when the latter’s first text analyzing it was in press,34 and he characterized the debate within critical urban studies as one between ‘the historicizers of geography and the spatializers of history’.35 In this sense, Jameson’s Bonaventure analysis appeared as a ‘discursive turning point, a crude beginning in a personal attempt to spatialize his well-established historicism’.36 Though he thought that Jameson’s latter attempts at furthering this beginning had not been so successful, he asserted that the critiques of Jameson’s work by Davis, as well as Donald Preziosi and Derek Gregory,37 had not been attentive to what Soja saw as the promise of Jameson’s analysis: ‘a critically balanced sense of the ontological trialectic of spatiality-historicality-sociality and a deeper appreciation of Lefebvre’s trialectic of perceived-conceived-lived space’.38 Rather than work through the consequences of this assertion in terms of Soja’s own position (and in particular his invocation of Lefebvre), his account of the Bonaventure debate can be seen to point to another of the atrium’s effects: the way in which the field of critical urban studies became increasingly internalized as it worked through its methods and questions. Rosalyn Deutsche critiqued these developments in her characterization of the field as consisting of ‘men in space’. She singled out Jameson’s use of cognitive mapping as a symptom of a misguided and theoretically problematic desire to unify an approach to the city: A commanding position on the battleground of representation – one that denies the partial and fragmented condition of vision by claiming to perceive the foundation unifying social space – is an illusory place whose construction, motivated by wishes, entails hallucinations and blindness. It is analogous to a position created by styles of knowledge that seek to produce total – unfragmented – subjects. This cannot be wished away by stating, as

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Jameson has, that his concepts are, like all others, representations. [. . .] If representations are social relations, rather than reproductions of pre-existing meanings, then the high ground of total knowledge can only be gained by the oppressive encounter with difference – the relegation of other subjectivities to positions of subordination or invisibility.39 Rendering the history-space debate moot, this critique extended to all these men in space: Davis, Soja, Gregory, and, in particular, David Harvey. For Deutsche, these all-seeing urban ‘detectives’, even as they argued their methods amongst themselves, sought to penetrate behind veils of signification and representation (all forms of distortion) to discover truths about the city and the fundamentals of its processes of economic structuring and restructuring.40 The Bonaventure atrium, and its entanglement with cognitive mapping, has continued to lure intrepid scholars. In his recent reappraisal of postmodernism, Reinhold Martin has presented Portman’s work as constituting ‘a map of enemy territory’, one he has pieced together in order ‘to offer some guidance as to how one might learn to imagine that what we call the system – the world system – could be different’.41 Martin acknowledges Jameson’s ‘justifiably famous’42 reading of the Bonaventure atrium, yet, in looking for a way out of the ‘nightmare’ space of the atrium, he calls for: new forms of projection, maps that lead to an exit from such spaces. Rather than projecting outward, from the architectural object to the city and to the world, such maps might lead to an exit or exits deep inside our postmodern nightmares. Built-in trap doors concealed in the architecture itself, that, like visors, open onto other, possible worlds, rather than onto one more solipsistic prison cell to which one is forever condemned, like a Russian matryoshka doll.43 Even though the map Martin wants to construct would lead to an exit from the atrium, and, we might imagine, the solipsism of the discourse arranged around it, he is actually throwing the discursive net more widely. Instead of understanding the way in which postmodern discourse, and in particular the critical urban studies emerging from it, make reference to architecture, Martin reverses the poles, ‘reading these arguments through reconstellated architectural and politico-economic phenomena. Architecture and architectural themes are the common denominator, which, I wager, is leverage enough to allow a modified picture of the entire postmodern discursive formation to come into view.’44 Where Arthur Drexler, through the visual means of his exhibition, was trying to fabricate a series of relationships between architectural examples – ‘what do these two pictures have in common’ – Martin points to the discursive operation that links these seemingly dissimilar phenomena topologically: architecture’s retreat into interiority, say, in the work of the New York Five, also became its ever-

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widening entanglement with its supposed ‘outside’, its massively expanding commercial imperative.45 A ‘close encounter’, staged in 1983 in the pages of Skyline, offers evidence of this: Peter Eisenman interviewing John Portman. Eisenman was clearly interested in drawing out what was particular about Portman’s practice – the architecture– development relation – and also in probing what might be, on its own terms, its unrealized potential. Prefiguring Marc Augé’s anthropology of supermodernity,46 and describing his own experience of never leaving O’Hare Airport on a business trip to Chicago – perhaps he stayed in Portman’s Hyatt Regency O’Hare (1971)? – Eisenman proposed that Portman’s interconnected interiors might be apt for developing ‘cities at airports’ rather than revitalizing downtowns.47 But Portman demurred, suggesting his real interest was in decongesting the city, making it a pleasant and safe place in which to work and socialize. No particular revelation emerged in this discussion, yet the fault lines running through the discipline begin to look more like networks of connection. As the spatial figure of this postmodern condition, the Bonaventure atrium presented Jameson with the possibility of retooling the cognitive map as an attempt at mastery, however impossible the actuality of cognitive mapping was thought to be. The cognitive map, too, echoed in Drexler’s attempt at artificial visual synthesis through his ‘bewildering’ array of photographs. First developed as a way of understanding and aiding ‘users’ of urban space, what was cognitively mapped after Jameson was not so much the city, but the territory of urban research, one spreading out before a subject attempting to make his – and it largely was his – way through the complex tangle of evidence towards a revelatory account of urban processes. To have Portman’s work remain in a symbolic role relative to these understandings of postmodernism and the city is to reinforce this epistemology of the urban, one that has been dominant in urban studies ever since Jameson’s visit to the Bonaventure. Despite the fervor of the debate that ensued, the Bonaventure, and architecture as a distinct discipline and practice, has, by and large, only been treated by urban studies as symbolic of conditions external to it. At the risk of once more submitting to the strange allure of the atrium, in the chapters that follow the aim is to return to Portman’s work an architectural reading, that is, one that attends to its instrumentality relative to urban transformation. What will be discussed is a relationship between what Lawrence Barth has called ‘the experimental impulse of architecture and the strategic demands of urbanism’.48 Regardless of the exuberance of the atrium, experiment is not understood here as exceptionalism, nor, clearly, as experimental practice that eschews built work. Rather, it is linked to what Drexler understood as the proliferation of tendencies, the reworking of material given in the discipline in the context of problems defined through architecture’s relation to urbanism.49

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This still means investigating areas of concern encountered via Drexler and Jameson et al.: the conditions surrounding the commercialization of architectural practice, the atrium emerging as a dominant tendency, and the processes and politics of urban development. To be sure, this will constitute a mapping of sorts, but one where architecture’s instrumentality, rather than its symbolic value, is at stake.

Plate 7 Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Reflected view of exterior. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 8 Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 9 Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 10 Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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2 THE BUSINESS OF ARCHITECTURE AND DEVELOPMENT Just to the north of Atlanta’s historic downtown is Peachtree Center, a mixed-use complex of connecting tubes and spectacular spatial set pieces stretching over seventeen city blocks.1 It creates another urban order within the existing city, its above-grade pedestrian skybridges literally stitching the buildings together, and with them the very idea of Atlanta’s center. It began in 1961 with Portman’s development of the Atlanta Merchandise Mart, and 1967 saw the completion of the building for which he is best known: the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, its 22-story void reinventing the atrium hotel as a globally proliferating type.2 Portman developed two further atrium hotels, office buildings and parking, as well as commercial, entertainment and leisure space, forming what he called a ‘coordinate unit’, a linking of complementary functions within a walkable distance of about seven to eight minutes.3 The Hyatt Regency is at the core of the success and sustained growth of Peachtree Center, which has acted as a laboratory for Portman’s practice of architecture and development. A Sunday supplement in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution newspaper devoted to the newly opened hotel, originally known as the Regency Hyatt House, documented its impact on the local imagination. On the front page, Portman was effusive about the hotel and its significance, commenting that: The Regency is a complete reversal of the typical hotel. Up to now the downtown hotel has been typified by the meagerness of space – offering a small, low-ceilinged lobby, enclosed small elevators, narrow room corridors and a small room with one outside window. The Regency on the other hand represents a total explosion of space. On entering the Regency you emerge in perhaps the only space of its type built since the Renaissance, 500 years ago. This is the largest hotel lobby in history. Glass elevators allow you to enjoy the view all the way up. A corridor with one side open to the vast space leads you to your room where you find a complete glass wall looking out to the private balcony. The entire concept is built around space in an elaborate manner.4 31

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Figure 2.1 Edwards and Portman, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, ca. 1967. View from 230 Peachtree Center building, showing the recently completed Hyatt Regency Hotel and Gas Light Tower under construction. A skybridge linking the tower to the Merchandise Mart building is ready to be winched into place. Under construction at the base of the Gas Light Tower is the plaza that would contain the Midnight Sun restaurant. Photograph by Joe McTyre. Joe McTyre Photograph Collection, Atlanta History Center.

A spot just inside the entrance way was nicknamed ‘profanity corner’ due to people’s reaction on stepping through to the atrium from a low-ceilinged, tunnellike entrance way and gazing upward in astonishment; in a hotel of 800 rooms, 14,000 visitors were reported to have entered the atrium on one of its first weekends in operation.5 A new hotel on this scale hadn’t been built in Atlanta since 1924,6 and the supplement lavished attention on the hotel’s luxurious features, its variety of eating and drinking places, including the revolving Polaris Lounge perched, spaceship-like, above the roof, as well as its advances in hotel management. To avoid queues at the check-in desk, hostesses would greet guests on arrival ‘with envelopes containing keys to their room and all the data they will need for their stay’.7 The supplement also pointed to the infrastructure needed to sustain the human, plant and bird life in the atrium environment. It

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reported that there were ‘macaws, two types of parrots, and cock-of-the-rock birds’ in a ‘three-story aviary’.8 A natural-gas-powered air-conditioning system circulated three million cubic feet of air through the atrium,9 and a full-time gardener was employed to tend to the exotic plants filling the atrium and cascading from the internal balconies. Progressive Architecture praised the audacity of the atrium, and the kinetic appeal of the novel gondola elevators that rose to its full height. The review recognized the step taken in design terms beyond the ‘safe, monumental commercial architecture’ that marked the Merchandise Mart, and noted that this audacity was clearly evident in Portman’s proposal for Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, which had just been publicized, anchored by another Hyatt atrium hotel.10 In Architectural Design, Peter Cook described Peachtree Center as a ‘Rockefeller-type complex’ – at the time Portman was in partnership with David Rockefeller in developing Embarcadero Center11 – and singled out the Hyatt’s elevators for particular praise, suggesting that ‘little more could be wrung out of the business of raising one up a building, which is a clue to its success’. Though he did worry about the excessiveness of some of the spatial moves, in also citing Embarcadero Center, he remarked that ‘developers are rarely as imaginative as John C. Portman, and by wishing that he had more taste (our taste), or more discrimination (and to reject, maybe, the whole directness of the invention), we are throwing away his value to us’.12 Questions around the value of architecture, and the ability of architects to address the problems of the contemporary city, were very much on the agenda at this time. A 1971 feature in Fortune entitled ‘Architects Want a Voice in Redesigning America’ began with an immersive description of the Hyatt atrium, a ‘triumph of artistic showmanship, which has propelled US hotelmen into a flurry of imitation’.13 The article linked this showmanship to Portman’s role as the hotel’s developer, arguing that architectural quality (or audacity) is deliverable through good business sense. Along with Portman, the Fortune feature discussed other key players who were changing the game in terms of architecture’s relation to large-scale urban development: the publicly floated Houston firm of Caudill Rowlett Scott;14 Archibald Rogers, architect of much of Baltimore’s Charles Center, which resembles both Peachtree Center and Embarcadero Center in terms of urban strategy;15 Robert Hastings, the reforming president of the American Institute of Architects; Los Angeles-based architect Charles Luckman, who had designed an early example of a mixed-use development, Prudential Center in Boston, and who merged his architecture firm with a conglomerate wanting to enter the development business,16 and Texan real-estate developer Trammell Crow, Portman’s development partner from the 1960s to the mid1970s. Each individual or team was cast as a harbinger of new ways of structuring practice and practicing architecture.17

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Despite singling out these ‘pioneers’, the article as a whole painted an alarming picture of architectural irrelevancy in the face of contradictory forces, including idealism about what constitutes significant architecture, undue constraint from clients and developers, the effects of uncoordinated urban planning, and spiraling construction costs: ‘the gap between architecture’s potential and its performance has created a profound crisis within the profession.’18 In Fortune’s terms, Portman’s work could be seen to close that gap, but it is not so straightforward to accept the elision of spatial exuberance and good business sense until one understands the organizational structure which in this period underpinned Portman’s projects in their architectural and business development. To address the reality of the atrium is not to address exuberance as architectural whim; it is, rather, to address a circumstance where architectural design related directly to its structuring as a business proposition. Of course, architecture has always been an investment or business proposition in one way or another. Yet Portman’s conjoining of architecture and development aligned business processes and architectural design at every step. It moved well beyond a fee-for-service model of architectural practice, and well beyond the idea of running a practice as a profitable business. This alignment brought the geometry of architectural organization into the metrics of property development. Not simply reducible to ‘artistic showmanship’, here the atrium emerged at the core of a strategy for urban transformation.

The Architect as Developer John Portman and Jonathan Barnett’s co-authored book of 1976, The Architect as Developer, outlined this mode of practice, one which saw Portman encompass what Morris Lapidus, America’s other great hotel architect, adumbrated as seven distinct roles: real-estate developer, city planner, financier, hotel business manager, architect, interior designer and purchasing manager: ‘As an architect who has spent many years in the hotel design field, I cannot help but feel that Portman has extended the boundaries of the architect’s endeavor, especially in this area, beyond the imagination of most professionals trained in architecture.’19 While Barnett characterized the book in somewhat dry terms – ‘The purpose of this book is to explain the basic principles of Portman’s designs and the procedures needed to implement them . . . We hope that as many individuals and organizations as possible will be moved to emulate and improve upon Portman’s work’20 – it was at once manifesto and manual, a bold statement about architecture’s urban role, and a how-to guide for enacting the relationship between architecture and development.21 The co-authorship of Portman and Barnett, an architect and urban designer,22 allowed the firm’s story to be told in a particular way. Perhaps counter-intuitively,

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given Portman’s personal investment in the relationship between architecture and development, it was the two parts authored by Barnett that outlined this relationship, and gave the practical details of Portman’s developments. These bracketed Portman’s own contribution, the middle part of the book, which was solely about his architecture. Despite the all-encompassing nature of the practice, there was a fairly predictable narrative in place here: the practicalities of development and management, as discussed by Barnett, made possible an architecture that flowed from Portman’s interests in movement, light, color, materials and nature. Indeed, these are some of the chapter headings in the part he authored, entitled ‘Architecture as a social art’.23 For Portman, being a developer as well as an architect simply meant that he could more readily achieve his desired architectural aims; his architecture was produced from within conditions that afforded it its own reality. As Barnett told it, the germ of Portman’s twinning of architecture and development was there from the beginning of his career as an independent, licensed architect. A failed venture to develop a building for medical offices in partnership with a real-estate firm led Portman to the belief that to be successful, he needed to be in control of the entire process of development and architectural realization. In 1956 he formed the firm of Edwards and Portman with Griffith Edwards, a professor who had taught him during his architectural training at Georgia Tech. Edwards and Portman remained the firm’s name until Edwards’ retirement in 1968. Barnett noted that the arrangement suited Portman, as ‘Edwards handled the administrative and construction side of the practice, leaving Portman to design and become involved in promotional [i.e. development] ventures’.24 A practice profile published in Engineering News Record in 1965, together with a preview of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta then under construction, described Portman at the center of a network of communication between the different parts of his architecture and development operation. The article noted that Portman’s office, situated in the middle of the Edwards and Portman firm, was without conventional doors. Demarcated via sliding screens, it was accessible from three sides, and Portman ‘permits – encourages – a free flow of people in and out for conferences, consultations and advice’.25 The article quoted his associate Stanley (Mickey) Steinberg: ‘ “There is no gulf in functions between staff members. There is organization, but not in the ordinary sense. There’s no bossism here – no chain of command.” ’26 By 1971, the Portman operation had taken over two levels of the Peachtree Center South building, with Portman’s office on the nineteenth floor, the sliding screens replaced by ‘windows on three sides’. In describing the layout of the office setting, Barnett noted, ‘The surroundings are well calculated to convince a visiting businessman or investor that the owner of the office is a man of substance, while not denying Portman’s taste or his vocation as a designer.’27 He also suggested that these surroundings were ‘primarily ceremonial, as Portman prefers to go to the part

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Figure 2.2 John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, ca. 1970. View of Gas Light Tower and South Tower, with plaza containing Midnight Sun restaurant and other amenities, and skybridge linking to Hyatt Regency Hotel. Photographer unknown. Manning, Selvage & Lee Forward Atlanta Campaign Photographs, Atlanta History Center.

of the building where the work is being done rather than have the work brought to him’.28 Portman himself was keen to relate a narrative of personal relationships at the heart of his way of doing business. This narrative was delivered in the mode of an extended interview with Barnett, and explained the genesis of the Atlanta Merchandise Mart, the first building of what would become Peachtree Center. Portman related with great pride the fact that the site secured for the original Merchandise Mart building ‘was the largest piece of land in single ownership in downtown Atlanta. It sold for the largest price that had been paid for a piece of property in the history of Atlanta.’29 Portman did not have the means to buy the land himself, however. A mortgage commitment for the construction of the mart was secured at the time that another developer, Ben Massell, agreed to buy the land.30 The success of the mart enabled Portman to exercise an option to buy out Massell with another mortgage during the second year of its operation.31

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At this point in the project Portman entered into a partnership with Trammell Crow, who had developed marts in Dallas. Crow and Portman each ended up buying out the other investors to own half of the mart interest each, and developed subsequent buildings in partnership. Spurred by the mart’s success, the development of the Hyatt Regency was not so straightforward, however. Portman and Crow were forced to sell the hotel prior to its completion when their major equity investor pulled out of the project.32 They lined up major hotel chains – Conrad Hilton passed on the purchase33 – and the hotel was eventually sold to the Pritzker family, operators of emerging westcoast chain Hyatt House, as part of their expansion plans.34 As The Architect as Developer showed, the mid-1970s was an intensely productive time for the office. In addition to the Hyatt Regency and the original mart building, by 1976 Peachtree Center would consist of the 72-story Peachtree Plaza Hotel (now the Westin), an extension to the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, five

Figure 2.3 John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, ca. 1975. View of Peachtree Plaza Hotel under construction. Photograph by Joe McTyre. Joe McTyre Photograph Collection, Atlanta History Center.

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office blocks, three parking garages, and a shopping and entertainment complex featuring the Midnight Sun restaurant and a dinner theater. The whole ensemble would by that time spread over seven city blocks linked together with pedestrian skybridges.35 Beyond Atlanta, Portman had completed the Chicago Hyatt at O’Hare Airport in 1971, the Fort Worth National Bank Building in 1974, and a trade mart in Brussels in 1975. By 1976 most of Embarcadero Center in San Francisco, including office towers and the Hyatt Regency San Francisco, would be finished. By 1977 the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles and Renaissance Center in Detroit would be complete. Also on the drawing board was a hotel for Times Square in New York, eventually completed in 1985, and a massive hotel and apartment complex on the Nile south of Cairo, seemingly big enough to have boats sail in to the hotel atrium and through to a marina in front of amphitheater-like apartment buildings.36

‘A continually-evolving character without precise definition’ A 1976 report by the Urban Land Institute (ULI ) highlighted mixed-use development (MXD ) as ‘the single-most important innovation in urban land use during the past two decades, comparable in significance to the evolution in shopping centers in the immediate post-World War II period’.37 It singled out Peachtree Center as a key exemplar. While not strictly conforming to the MXD type because it had not been subject to a fixed master plan, the report praised its ‘highly flexible’ plan, ‘allowing for development-program phasing and a product mix capable of responding to market opportunities and coping with economic constraints. This development approach gives Peachtree Center a continually-evolving character without precise definition.’38 The AIA Journal also picked up on the significance of MXD s. It devoted a special issue to the topic in 1977, evaluating the ULI report as well as Peachtree Center, and their significance for architectural practice in tacking the developmental context of downtown.39 Portman did, of course, have a plan, though it was one against which he was able continually to calculate the development strategies of Peachtree Center, rather than one that outlined a fixed structure for its growth. In this way his strategy was an advancement of the MXD type at a time when the conditions of that type were first being comprehensively outlined. The flexibility that governed Peachtree Center’s continual development came about in part through the use of leasehold for land acquisition, combined with the ability to build over existing property lines. As the ULI report argued: With this arrangement, development would not be ‘forced’ into the market due to onerous carrying costs on vacant land programmed for future

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development. Further, developers would not be faced with owning a nondepreciable asset (land), lease payments could be expensed, and the site could be controlled without undertaking what would likely be a difficult and costly front-end land purchase.40 The development of Peachtree Center’s first office building in 1965, 230 Peachtree Street, is worth considering in this context. The building was constructed over two land parcels, one that Crow and Portman were able to buy outright, and the other obtained on a long-term lease. The leasehold conditions stipulated that at the end of the ninety-nine years, the portion of the building on that land should be able to be separated from the portion on the land owned outright. The building was organized in separable slabs making that possible, and, as such, expressing that very constraint.41 The formal arrangement of articulated slabs made necessary by the financing structure would be adopted for the rest of Peachtree Center’s office blocks, and adapted for those at Embarcadero Center. In 1972 Portman would go public with a plan for Peachtree Center’s future. A front-page article in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution newspaper in February that year featured an image of an architectural model of Peachtree Center, with Portman outlining his plans for two flagship projects: a 70-story hotel, which would become the Peachtree Plaza, and a 70-story World Trade Center, the site of which had not been finally determined.42 Also projected was a high-end apartment building, one of Portman’s more architecturally audacious designs. From a 27-story sky-lit atrium projected eight wings of serrated triangular fins containing 400 apartments.43 In an editorial for the magazine Interiors, Portman was quoted describing it as ‘a tree with a hollowed-out trunk, [with] limbs which will cantilever over 100 feet’.44 The structure would have deployed prefabrication techniques, with the apartments slotted into structural ‘cradles’, saving on-site construction time, and, through repetition, cost.45 The Journal and Constitution’s article also reported an expected increase in the Merchandise Mart’s floor area to two and a half million square feet (with the exact location of new structures to be determined), and four more office buildings to add to the four already completed and under construction. The timescale for completion was estimated at eight years. This was reported as a $700 million investment in downtown Atlanta, positioning the city as a locus of national and international trade, aided by the construction of a metro system known as MARTA , which would link an expanded international airport directly to the center of the city.46 The fact that Peachtree Center would not be developed exactly in this form, and that the sites of some of the new buildings had yet to be determined, actually reinforces what the ULI report understood to be Portman’s approach: ‘Continuous evaluation of economic feasibility’, suggesting that ‘much time and money are characteristically devoted to this function to insure that new buildings appropriately respond to market opportunities’.47

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The structure that underpinned this approach to development is revealed in an organizational chart published at the end of The Architect as Developer. The practice was shown to consist of two major domains, John Portman and Associates, the architecture firm, and Portman Properties, the property development and management firm. Portman himself was shown to have operational control over both entities.48 The architecture firm included all of the functions needed to deliver buildings, including structural engineering and construction management. Portman Properties had a slightly more complex structure, but essentially looked like a development company, with various divisions handling project development, financing, acquisition, project management, legal, public relations, and divisions that operated the various properties, including the Merchandise Mart, hotels and entertainment venues.49 Portman’s own modus operandi in personally operating across these two major domains was brought out in The Architect as Developer. Barnett noted that Portman himself was present in all major meetings and negotiations at every phase of project development and completion, from leasing, financing, construction, facility management, and liaison with government. He also initiated all projects. Barnett mentioned the way in which: Portman, on his own, will work out a design or real estate concept. He will then advocate it, and it is up to his associates to help him test it to see if it works. [. . .] Portman never loses sight of his role as an architect despite his immersion in real estate marketability, finance, and management; by mastering the context in which he must work, he is enhancing the depth of his understanding of architecture.50 By turns, Portman initiated and oversaw all design conceptualization and development. Apropos the design of the Peachtree Plaza Hotel, Barnett noted that Portman ‘took a directing role in determining the concept, the structure, and the arrangement of major spaces, and he did all of the interior design himself’.51 A somewhat casual remark by Barnett attested to the all-encompassing nature of Portman’s modus operandi. In describing the opulent Midnight Sun restaurant in Peachtree Center, Barnett wrote: ‘Portman went into the restaurant business because he was sure no outside concessionaire would produce the kind of atmosphere he had in mind or keep up his standards of food and maintenance once the restaurants were in operation.’52 Further, the development of this expertise radiated outwards. Portman’s corporate structure included Peachtree Purchasing, the firm set up to buy in bulk the furniture specified in the developments, in the process building its business for other clients.53 The organizational chart also matched up the architectural design and development stages. Each stage was represented through identical phases: initial project consideration, go/no go decision (which for the development aspect

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included the decision to proceed with loans), commencement of construction, initial occupancy and completion of construction.54 The alignment of business and design strategies enabled the firm to quantify the effects of architectural design, whereby the architecture itself, certainly since the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, was understood in terms of its developmental possibility and income-generating capacity. Barnett noted how feasibility studies, normally determined externally to the firm proposing the development to maintain objectivity, were also drawn within the remit of Portman’s operation: ‘Portman realized quite early . . . that he would have to check the assumptions of the market analysts working on his projects. He wants allowances to be made for his intention to deliver a different and, he is certain, superior product. [. . .] Portman has also affected the market, particularly for hotels, by demonstrating that the total environment is important.’55 The same held true for the cost estimates for the buildings, which ‘are always based on the actual design, which is carried far enough that accurate estimates can be made. This precision is a major reason why Portman has been able to build his unconventional designs.’56 In a very direct way, the geometric encoding of Portman’s ‘unconventional designs’ – i.e. the atrium – provided the calculus for financial evaluation. Yet it is important to read this financial calculation against the qualitative, affective dimension which was at the core of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta: through its spectacular spatial effects but also through its sheer size, the atrium captured what had been considered externalities – bars, restaurants, birdlife, nature – within the conditioned interior space of the hotel. This capturing translated directly into its success as a business, in that the hotel operator benefited from the economic activity generated in this environment. And because of the internal connections via skybridges across Peachtree Center, connections at the heart of the theory of the coordinate unit, the flow of people generated by the mart business was also effectively internal to the hotel. This atrium effect also expanded outward, in that adjacent land had the potential to be improved by proximity to a successful development, a further capturing of externalities within the controlled interior environment of the architecture and its developmental reality.57 One should not make the mistake, however, of assuming the success of MXD s in general, and Peachtree Center in particular, as a fait accompli simply because of their more sophisticated understanding of the relations between financial instruments, land development and architectural effects. Two other mixed-use developments of the period were noted failures. The first was Colony Square, a development containing offices, retail, a hotel, ice skating rink and upscale apartments, constructed in Atlanta’s midtown between 1970 and 1974. The complex’s developers filed for bankruptcy in 1975.58 The second was the Omni International complex, developed by another prominent Atlanta businessman, Tom Cousins. Designed by Atlanta firm Thompson, Ventulett and

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Figure 2.4 Aerial view of Atlanta, 1976. Visible in the center of the photograph are the Hyatt Regency Hotel (center right), the office towers surrounding the Midnight Sun restaurant and Shopping Gallery (center), a further office tower and the original Merchandise Mart building (above), and the Peachtree Plaza Hotel (upper left). To the left of the Peachtree Plaza is the Omni International Complex. Trammell Crow’s Atlanta Center is below the Hyatt Regency. Photograph by Floyd Jillson. Floyd Jillson Photograph Collection, Atlanta History Center.

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Stainback, and organized around an atrium complete with gondola elevators and the world’s longest escalator, the complex featured offices, retail, hotel and entertainment facilities including an ‘international bazaar’, another ice rink and, for a short time, a theme park created by puppeteers Sid and Marty Krofft. The complex was linked to the Omni Coliseum sports arena, and opened in 1975. The project suffered from massive cost overruns in construction, and lack of patronage and high vacancy rates in its first years of operation, despite its direct link to the sports arena developed by the City of Atlanta and Fulton County, and in whose home teams of the National Basketball League and National Hockey League Cousins owned stakes. Its failure, along with that of Colony Square, has been put down to the effects of the 1974 recession, exacerbated by overbuilding in Atlanta.59 Yet Omni’s failure has also been attributed to its choice of location within what Charles Rutheiser has called ‘Atlanta’s intensely racialized geography’. Located to the west of the historic downtown, the perception was that Omni ‘was in a “black” area’.60 While MXD s attempted to secure what would conventionally be considered externalities within their developmental realities, this did not inure them from the fluctuations and volatility of external conditions. By the mid-1970s, this volatility could be read in terms of the way development was changing in the wake of Federal Urban Renewal programs, when public–private partnerships became prominent, and the ‘racialized geography’ of the city was being negotiated. In the next chapter, Peachtree Center’s ‘continually evolving character’ will be considered in relation to the socio-politics of downtown development.

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Plate 11 John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, 1961–present. Pedestrian skybridge. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 12 John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, 1961–present. Interior of pedestrian skybridge. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 13 John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, 1961–present. Pedestrian skybridge. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 14 John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, 1961–present. Interior of pedestrian skybridge. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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3 ATLANTA, NEW AMERICAN CITY As a settlement, Atlanta grew in the mid-nineteenth century around a center point that marked the terminus for the railroads. As a rapidly expanding city after World War II , the significance of its center had become a problem rather than a given. Lines of convergence – first the railways, then the airways, highways and rapid transit – also acted as lines of dispersion, enabling rapid and sustained suburban and exurban growth.1 In this context, in 1969, Architectural Forum singled out Atlanta as an example of a city coming to grips with the problem of its downtown. It reported on how public and private leadership was beginning to coordinate haphazard development by projecting an integrated urban plan. While the article discussed six major downtown developments either constructed or projected, it positioned Peachtree Center, and the Hyatt Regency atrium, at the core of what it called ‘a new kind of city’.2 The different developments would be integrated into a ‘platform city’,3 via an urban strategy developed by the City of Atlanta together with the downtown business leaders’ forum Central Atlanta Progress. Five years later, in her New York Times column, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable would assess the fruits of that strategy, claiming: ‘This is Instant City. Downtown Atlanta has been built in the last 10 years.’4 For Huxtable, Atlanta stood as ‘the new American city in microcosm, still arising from the rubble of demolition and the dreams and determination of its business leader’.5 That business leader was John Portman. The following year, the AIA Journal profiled Atlanta ahead of the AIA National Convention held in the city in May 1975, where the headquarters hotel was the Hyatt Regency. As an effect of Portman’s detonation of the existing hotel type with the Hyatt atrium, the editorial noted that the city itself had ‘exploded’.6 Despite widespread perceptions of its success, combined with a healthy dose of homegrown pride and not a little boosterism, Atlanta had its share of urban problems. As with many North American cities at this time, central Atlanta was beset by social, racial and spatial fracturing brought on by urban renewal and its aftermath.7 Its response to these conditions offers an important case study of the development of the American downtown in this period, or perhaps 49

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more pointedly, the development of a new downtown condition, the ‘instant city’ or ‘new American city’ of consolidated urban development.8 Notwithstanding Portman’s personal role in developing downtown, Atlanta demonstrates how structures of urban governance emerged and became consolidated amid urban upheaval. To the extent that the problems of Atlanta’s urban growth could be identified and argued over, political alliances across public, private and racial lines would consolidate in a way that was conscious of, and to an extent responsive to, the changing demography and geography of the city. We have already seen how the growth of Peachtree Center as a key example of mixeduse development was not governed by a pre-ordained master plan; in that sense its future form was unknown. In the same way, and in parallel, we see in Atlanta the trajectory of an urban strategy aiding not so much the development of new buildings – though these were manifest with surprising speed – but political allegiances and forms of political cooperation. Urban strategy emerged in Atlanta as a key mechanism in the structure and conduct of urban governance.

Changing demographics and emerging alliances The formation of public–private political alliances had underpinned the development of Atlanta since mid-century. The Central Atlanta Improvement Association (CAIA ), formed in 1941 and drawing its membership from a small group of major downtown property holders, was an early example of this kind of organization, its existence prefiguring the public–private partnerships that would enable the implementation of postwar Federal Urban Renewal programs.9 In an early example of this kind of action, in 1944 the CAIA joined forces with the Georgia Department of Transportation in commissioning a report from a Chicago consultancy on traffic and roadway planning, including the planning of new highways that would connect the city center with outlying suburban areas. The Lochner Report, released in 1946, was prescient in terms of the Federal Highway Act, which would follow ten years later, positioning Atlanta as a node within a southeast highway network. The report recommended the rationalization of the downtown street grid to enable easy connection to the highway system, with parking also regulated to assist with access to downtown. The report also set the plan for the way in which infrastructure development would produce lines of inclusion and exclusion in the urban fabric of Atlanta. The plan envisioned what would become the confluence of I75 and I85, a north– south expressway curving around downtown, effectively buffering it from innerurban residential areas immediately to the east, which, in the following decades, would be designated as blighted. Combined with the buffer provided by the existing railroad corridor to the west, and the east–west I20 to the south, Atlanta’s ‘central area’ was effectively defined through these lines of infrastructure.10

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From this basis, the City of Atlanta grew extensively through the 1951 Plan of Improvement instituted by Mayor William Hartsfield, and implemented with support from Atlanta’s business leaders. At this time, the city tripled in size through including municipalities with predominantly white, middle-class voters.11 The population increased from 331,000 in 1950, to 487,000 by 1960, with the proportion of the African American population increasing only from 36.6 percent to 38.3 percent in that time.12 This moment, however, was the beginning of a growth dynamic that saw the suburban metropolitan area develop rapidly. During the 1960s, large numbers of the white population moved out of the City of Atlanta to suburban counties, and the practice of ‘blockbusting’ saw middle-class African Americans move in.13 By 1970, the City of Atlanta had a majority African American population, which reached 66.6 percent in 1980.14 And in 1973 Atlanta voted in its first African American mayor, Maynard Jackson. The Lochner Report’s guidelines, together with this demographic shift, set the structure for Atlanta’s response to and uptake of Federal Urban Renewal programs. Between 1958 and 1968, fourteen urban renewal areas were established, forming a ‘U’ shape around the Atlanta central area. This arrangement also meant that ‘downtown would be given a wide buffer zone between it and lower-income neighborhoods’.15 By one account, one-third of the city’s housing stock, mostly low-income, and mostly occupied by African Americans, was demolished, with one in seven Atlanta residents, or 67,000 people, displaced.16 An estimate put at 50 percent the amount of downtown land consumed by freeways, streets and parking as a result of this redevelopment.17 Under Mayor Ivan Allen Jr, who succeeded Hartsfield in 1962, Atlanta was being positioned as a nationally significant city.18 Metropolitan Atlanta experienced the highest growth of jobs of any American urban region through the 1960s,19 though this growth occurred outside the municipal City of Atlanta due to rapid suburbanization. Urban renewal projects were seen as a way of attracting private investment to the municipality through providing necessary infrastructure, which, in addition to freeway expansion, would include a stadium, convention facilities and a mass-transit system known as MARTA . In 1961, Allen had developed the framework for this strategy as a ‘Six-Point Program’ during his tenure as president of the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce. His election as mayor ‘made this program an official city plan, although it was never formally accepted as such by the Board of Aldermen’.20 These projects were able to be proposed and built in part through what political scientist Clarence Stone has called the formation of a biracial governing coalition capable of enacting urban renewal.21 This coalition, central to Hartsfield’s tenure as mayor and continued under Allen, included a range of bodies belonging to city, state and federal government structures, as well as business and citizens’ associations such as the Chamber of Commerce and Central Atlanta Progress.

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Central Atlanta Progress Central Atlanta Progress (CAP ), an organization that still exists today, was one of the key players in this coalition. In 1967, CAP emerged from its predecessor organizations, the CAIA and the Central Atlanta Association, as ‘a formal actionoriented player in all aspects of the redevelopment process, from research and planning to funding of selected projects’.22 This redevelopment process was, Stone remarks, ‘complicated by the fact that the city is the state capital, a county seat, and a federal regional headquarters’.23 This context was combined with significant shifts in development that were seeing the growth of business districts in suburban metropolitan counties that had not been incorporated into the City of Atlanta.24 Navigating this complex landscape required CAP to develop a modus operandi that did not replicate the bureaucratic structures of the other organizations with which it dealt. According to Stone, the task-force approach it developed gave: downtown business a privately controlled planning capacity and an opportunity to unite around concrete measures so generated. Its efforts are directed at stimulating public action that would enhance the value of downtown property or at least protect it against the centrifugal force of changes such as the automobile. Thus CAP ’s shrewdest move has been to make itself an integral part of the planning process in Atlanta.25 One of the most significant projects to consider in this context was the Central Area Study of 1969–71,26 undertaken during the period John Portman was CAP president. The study was part-funded by a grant from the US Department of Transportation’s Urban Mass Transportation Administration, and undertaken jointly between CAP and the City of Atlanta’s Department of Planning.27 Together with Mayor Sam Massell (elected in 1969 to succeed Allen), Portman co-chaired the policy committee that guided the study. Calling upon Atlanta’s historical founding as a transportation terminus, the main aim of the study was to promote increased and improved access to, and circulation within, the central area, while discouraging through-movement of traffic not destined for downtown. Vehicular, pedestrian and rapid transit movements were considered in an integrated way. Rationalizations were proposed for the streets within the Central Business District through one-way designations, widenings, and better connections within the downtown grids and to the highway system. A car intercept strategy was also proposed, whereby ‘parking reservoirs’ would allow commuters to change to other transportation modes, and would offer them easy access to downtown through a proposed elevated ‘people mover’ system.

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Figure 3.1 Diagram of strategy for parking reservoirs to intercept inbound traffic, enabling motorists to change to different transit modes to reach different parts of the central area. ‘Central Atlanta Opportunities and Responses’, p. 35. Courtesy City of Atlanta Department of Planning and Community Development.

Where possible, under-utilized streets would be converted to pedestrian use. These proposals had much in common with contemporaneous downtown improvement plans in many North American cities, and the explicit influence of Victor Gruen’s 1956 plan ‘A Greater Fort Worth Tomorrow’ can be traced for the parking reservoir idea. Apart from road reorganization, access and circulation was to be organized through a new rapid transit system, though plans for its development pre-existed the Central Area Study. Such a system had been the centerpiece of Ivan Allen’s vision for Atlanta as a city of national importance. The Central Atlanta Association, CAP ’s predecessor organization, had effectively lobbied the State of Georgia, which commenced planning for the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA ) in 1965. The aim was to maintain the centrality of Atlanta’s central area in the context of the rapidly suburbanizing city. Together with expanding freeways, a rapid transit network would allow suburbanites, especially those to the north,

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Figure 3.2 Rendering showing proposed people mover system connecting parking reservoirs with downtown. ‘Central Atlanta Opportunities and Responses’, p. 39. Courtesy City of Atlanta Department of Planning and Community Development.

easy access to the center however the proposal was defeated at a state referendum in 1968. In its focus on downtown business needs, this MARTA proposal neglected African American neighborhoods to the west of the city. Based on the experience of urban renewal, there was a fear that its construction would continue to displace African American populations. The plan also failed to gain the support of white suburbanites, who feared the connection to African American neighborhoods MARTA would eventually bring.28 A revised MARTA plan was narrowly adopted in three of the five metropolitan counties in 1971; it included new rail lines linking African American neighborhoods, affirmative action in contracting and employment, improvements for the connecting bus lines which were now MARTA -controlled, and an initial subsidy for bus fares.29 Action Forum, a new, biracial group of white and African American business and community leaders, and of which Portman was a founding member, emerged in the negotiation of the new MARTA plans. This indicated a shift in how African American needs were to be considered, and support gained, across areas of

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transportation, schooling, and economic and urban development.30 Stone argues that the MARTA experience ‘left the biracial coalition intact but with significant concessions to the black community and its increased electoral power’31 that was a consequence of the demographic shifts of the 1960s. The year 1971 also saw the release of the Central Area Study report, entitled ‘Central Atlanta Opportunities and Responses’. The report proposed eight urban design projects that envisioned solutions to the central area’s reorganization. These were clearly oriented toward the development opportunities that the MARTA system would bring; several of them related directly to development around the proposed MARTA stations. The most significant project, Peachtree Promenade, illustrates the complex inter-relations between private and public interests as they took shape around Atlanta’s downtown development into the 1970s. Peachtree Street forms the central spine of downtown Atlanta, and the study accorded it a ‘historic role as a national symbol of Atlanta’.32 The reorganization of traffic flow in the central area was designed to take pressure off Peachtree Street as a major artery, freeing it up to perform its symbolic role. Yet the most significant stretch where the street follows a ridge line between Baker and Ellis Streets was to be radically transformed. Peachtree Promenade would enact the latest ideas in transportation-led urban design thinking, fundamentally altering the character of the central area and positioning it as the hub of an expanding metropolis. The project proposed separating movement paths into four distinct layers. The existing street level of Peachtree would be pedestrianized, with its vehicular traffic run through a cutting one level below grade. The level below this would be the concourse for a MARTA station, and provide direct access to and from adjacent properties and space for retail activities. The three cross streets of Cain, Ellis and Harris would also be lowered to run through at this level. Below this would be the MARTA line, and above the four-layer separation would run a people mover. Two renderings included in the Central Area Study report demonstrated the visionary nature of this proposal. They showed the core of a bustling metropolis as an ordered and legible separation of movement types and patterns. Further, the nature of this separation would be made visible to the pedestrians on the mall. Voids would allow pedestrians to look down onto the lowered throughtraffic, as the suspended people mover glided overhead, the escalator connections to its open-deck stations highly visible. In somewhat blithe terms, the Central Area Study report summarized the potential to enact the proposal: In particular, the concept for Peachtree and Broad Streets merely entails replacing the street after transit construction with a coordinated pedestrian and vehicular system relieving existing traffic problems, avoiding future ones, and resulting in a much more attractive environment. The expense, in addition to transit construction costs, would be small, while the benefit would be great.33

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Figure 3.3 Sectional rendering of Peachtree Street showing grade separation envisaged in Peachtree Promenade proposal. The skybridge linking the Merchandise Mart and the Gas Light Tower at Peachtree Center is visible above the street. ‘Central Atlanta Opportunities and Responses’, p. 43. Courtesy City of Atlanta Department of Planning and Community Development.

Just after the publication of ‘Central Atlanta Opportunities and Responses’, CAP formed a task force to advance the key projects from the study. Peachtree Promenade, now referred to as Peachtree Mall, was at the top of its priority list.34 The aim was to work with representatives from the City of Atlanta, the Atlanta Regional Commission,35 MARTA (itself a body with planning powers brought into being through state charter),36 and engineers from Parsons, Brinckerhoff, Tudor & Bechtel (PBTB ), the firm tasked with constructing the MARTA rapid transit line.37 CAP ’s modus operandi was to present and rework versions of the fourlevel traffic separation scheme to present to PBTB and MARTA for evaluation. As the project began to unfold, it also began to unravel, as it became clear to CAP that PBTB and MARTA were working on their own versions of a Peachtree Mall alongside proposals being made by CAP. In early 1973, as it appeared that the depth of the cut for the transit line was an issue for the delivery of the metro,

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Figure 3.4 Rendering showing pedestrianized cross street proposed as part of Peachtree Promenade proposal. A people mover station hovers above the street, and a void provides a view down onto the lowered traffic way. ‘Central Atlanta Opportunities and Responses’, p. 43. Courtesy City of Atlanta Department of Planning and Community Development.

CAP agreed on a compromise three-level scheme that would see the cross streets remain at grade with the pedestrian mall.38 In the end, however, Peachtree Mall was not realized. The metro was constructed via a tunneling process, placing it well below the level indicated by the Peachtree Mall proposal.39

Investor prerogative Portman’s own proposals for Peachtree Center added complexity to this public– private dynamic. Portman had concluded his term as CAP president in 1971, the year of the release of the Central Area Study report, and, as we have seen in Chapter 2, early in 1972 he publicized his projections for Peachtree Center on the front page of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.40 Despite the integrated connections promised in the Peachtree Mall project, the projects envisaged for

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Peachtree Center maintained their own above-grade connections via skybridges. Indeed, the rendering in the Central Area Study report showing the grade separation on Peachtree Street includes, way above the street, the existing skybridge linking the top of the Merchandise Mart building with the office block across the street. The proposed extension of the skybridge network in future plans for Peachtree Center might have seemed antagonistic towards what the Peachtree Mall project, and the Central Area Study more broadly, were trying to achieve, that is, to position Peachtree Street as the pedestrian connector of downtown; however, such a move had a certain symbiotic logic with regards to these aims. In particular, it had to do with maintaining what Stone refers to as ‘investor prerogative’, an exercising of private rights in the sphere of publically supported development, in this case through the purchasing of air rights to construct the skybridges that linked Peachtree Center into a coordinate unit, enabling its continued, integrated expansion.41 In Stone’s terms, investor prerogative developed within and also regulated the climate of business unity and cooperation in Atlanta. Organizations such as the Chamber of Commerce and CAP forged unity of purpose within the business community built to a large degree on the fostering of personal networks. These networks, which were not simply about private interest, but extended, for example, to the private sector’s representation in public and not-for-profit organizations, could, for Stone, ‘also serve to reinforce norms of business unity and civic cooperation’, and ‘for the norms to be effective, they require a hospitable environment’.42 CAP, representing a business elite, had developed its own action orientation in partnership with elected government, with a focus ‘on getting government support for initiatives that maintain wide investor prerogative and in that way further business unity’.43 In promoting unity, CAP did not oppose the interests of Portman as one of their own in being able to construct the skybridges, even though CAP ’s plans, through the Peachtree Mall project and others in the Central Area Study, focused on the street and its pedestrian capacity as the integrating urban element of downtown. Indeed, the development of skybridges became productive for CAP and the city’s joint efforts. As Stone argues: Rather than limiting the construction of bridges as a way of encouraging street-level pedestrian traffic, the city has embarked upon various publiclyfunded efforts to make the street level of the business district more appealing. That is, instead of supporting a restriction on one of their own, business executives back public projects to meet the problem.44 In this way, Portman’s skybridges actually supported business unity in the subsequent promotion of projects that relied on public engagement and advocacy, and that stabilized the operation of Atlanta’s governing coalition.

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One can now see the Peachtree Mall project, and indeed the wider objectives of pedestrian separation and interconnection proposed in the Central Area Study, in a new light. The study and its projects became a response to a key component of Portman’s spatial reasoning: above-grade pedestrian movement between a range of functions, which had been at the core of Peachtree Center’s design logic from the beginning. Peachtree Mall extended the idea of separating pedestrians from traffic, but it did so as an explicit reinvigoration of the idea of a vibrant street-level, responding to the lifting of pedestrians up above it. These ‘street improvements’ proposed via Peachtree Mall became about a public recognition of the need for this improvement, in political rather than strictly urban terms. CAP needed to be seen as pro-active in its efforts with MARTA , the city and the state to implement this ‘opportunity’ that was provided not so much by the construction of a metro as by the very nature of the politico-economic reality of downtown development, and the reality and leverage that a piece of infrastructure such as skybridge had in that process. In characterizing what he terms ‘partnership new south style’, Stone argues that: ‘Race consciousness, metropolitan fragmentation, and economic growth provide the context for Atlanta’s public-private partnership. One could even say that the interrelation among these factors is the partnership’s main concern.’45 Here the instrumental function of the Central Area Study should be recognized. Its success didn’t hinge on whether its major projects were built as projected.46 Rather, its role was political in its organization of public–private collaboration, and therefore degrees of stability and the visibility of cooperation in governance in the context of an urban environment that remained perpetually problematic. Urban action occurred through, and took as its interest, the management of inherent urban instability, rather than the fixing of urban problems.47

Pedestrianism, but not as we know it The development of Peachtree Center and the proposals of the Central Area Study touch on pedestrianism as a key aspect of the debate regarding urban renewal and its aftermath. Prior to the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, Jane Jacobs’ thoughts about pedestrianism appear at an important moment in debates that would define the strategies implemented in mixed-use development. In a chapter for the 1958 anthology The Exploding Metropolis, she wrote in support of Victor Gruen’s 1956 scheme ‘A Greater Fort Worth Tomorrow’.48 Funded by the head of Fort Worth’s largest utilities company, the urban design scheme envisaged the pedestrianization of the downtown through strategies to remove automobile traffic. Six enormous parking garages, fed by a ring of highways, would encircle the city center and turn it into a giant pedestrianized podium, serviced from below. The podium would ‘capture’

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existing buildings as well as provide the structure for new development in a consolidated amalgam. In the context of her criticism of other plans for downtown revitalization that were going to ‘banish’ the function and variety of the street, Jacobs’ support for Gruen’s plan was based on the way in which it would enliven the newly pedestrianized streets with variety and diversity of function and experience. This was mostly to be provided by street-level kiosks and vendors – a strategy Gruen had developed for the thoroughfare spaces of his suburban shopping malls – together with a diversity of spatial scales in the streets and plazas created. The plan promoted a high degree of redundancy. Many paths could be taken between points, thereby multiplying variety, and heightening the experience of the street as a network. Yet Jacobs’ support for the plan also allowed her to articulate what she thought subsequent plans, which took their lead from Fort Worth, missed. Too many were focused on the podium solution as a way of separating and isolating the resultant built forms that tended to cater for only one function.49 The illustration of Gruen’s scheme that appeared on the front page of the Fort Worth Press in March 1956 shows clearly the vitality Jacobs praised.

Figure 3.5 Victor Gruen & Associates, rendering from ‘A Greater Fort Worth Tomorrow’, 1956. Victor Gruen Papers, American Heritage Center.

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It is an image not unlike those included in the report of Atlanta’s Central Area Study: a bustle of citizens partake in public, social life in a pedestrianized environment where car traffic has been removed or sectioned away from pedestrian activity.50 Clearly the Central Area Study planners had taken their lead from Gruen’s well-known scheme, their car intercept strategy being the most obvious component adopted. But it is perhaps the difference, or distance, between the Fort Worth plan, and what resulted at Peachtree Center, that is most noteworthy. In a way not dissimilar to the Central Area Study rendering, Gruen’s image shows an elevated, enclosed walkway connecting a parking garage with a building across a pedestrianized street. At one level this can be read in terms of the redundancy of connection that was praiseworthy in the scheme, and also as a simple illustration to explain the carpark strategy. But it can also be read in relation to Portman’s desire to maintain above-street connections among his Peachtree Center buildings, even given the potential for the Peachtree Mall project to provide pedestrian interconnection. Here we see that redundancy in movement paths could also be used as a strategy to maintain the coherence of a particular development, especially if the infrastructural changes necessary for traffic abatement in downtown could not be secured. The problem, then, was not so much that downtown redevelopment was creating isolated environments through the proliferation of podiums – though, empirically, this occurred in many instances – but that street structures were maintained, and hence traffic was not effectively quarantined from downtowns. Gruen’s Fort Worth plan brought the spatial solutions his office developed in the suburban shopping mall to the city center, offering the initial spatial prototype for its transformation.51 However, shopping mall solutions confronted existing street patterns as the mark of what could be called downtown’s prior existence. Street patterns gave rise to an image of the city’s exteriority, an image canonized qua image in Kevin Lynch’s 1960 study The Image of the City. Amalgamations of form, block consolidation and the creation of podiums challenged the ability for this image to be created, yet an image of exteriority was still at stake in these architectural solutions. Such an image remained for Gruen in Fort Worth, which might explain Jacobs’ support for it. The experience of the street, whether or not devoid of cars or raised on a platform, was taken to be an experience of the city’s exteriority, its diversity secured as much by a mix of building exteriors as by the diversity of activity a street could produce. For Jacobs, these two factors were directly and intimately linked, and this conviction would go on to inform The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Atlanta’s Central Area Study tried to create a new image of downtown’s exteriority. It did not tamper with the street grid, nor could it to any great extent, as the grid organized the divisions of land holdings which made development possible. In this context, the Peachtree Mall project tried its best to pedestrianize a part of downtown, still in the name of the street. In its deployment of skybridges

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to maintain its internal connectivity, and therefore its developmental viability, Peachtree Center departed quite radically from the vision of the Central Area Study. The spatial logic governing the positioning and connection of the skybridges was internal, and hence not visible in an exterior reading of Peachtree Center. In this way, their appearance seemed contingent or haphazard. Yet they instantiated an urbanism via this interior logic, one based on the integration of architecture and development, and actualized via investor prerogative. The account of this interior urbanism now proceeds in two directions. The next chapter will discuss its innate spatial reasoning through a reading of Portman’s major projects from the 1960s and 1970s. Then Chapter 5 will return to the question of the street, and the way in which it became a problem rather than a given in urban thinking during this period.

Plate 15 John Portman and Associates, Hyatt Regency, San Francisco, 1974. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 16 John Portman and Associates, Hyatt Regency, San Francisco, 1974. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 17 John Portman and Associates, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, 1971–89. Exterior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 18 John Portman and Associates, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, 1971–89. Exterior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 19 John Portman and Associates, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, 1971–89. Exterior view of above-grade pedestrian surface. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 20 John Portman and Associates, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, 1971–89. Exterior view looking towards Hyatt Regency. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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4 THE GEOMETRY OF INTERIOR URBANISM In a 1965 editorial for the professional magazine Interiors, entitled ‘The Airconditioned Hanging Garden’, Olga Gueft made a claim for design as an environmental practice. She was celebrating the rise of Romaldo Giurgola, art director of Interiors between 1952 and 1957, and by the mid-1960s professor of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and ‘right hand man of brilliant Philadelphia planning commissioner, Edmund Bacon’.1 In rising through these ranks, Giurgola had also moved through a kind of continuum of environmental design. As Gueft remarked, ‘He can, as an exceptionally able architect, design environment on any scale and at any level. The key word is design. The point is the same design principles apply whether the hunk of environment involved is indoors or out.’2 Environmental design was about lowering the difference between inside and outside, ‘sometimes by placing only transparent glass walls between them, sometimes by plans that unite indoor and outdoor space’.3 Gueft previewed a project featured in that issue of the journal, the La Guardia Terrace Restaurant by Warner Burns Toan Lunde, atop Harrison and Abramowitz’s La Guardia Airport Terminal in New York, by suggesting that it ‘has been handled as though it were an outdoor space with a building set within it’.4 Foliage and planting abounds, the carpet takes on the effect of a lawn, cane chairs suggest garden furniture, brick walls appear like exterior façades, and ‘Unobtrusively, as night falls, the sky inside is dimmed to match the sky outside.’ Approvingly, she asked the question in conclusion: ‘What has been practiced here? Interior design? Architecture? Landscape architecture?’5 Through the 1960s and 1970s, designs that crossed scales and practices became a distinct feature of Interiors. In this period, Interiors devoted more page space to Portman’s designs than any other professional magazine in architecture or interior design. The scope of Portman’s architectural and business interests enabled Interiors to project interior design’s urban role, and Atlanta played a significant part in this. As Gueft claimed, the city ‘offers a unique case study in instant environmental planning by teams of developers and architects’.6 Gueft was one of the earliest reviewers of Peachtree Center, reading it in terms of its interior urban interconnection, and its nested scales of enclosure, from 69

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large-scale atrium to the intimacy of a booth in a bar or restaurant. For Gueft, this extensive interiority ‘metropolitanized’ Atlanta. At the same time, the presence of the Merchandise Mart as part of Peachtree Center, together with the interiors department of Rich’s department store, the business furniture firm Ivan Allen Company, and Portman’s own operation Peachtree Purchasing, placed the professional services of contract interiors at the heart of the city’s economic development. As Mayor of Atlanta, Ivan Allen addressed the 38th National Conference of the American Institute of Interior Designers (AID ), held at the Hyatt Regency in 1969. He was addressing an audience whose business he knew well, in a location that had literally and massively expanded the profile and role of interior design. Interiors reported on the conference program and profiled major delegates, quoting president of the AID , James Merrick Smith: ‘We must change our profession or we will be by-passed in a world of unprecedented movement and change.’ It praised Smith’s decisive leadership of the institute, noting that his primary achievement since becoming president in 1966 had been to inspire AID members to ‘Participate in urban renewal as members of the environmental team’;7 in a later editorial on Atlanta, Gueft would quote Portman on Peachtree Center: ‘ “this private urban renewal project of mine” ’.8 Two months after her ‘Hanging Garden’ editorial, Gueft wrote a review of Entelechy, the house Portman built in 1964 in the suburbs of Atlanta for his family. She didn’t recall the terms of that editorial, despite the garden-effect within the house: there was an ‘arboretum’ of mature trees arranged on an island in a pond that ran the width of the house’s interior, and surrounding courtyards seamlessly linked interior and exterior spaces. She commented instead on the somewhat forbidding impression the house gave, with its interior hidden under an imposing roof and behind massive columns, and accessed from a platform encircled with spiked edges, the whole design suggesting either fortress or temple. Gaining entry, she experienced the house unfolding as a continuous interior space. The courtyards too were understood as part of the interior, distinct from the exterior garden in which the house was set.9 Rather than a link between inside and outside giving the impression of a landscape, the house suggested something more like a city in miniature. What emerged within the boundary of the house was an urbanism sui generis. The aim of this chapter is to trace the development of this urbanism from Entelechy through a selection of Portman’s major projects of the 1960s and 1970s: the Hyatt Regency Atlanta and the Midnight Sun restaurant in Peachtree Center, the Hyatt Regency San Francisco and Embarcadero Center, and Renaissance Center, Detroit.10 All of these projects were designed and constructed within a relatively short space of time, suggesting the unfolding of a larger design agenda, regardless of their specific developmental conditions.11 The discussion will focus on a process of development within the architecture itself, where projects are considered part of a series. This is parallel to, but also conceptually

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different from, their development as business propositions. It is important not to conflate these two domains, nor to suggest that the business aspect was dominant – form following finance – even though, as discussed in Chapter 2, the architectural design of each project provided the calculus for business decisions. While the geometry underpinning these projects did relate to where efficiencies could be made for aspects of the different programs, the geometry is not reducible to a drive for efficiency, whether consciously or not. Rather, urban effects, often exuberant, were produced as an integral part of a tightly defined and systematic geometrical arrangement unfolding across projects. This combination of system and effect emerging from within the conditions governing the series of projects underpins a distinct practice and set of material outcomes operating spatially and economically at the level of urban development.12

Entelechy At Entelechy, twenty-four hollow ‘exploded columns’ distributed across a fiveby-three grid rise through the two levels of the house.13 The grid sets out the extent of the house’s interior, and the boundary of the house is marked by

Figure 4.1 Edwards and Portman, Entelechy, Atlanta, 1964. Diagram showing the distribution of hollow columns across the two levels of the house. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

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semicircles that close off each grid square in outside courtyard spaces. Entry to the house is via a bridge at the second level, over the interior pond, and with a spiral-staircase descent to the main double-height living spaces. Architecturally, and with an echo of Louis Kahn, the exploded columns create a poché space in the plan. Their positioning anchors the major rooms of the house, the basic unit of which is a square marked by columns at each corner. The columns organize the vertical circulation across the two levels of the house, provide points of transition between the rooms, and contain minor functions, such as display spaces, storage and study nooks. The structural perimeter of each column is divided into eight paneled segments. The number of segments used in each column determines their permeability, and this varies across the plan: columns with only four segments are permeable in four directions, while those with seven are permeable in only one. The relationship between column and room creates inside/outside effects across the plan. At one level, walking from a room into a column is akin to walking from inside to outside; being sky-lit, the double-height columns bring natural light into the depth of the plan, and their terracotta tile flooring matches the brick surfaces that bound the house in the courtyard spaces. At another level, because of their scale and separateness from each other, the inside of the columns can also be read as interiors distributed across a field defined by the rooms. These two possible readings of inside/outside effects suggest a rhythm of spatial alternation operating within the house, room and column switching between inside and outside designations. The house thus has a game-board quality to it. The geometry inscribes certain rules of movement. But in combination, these rules produce spatial and experiential complexity: an urban condition is created within the house without reference to a larger exterior condition. The house can be positioned as the progenitor of the organization of Portman’s major projects that followed in the next decade, each deploying a strict geometrical, material and structural organization to create an interior urban condition where a sense of being inside and outside are both in play.14

Peachtree Center In the Hyatt Regency Atlanta (1967), slabs of rooms are arranged around the atrium that is almost square in plan. Large-scale convention spaces sit in a partly sunken podium underneath the atrium.15 Geometrically, even though they form an almost square block, the slabs of rooms are organized in what is effectively a pinwheel formation, producing a sense of rotational motion, and reinforcing the enclosure the atrium provides.16 In the original design, one entered the atrium from the motor lobby through a low-ceilinged, tunnel-like space. The entry experience was of spatial compression

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Figure 4.2 Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Diagram showing organization of hotel room slabs in pinwheel formation around atrium. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

before release into the atrium.17 From the street, one perceives a conventional, solid building. One then enters a building entirely voided. In this transition, there is the strange feeling that one hasn’t really gone inside at all. Rather, the effect is of entering a different kind of outside. Rather than simply being the inside space the façade protects, the atrium is formed through the folding in of the façade. Given the external and internal facades are materially the same and compositionally consistent, it is as if a building envelope of double height has been folded down into the atrium void. This operation is possible due to two factors. First, the programmatic thinness of the hotel rooms means they can be placed within this folded-in façade. Second, the large-scale spaces required for the restaurants, bars and convention rooms then occupy the podium on which the main volume sits. In a way that recalls the alternation of inside and outside within the plan of Entelechy, this ‘pulling through’ of the façade is also a ‘pulling through’ of the urban in the sense that the building no longer simply appears to the city as

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Figure 4.3 Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Diagram showing folding of façade into atrium. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

exterior form. Rather, it appears to itself on the inside, for which the outside is no longer the primary urban condition. The 22-story height of the atrium means that its verticality is emphasized as an urban quality more convincingly than the building’s form perceived externally. One cranes one’s neck upwards as one would in a ‘real’ metropolis. The vertical kinetic movement of the silent elevators stands as an abstract form of the kind of movement and dynamism a metropolis would support. And even a small number of people occupying the atrium produce an urban din due to the echo of the atrium’s hard, reflective surfaces. Definitions of the ground plane attempted to mediate the vastness of the volume through a literal splicing together of spatial scales and experiences. Part of the effect of transition from outside to inside – the sense that, through the compressed entry sequence, one had transitioned to a new kind of outside – was secured through the continuity of the paved surface underfoot, the same glazed tiles moving from outside to inside. Once inside on this continuous surface, spatial pockets were defined through furnishing.

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Figure 4.4 Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Sectional diagram showing folded-in façade and tunnel-like entry from motor lobby. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

The initial configuration positioned a waiting area defined by a ‘U’ of perimeter sofas atop a red carpet. Four circular planters containing trees anchored this space, and were akin to the exploded columns at Entelechy in the way they defined this domestic ‘room’, as well as marking out the larger urban field of the atrium. A circular lattice canopy hanging from the top of the atrium by a single metal cord provided semi-enclosure and an intimate scale for a cocktail bar. A terrace café offered the experience of a sidewalk, emphasizing the outdoor effect of the space, and a monumental conical sculpture, installed in the mid-1970s to replace an earlier fountain sculpture, rose into the atrium. One would move through a set of functions and experiences as one might a city: from home, to garden, to urban plaza, café and bar. The splicing together of these experiences was both physical and temporal. Daytime and night-time activities were spatially juxtaposed; temporal experience could be abruptly shifted in moving between garden and bar. The Hyatt Regency is the conceptual heart of Peachtree Center, the presence of the atrium setting the course for how the rest of Peachtree Center would

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Figure 4.5 Edwards and Portman, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta, 1967. Diagram showing outline of atrium space and objects and settings within: planters, seating, terrace café, conical sculpture, suspended canopy and elevator shafts. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

unfold. The block to the south of the Hyatt Regency contains four of Peachtree Center’s office towers (1968–75), which sit atop a mixed-use podium. One level below the street the podium contained, in its original configuration, an exterior courtyard surrounded by shops and eating places, as well as the Midnight Sun (1968), the dining room of which looked onto a second sunken courtyard. Two office towers flanked these courtyard spaces, the perimeters of which defined seating and planting at ground level (see Figure 2.2). At the eastern edge of the block the sunken spaces flowed into the Shopping Gallery (1975), which rose over four floors and was lit by an angled, glazed façade. Atop the Shopping

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Figure 4.6 Edwards and Portman, Midnight Sun, Atlanta, 1968. Diagram showing arrangement of restaurant around courtyard, and adjacent bar. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

Gallery was a dinner theater. The gallery and theater block were flanked by the second pair of office towers (see Figure 2.4). A central axis running through the sunken courtyards emphasized the overall symmetrical configuration of the site, with the Midnight Sun arranged around this axis. The organization of the Midnight Sun reads as a variation of Entelechy. The dining room surrounded an exterior courtyard, and around its inside edge, circular mushroom-like canopies extended from column heads through the glass line dividing interior and exterior. This had the effect of connecting the whole space as a field extending from inside to outside, unified at ceiling level through the column heads. Adjacent to the dining room, and running its full width, was a circular bar crowned by another spreading column head, from which radiated circular and elliptical seating clusters. Materials once again participated in the sense of an alternation between inside and outside, with brick flooring organized in a radiating pattern from the edge of the seating clusters to the perimeter of the bar’s orthogonal enclosing space. Airlock doors gave entry to a second sunken outdoor courtyard at either edge of the bar. In a further play on inside/outside relations, these doors were pushed into the brick floor space of the bar area, the boundary line dividing the bar from the rest of the sunken courtyard wrapping around the forms of the bar’s outer seating bays. Thus certain formal and material qualities of the bar were made visible to the outside courtyard as its edge condition. As with the compressed entrance at the Hyatt Regency, the airlock

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Figure 4.7 John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, 1961–2009. Diagram showing major buildings developed as part of the center. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

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Figure 4.8 John Portman and Associates, Peachtree Center, Atlanta, 1961–2009. Diagram showing major interior spaces, vertical cores and pedestrian connections. Darker shaded areas indicate skybridges above streets. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

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doors produced another kind of compression (or perhaps decompression) when moving from exterior to interior. Despite the strong axial organization of the Midnight Sun, the bar and seating areas were slightly rotated around the central axis, suggesting a formal autonomy from the larger axial coordinates of the spatial configuration. This sense of autonomy gave rise to another condition of the interior urbanism operating in Peachtree Center: the concourses and skybridges linking the individual buildings together. These connections were above all local; they did not accord with an overall axial or ordered geometrical schema. Their effect was to join the center together as a network. Each component of the center relied on this connection. Yet, to produce their interior urban effect, each component also relied on a clear separation from connection: the slight rotation of the Midnight Sun bar and its airlock doors, the tunnel-like entrance way separating the Hyatt atrium from the exterior. The contingent nature of the connections between the different parts of the center then emphasized the interior urban effect of each part as a spatial set piece.18 Peachtree Center has been under almost continual development since 1961. Other significant projects include the Peachtree Plaza Hotel (now the Westin) of 1976, in which the circular geometry was literalized in the hotel’s 22-story cylindrical tower, and the Marriott Marquis of 1985, whose 48-story undulating atrium with centralized, circular elevator core represented a significant jump in scale and spatial effect when compared to the Hyatt Regency; however geometrical organizations and material palettes remained consistent between all of these projects. A stand-alone Hyatt Regency at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport (1971) developed the Atlanta Hyatt’s orthogonal atrium, enlarging its area and lowering its height (due to the restriction around the airport), as well as centralizing the elevator core, from which extend bridges to the slabs of rooms, the corners of the whole structure marked by circular room structures of the kind added to the Hyatt, and enlarged for the Peachtree Plaza.

Embarcadero Center Embarcadero Center in San Francisco (1971–89)19 was developed in parallel to the phases of Peachtree Center just discussed, and presents a different case because of the integrated design of all of its parts. The San Francisco Hyatt Regency (1974) was a variation on the Atlanta Hyatt. This time, the atrium took on a ziggurat shape, angular in plan due to the constraints of its site, with terraces dramatically stepping in to enclose a wedge of interior space 17 stories at its height. The directness of the folded-in façade at Atlanta was here replaced with a more sculptural condition, a bolder experimentation with spatial form. The irregular shape of the atrium floor, a combination of triangular and oblong

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Figure 4.9 John Portman and Associates, Hyatt Regency, San Francisco, 1974. Diagram showing outline of atrium space with interior elements: trellis structures, sculpture, conversation pit and elevator shafts. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

areas, posed a particularly urban challenge to the design of the spatial elements within. The atrium floor is paved in glazed tiles organized in circular arrays, as if replicating the geometry of Entelechy. Escalators lead from the motor lobby up to the atrium, and, in its original configuration, a tunnel once again mediated the entrance from the adjacent above-grade walkway linking the hotel to the rest of the buildings of Embarcadero Center. This time, the tunnel’s roof was dramatically tilted upward to frame the view of a spheroid sculpture that mediated the scale of the atrium and provided a pivot point between the triangular and rectangular segments of the atrium floor. In its original configuration, two concrete trellis structures anchored each of these segments. The rectangular trellis, accessed via several steps descending into the structure in concentric circles, was positioned opposite the elevator core. Between trellis and core was a large sunken conversation pit. Anchoring the middle of the rectangular segment of the atrium floor, and flanked by two lines of mature trees in circular planters, the pit created a centripetal force through

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the circular arrangement of couches at its center, as well as a centrifugal one, with leather cushions arranged around its square perimeter, offering vantage points for the outward observation of the atrium. The chamfered triangular trellis, with the same descending circular stair, orientated more seating areas defined in orthogonal and circular forms. Geometrically bold forms anchored the difficult shape of the atrium. While different experiences were spliced together in the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, San Francisco consisted of a molded ‘concrete’ landscape as a fixed and consistent terrain. Looking at the published plans of the hotel’s original configuration is akin to looking at a series of autonomous domains, defined through the interplay of orthogonal and circular forms. Each element could be a building plan in its own right, loosely held together by the urban tissue of the circular paving grid. This grid provided an overarching consistent ‘plan’ that united these elements, a plan that moves seamlessly outside in the paved surfaces that cover the entirety of Embarcadero Center. The hotel anchors the south-eastern edge of the center, with four office towers, sitting adjacent to commercial and retail podiums, arranged over four blocks. The podiums are all connected above-grade by wide plaza-like walkways. These are not at all like the enclosed tubes connecting the parts of Peachtree

Figure 4.10 John Portman and Associates, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, 1971– 89. Diagram showing center in its urban context. The Hyatt Regency is at left, with the four major office towers connected via podiums and pedestrian walkways. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

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Center, as they define a consistent outdoor pedestrian datum that links the entirety of the center together. The difference between interior and exterior is lowered in the material continuity of the paving, and the entire development takes on the appearance of the sculpted environment experienced inside the atrium. More clearly than in Peachtree Center, where its constituent parts were contingently linked, there is a larger interiority defining the whole Embarcadero complex, whether one is inside the atrium or outside in the pedestrian environment. The development is also clearly stitched into the existing grid pattern of the surrounding city. Stairways descend from the raised pedestrian datum to street level at several points, and the towers also have street-level entrances and shop fronts. This more

Figure 4.11 John Portman and Associates, Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, 1971– 89. Diagram showing pedestrian surface extending from atrium of Hyatt through commercial podiums (above), and pedestrian walkways, commercial podiums and streetlevel surfaces (below). Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

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comprehensively controlled interior condition exists despite (or perhaps because of) the established street pattern in the surrounding part of the city. The center feeds off the regularity of this grid, in this way being able more clearly to impose its own sense of structure and pedestrian continuity. There is clearly also a difference here in the whole center having been designed all of a piece (though phased in construction), with subtle alignments and breaks in axes along the length of the center.

Bonaventure Hotel Rather than being a graphic pattern, as at San Francisco, a basic geometric arrangement of circles was the structural basis for the arrangement of the Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel (1977), with five circular towers rising from an orthogonal podium with above-grade skybridges connecting to adjacent podiums. A taller tower occupies the middle of the arrangement, with four slightly lower towers symmetrically arranged around it. The podium houses retail and largescale convention spaces around an atrium extending over six levels, its space scooped out from around the towers’ columnar structure, a lake at their base.

Figure 4.12 John Portman and Associates, Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Diagram showing hotel in its urban context, with pedestrian skybridges linking to adjacent podiums. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

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Figure 4.13 John Portman and Associates, Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Diagram showing formal organization of hotel. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

Terraces and bridges trace pathways of movement around and between the circular structure of the towers, creating an effect that is at once highly ordered and spatially convoluted. In this arrangement, there is no conventional front or back to the complex. The services for each of the five towers must drop through the middle of the atrium. This produces the effect of directed but circular movement – one is always walking towards and then around one of the five impenetrable service cores. And what would normally be experienced as part of a core – the elevators – are again spectacularly present, moving silently through the atrium and then externally up four shafts which link the towers together. As with the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, this organization maximizes the hotel’s efficiency. Portman had developed the circular hotel tower type for the Peachtree Plaza Hotel; the circular floor plate has the smallest ratio of corridor-to-room

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Figure 4.14 John Portman and Associates, Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Diagram showing interior walkway structure, tower service cores, external lift shafts, corridor connections between towers at upper level, and indicative hotel room area. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

space, and the wedge-shaped rooms allow for small efficiencies in terms of planning auxiliary spaces such as bathrooms. Siting five towers on the podium of the Bonaventure Hotel further maximized the possibilities for this site. Each of the four peripheral towers is spaced from the central tower by the width of the elevator shafts. This spacing of the towers, coupled with their circular forms, means that overlooking between rooms was avoided, with each room enjoying an equal though different outlook. The effect of this geometrically clear arrangement has to be ‘sorted out’ in the atrium. While their atriums differ in terms of their basic geometry, the challenge of the Bonaventure, and the Hyatt Regency hotels in Atlanta and San Francisco,

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Figure 4.15 John Portman and Associates, Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, 1977. Diagram showing circularity and enclosed organization of interior walkway structure. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

was the same: to define smaller pockets of inhabitable space, smaller-scale inside spaces within the larger-scale interior of the atrium. At the Bonaventure, and the Peachtree Plaza, elliptical pods cling to the circulation paths around the central core. The distribution of the pods in three dimensions in the Bonaventure presents the atrium as occupiable volume, rather than as differentiated ground plane. These pods also echo the wedge-shaped hotel rooms in the towers above, creating autonomous zones, as in Peachtree Center. Taken as an integrated structure, the atrium walkways underscore the autonomy of the atrium interior as a whole, with connections to the exterior once again being local and contingent.

Renaissance Center The Detroit Renaissance Center (1977) took the arrangement and material conditions of the Bonaventure Hotel, including the lake, and enlarged them by about 100 percent, with a concomitant jump in spatial effect.

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Figure 4.16 John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Diagram showing center in its urban context.

As in Los Angeles, five symmetrically arranged towers meet an orthogonal podium, out of which the atrium space is carved. The four perimeter towers are chamfered orthogonal forms, derived from Portman’s Fort Worth National Bank building (1974), with the central hotel derived from the Peachtree Plaza. The combination of hotel, convention, retail and office functions adds programmatic complexity to the atrium, which then functions like the whole of Peachtree Center or Embarcadero Center. Due to the different shapes of the towers’ footprints, the ensuing geometry of the atrium combines circle and diamond. The total enclosure ensured by the circularity at the Bonaventure is here transformed into a component of a much larger network, the orthogonal interior walkways surrounding the central circular core offering connections to other potential phases of the development.20 Having been built on a cleared site, Renaissance Center was not constrained by an existing street grid, and, unlike the Bonaventure Hotel, it could define the potential for adjacent connection from within its own interior arrangement. Theoretically at least, this network could extend to – and become – the entirety of the city. The coherent interior urbanism operating across Embarcadero Center exists literally inside Renaissance Center’s vast atrium. This serves to emphasize the idea that interior urbanism need not be about literal enclosure, but is rather

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Figure 4.17 John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Diagram showing formal organization. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

about the coherence of an arrangement where insides and outsides, connectors and autonomous spaces and forms, are put into dynamic play.

Consistency and proliferation The analysis of these projects has emphasized the consistency of geometrical organization, and, to a large extent, the consistency of a material palette that contributes to the effects of this organization. Across the projects discussed, one can see the different ways in which geometry and materials allowed autonomous spatial elements, whether at the scale of the building or of the seating pod, to link together into larger urban ensembles. Entelechy is the ur-site of this arrangement,

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Figure 4.18 John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Diagram showing interior walkway structure, tower service cores, external lift cores, and indicative hotel room area. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

the play between column and room displaying how an urban condition – the ability to move from inside to outside across an ordered arrangement of forms – was created in the interior of the house, without reference to an exterior. Renaissance Center comes closest to this original condition in large part because it was constructed on a cleared site, without constraints as to how its geometry could play out. It implies a potential for infinite connection, an urbanism unfolding from its own internal organization. If a particular kind of geometry is the basis of interior urbanism, then the analysis underlined the idea that it has no inherent scale, nor a ‘proper’ attachment to a particular program type. This is to do not just with the fact that a consistent geometrical arrangement underpinned the different programs of house, hotel,

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Figure 4.19 John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Diagram showing organization of interior walkway structure, emphasizing circularity of central atrium space, and connectivity through commercial towers and (potentially) beyond. Drawing by Alina McConnochie.

convention center, office block, restaurant and retail space, as well as the smallest and largest spaces within them. Rather, at the intersection of geometry and program, interior urbanism was produced as a particular spatial effect. This has to do with the sense of being outside in an interior, say, in a seating pod in Renaissance Center or the Bonaventure Hotel, or being inside on the exterior plazas of Embarcadero Center. As with the relation of room and column at Entelechy, these experiences could alternate or change phase. Interior urbanism then becomes about the consciousness of this effect in one’s experience of it, as well as its control via geometrical and material arrangement. All of this amounts to what might be called an indifference between geometry and program. And here there is an insight into another important aspect of interior urbanism: the proliferation of the atrium through the work of many practices and in many places through the 1970s and beyond. In some ways Renaissance Center marks this proliferation within Portman’s own oeuvre, the sense that the solution appears as pre-established, decided in relation to other projects that appear to be ‘brought in’ to make the Detroit scheme: the basic geometrical diagram of the Bonaventure Hotel, the tower of the Peachtree Plaza Hotel, and the Fort Worth office tower, multiplied by four, were all combined, Renaissance Center’s atrium then emerging from the ‘net effect’ of this organization.

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In this light, it is instructive to return to the idea, discussed in Chapter 1, of the proliferation of ‘tendencies’ – ‘greenhouses and other public spaces’ prime among them – through architectural practice. Understanding this proliferation as beginning within Portman’s own oeuvre moves past questions of its idiosyncrasy or exceptionalism, suggesting instead that geometry acted as a kind of code that could travel between projects and programs, controlled, yet to a certain extent beyond control in its ability to jump scale and meet very different site constraints with an array of spatial effects that belonged to the way geometry intersected with materiality. Stark evidence of this proliferation is visible on the pages of Interiors through the 1960s and 1970s. The literal expansion of the interior was made plain not just through the type of work the magazine published, but in the means it employed to do so. In the middle of the 1960s, editor Olga Gueft had conceived of the interior in terms of environmental design as an expansion of the designer’s remit, and in terms of contract interiors as the core of the interiors business. Having championed Portman’s work, the amount of atrium hotels the journal would publish increased markedly by the mid-1970s, with projects including: the Hyatt Regency Houston (1973) by Joint Venture III (comprising Koetter Tharp & Cowell, Caudill Rowlett Scott, and Neuhaus & Taylor); the Crown Center Hotel, Kansas City (1973) by Harry Weese & Associates, where the interior contained a tropical garden built around an existing rock outcrop; a project for the Regency Hyatt New Orleans (1973) by Curtis & Davis and Welton Beckett & Associates, along with International Rivercenter (1973), including a Hilton hotel with fully glazed atrium by Neuhaus & Taylor and Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum; the mixed-use Galleria in New York City (1975) by David Kenneth Specter; Stouffer’s Riverfront Towers in St Louis (1975) by William Tabler & Associates; the Chicago Holiday Inn Mart Plaza (1977) by SOM , an atrium hotel atop a merchandise mart; the Hyatt Regency Dallas (1978) by Welton Beckett & Associates and Howard Hirsch & Associates; the Hyatt Regency Cambridge by Graham Gund & Associates (1978), and of course all of Portman’s hotels and developments of that period.21 Those were only the most obvious examples of atrium hotels.22 Urban-scaled interiors appeared in institutional and commercial buildings, and schools and university campuses, but their appearance had as much to do with editorial policy as it did with spatial and economic transformations in architecture and interior design. By the middle of the 1970s, Gueft had become editorial director of Interiors, with C. Ray Smith and then Stanley Abercrombie taking on the role of editor. In 1977, the journal briefly changed its name to Contract Interiors, elevating what had been a section of the magazine to masthead status.23 Residential projects were also divided first into a series of quarterly supplements, and then into a separate magazine. With the domestic context no longer visible in the main publication, Interiors became about contract interiors operating as a business at

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an urban scale. In an editorial, Abercrombie was clear about the professional rationale for this, suggesting it reflected changes in the profession itself, and noting only a small overlap between readers of the domestic and contract issues of the publication. He also indicated the appointment of more editorial staff, and a new section, ‘Interiors Newsletter’, edited by Gueft, ‘summarizing economically significant developments in the interiors industry’.24 This period was also marked by a more expansive photographic sensibility, matched to the increased scale of the spaces on show, with a significant increase in the use of color and a near universal use of photography on the front cover, where illustrations had been prevalent in the 1960s. Reading Interiors through the 1970s, it seemed that cities really were being made from linked furniture components organized into spatial arrays within extensive architectural structures.

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Plate 21 John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 22 John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 23 John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 24 John Portman and Associates, Renaissance Center, Detroit, 1977. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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5 URBAN STUDIES ON THE STREET Interior urbanism emerged within a house. Portman’s spatial experiments at his family home Entelechy would emerge in the major projects his office would complete in the 1960s and 1970s. In this way we might understand the domestic origin of interior urbanism: the appearance of what would be private, the oikos and its economic management, in place of what would classically be its opposite, the space of the public, and therefore of politics. In relation to the disturbance of this classical urban model, architect Trevor Boddy termed the interior urbanism of the atrium and its connecting pedestrian links the ‘analogous city’.1 As for so many writers on the North American city since the publication in 1961 of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the street came sharply into focus in the way Boddy made his argument: ‘Precisely because downtown streets are the last preserve of something approaching a mixing of all sectors of society, their replacement by the sealed realm overhead and underground has enormous implications for all aspects of political life.’2 Boddy’s essay appeared in the 1992 anthology Variations on a Theme Park, edited by architect Michael Sorkin. The anthology presented a scathing attack on the ‘new’ kind of urbanism that had emerged in American cities after the end of urban renewal. It was a rappel à l’ordre for those who believed that the fundamental spatial values of the city were being destroyed by ersatz equivalents. Most threatened was public space itself, and the democratic ideals it supported. Yet, in his critique of the anthology, political theorist Paul Hirst argued that: these changes in the urban fabric are merely one in a series of factors rendering the political ideal of a primary self-governing community whose citizens interact in a common public space deeply problematic. One cannot respond to such changes nostalgically, by seeking to rebuild the classical city or restore the democratic polis.3 Hirst’s critique advanced the idea that urban form and politics are inextricably linked, but that the nature of that relation is not given in advance. The changes 99

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he signaled have to do with the waning of the nation state as the locus of political power, and the emergence of a ‘series of loci of public and private governance that intersect in many complex ways’.4 He argued that the emergence of social differentiation and segregation in cities had overwhelmed the political capacity of idealized urban spaces, such as the street and the square, to represent and to allow transparent social and political interaction.5 Extending the critique of feminist scholars such as Nancy Fraser,6 art theorist Rosalyn Deutsche argued that classical definitions of urban space and its relation to politics, drawn mainly from Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas’ definition of the public sphere, had within them foundational exclusions, particularly of women. This had to do with the historical constitution of a version of the political understood through spatially enacted divisions between public and private. Apropos Variations on a Theme Park, Deutsche wrote: the public sphere remains democratic only insofar as its exclusions are taken into account and open to contestation. When the exclusions governing the constitution of political public space are naturalized and contests erased by declaring particular forms of space inherently, eternally, or self-evidently public, public space is appropriated. Although it is equated with political space, public space is given a pre-political source of political meaning and becomes a weapon against, rather than a means of, political struggle.7 For his part, Hirst saw the necessity to understand ‘the new political structures and new spatial correlates’8 that attend the changing landscape of the city in order that a sharper sense of architectural and urban action might be developed in the context of continued upheaval. In understanding this idea historically, previous chapters have shown how atrium and skybridge emerged in overlapping contexts of transformation: architectural, developmental and political. As Chapter 3 in particular argued, while skybridges posed problems for the street and street life – the kind of problems Boddy and others sought to identify – they played an active role as part of the political process of urban governance. While a skybridge might not be a space of political representation and participation, it became a correlate of the political structure operational in Atlanta. Understanding politics and urban space from this perspective opens the question of the street as it became a re-engaged and yet contested category and material condition in North America through the 1960s and 1970s. As this chapter will discuss, far from being a stable referent for public life, the street enabled a range of urban problems and stakeholders to become visible through architectural and sociological research. And rather than simply being displaced, the street and its ‘analogous other’ became entangled in debates and propositions about how to understand public space in the ‘new’ American downtown.

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Street life The Death and Life of Great American Cities famously catalyzed the emerging interest in the street, bringing its place in cities widespread attention amid the upheavals of urban renewal.9 Being an inhabitant of Manhattan’s West Village, many of Jacobs’ ideas were drawn from the experience of her immediate social and spatial environment, and a strong, political sense that the street needed to serve its community of ‘inhabitants’.10 In order to explain the structure of this sense of community, Jacobs took her lead from research on complexity then emerging in information science, framing the street as a communicational network.11 Being on the street meant being part of the vital life of a diverse community forged in interaction: meeting neighbors, shopping locally, being exposed to difference and otherness, all of this taking place in an environment which should be safe because of its openness and connectedness. In vibrant, street-based neighborhoods, children could be out on the street playing because the community network would mean that there were always ‘eyes on the street’. The public nature of the street could be ensured by the levels of surveillance literally emanating from the street’s informational network – for Jacobs’ shopkeepers played a key role as guardians of order – as well as from the surrounding private domestic environment. Indeed, this practice of watching the street was a core part of Jacobs’ research method.12 Central to Jacobs’ position was that the street’s sense of vitality and diversity might look chaotic to the untrained eye, but was a manifestation of an underlying complex order. The physical order of the street not only enabled the kinds of visibilities and interactions that made it a vital and also a safe place, it also manifested this vitality in the diversity of its built fabric. Jacobs’ enemy was the spatial, and therefore functional and social, homogeneity and separation prevalent in architectural modernism, and its implementation via urban planning, where the ‘bottom up’ order of communication and proximity was overridden by the ‘top down’ order of separation and circulation. While Jacobs would find the value of street life in the ordinary goings-on right under her nose, Bernard Rudofsky’s 1969 book Streets for People, subtitled A Primer for Americans, would engage a different kind of visible evidence of the street: historical precedent, mostly in the form of images of Italian street life, presented in order to educate a nation of non-walkers who knew only ‘roads’.13 Like Jacobs, the impetus for his learned yet idiosyncratic musings began with a view from his Manhattan window, yet, unlike Jacobs’ proscription of images – she included no illustrations, instructing readers that ‘The scenes that illustrate this book are all about us. For illustrations, please look closely at real cities’14 – Rudofsky’s photographed view gave onto a cascade of his own photographs, peppered with historical representations, of streets and street life, arranged in order to shame American city dwellers, planners and architects alike for their anti-street sensibilities.

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A third major project chronicling the street was William H. Whyte’s Street Life Project, which was active through the 1970s. Though less well known than Jacobs’, Whyte’s project came to many of the same conclusions about the value of an active street life. Whyte, an editor at Fortune magazine, had invited Jacobs to contribute to the 1958 Fortune anthology The Exploding Metropolis.15 By that time, Whyte was celebrated for his best-selling 1956 study The Organization Man, which evoked the banality and conformity of suburban life, and painted a portrait of the ‘organization man’ as an emerging social type. Jacobs’ evocation and spirited defense of the diversity and vibrancy of inner-city living formed an interesting counterpart to Whyte’s earlier work. Yet in his focus on the city center, Whyte’s Street Life Project didn’t simply follow Jacobs’ lead. Where Jacobs’ findings appeared to come from personal knowledge and deeply held conviction, Whyte’s meticulous observational methods were made explicit in how he communicated his findings. And while, as with Jacobs, his rhetoric tended to suggest these findings as commonsensical, if not obvious – apropos urban plazas: ‘People tend to sit where there are places to sit’16 – the observational methods he employed were significant in their own right. Whyte released what he referred to as a preliminary set of findings in the 1980 ‘manual’ The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, which was also the title of a fifty-five-minute film distributed by the Municipal Art Society of New York.17 He then followed in 1988 with a longer book-length study, City: Rediscovering the Center.18 Whyte’s concern with ‘small urban spaces’ began with studying parks and spaces for recreation in New York, and this led him to try to understand the relationship between urban space and use, especially of the plazas of corporate buildings in Manhattan, the developers of which, since 1961, had been taking advantage of an incentive bonus which offered an extra ten square feet of commercial floor space for each square foot of open plaza provided. This was an incredibly popular incentive, providing, according to Whyte, ‘in total, by 1972, some 20 acres of the world’s most expensive open space’.19 But the use of all of this space was variable, even in such a dense city. Whyte’s project set out to determine exactly what made some spaces work and others not, as it seemed clear that the success of such small urban spaces was not simply a question of the provision of space per se. Whyte and his team of student assistants made intricate studies of the use of these spaces, employing time-lapse photography, and notational diagrams and charts, which enabled emerging patterns of use to be analyzed. The team gathered very detailed data about proportions and different kinds of people, how they occupied these small urban spaces, as well as how their designed features – walls, plinths, benches, chairs, water, trees, as well as provision of sun and shade – encouraged and also mitigated a range of activities and forms of social life. A key finding was that people don’t prefer open, less crowded spaces, but are driven towards a more crowded milieu through what Whyte termed ‘self congestion’.20 The crowded, convivial use of open

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space in the city was made literally visible in the manual through Whyte’s liberal use of still photographs. While the aim of these photographs on one level was similar to Rudofsky’s – to value an engagement with urban life on the street – for Whyte they were evidence of an existing yet unstudied and un-reflected-upon set of preferences and practices that were innate to the dweller of a dense, complex city.21 The plazas and parks that were the focus of Whyte’s analysis partook in an expanded sense of street life. Their physical relationship to streets and sidewalks was crucial to their success, and the kind of vitality they supported was an extension of what was, for Whyte, the essence of the street. Both Jacobs and Whyte shared a sense of the street as the site of an elaborate performance of life; Jacobs famously referred to the ‘ballet of Hudson St’. When she evoked it in words, she sensed that she had made it: sound more frenetic than it is, because writing telescopes it. In real life, it is not that way. In real life, to be sure, something is always going on, the ballet is never at a halt, but the general effect is peaceful and the general tenor even leisurely. People who know well such animated city streets will know how it is. I am afraid people who do not will always have it a little wrong in their heads[.]22 While Whyte was equally deft at evoking the various urban ‘types’ he encountered, he chose to share how he came to understand the underlying structures of spatial use. In a very detailed explanation of his research methods, where he advised what cameras to use, and discussed how to set up time-lapse photographic equipment effectively, he described how to get in amongst the throng while not appearing to be obtrusive. He possessed a voyeur’s eye, the detail of behavior captured through a meticulous technical setup.23 And the detailed data he collected fed directly into a significant outcome of his project, which was a major contribution to the process that revised the 1961 incentive bonus with a series of zoning amendments, agreed in 1975, to make plazas developed under the bonus scheme, as Whyte put it, ‘amenable to the public’.24 Despite the metricized, legislative orientation of the research, such was the pull of the street that Whyte was inexorably drawn into his subject matter: ‘When you study a place and chart it and map it, you begin to acquire a proprietary right in it. You do not reason this. Obviously, you have no such right. But you feel it. It is your place. You earned it.’25 This proprietary sensibility marks out the examination of street life as it was encountered through the works of Jacobs, Rudofsky and Whyte. Through the 1970s, their arguments and sentiments showed significant impact, especially on architects and urban designers, with several publications emerging in response, such as: The Pedestrian Revolution: Streets without Cars, For Pedestrians Only: Planning, Design and Management

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of Traffic-Free Zones and More Streets for People, the latter directly inspired by Rudofsky, and to which he, Jacobs and Whyte contributed.26 In their calls for the ‘pedestrian revolution’, these publications showed a transformation of the very concept and morphology of the street. The design solutions they analyzed and presented were often for pedestrian spaces not attached to traditional sidewalks or car-based streets, the kind that were still key to Jacobs’ conception of urban vitality in particular.27 In this context, pedestrian ways ‘above and below’ were not yet critiqued as the city’s ersatz analogue, but were part of propositions through which pedestrians could be better accommodated in the city. That said, Whyte was clearly ambivalent about skybridges and atriums. While he recognized that for indoor open spaces such as atriums and corporate lobbies ‘there is enough of a record to indicate that the denominators are much the same as with the outdoor spaces’,28 he worried that removing these spaces from street level would lead to their disconnection from the network of the city. He did see the value of certain large-scale indoor spaces, in particular the Crystal Court at Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s IDS Center in Minneapolis (1972), which links directly to a network of skybridges and to Nicollet Mall (1968), a partially pedestrianized street. He also saw value in the network of underground passages and shops through the center of Montreal. But for Whyte their necessity was primarily in the

Figure 5.1 Philip Johnson and John Burgee, Crystal Court at IDS Center, Minneapolis, 1972. Photograph by Peter J. Sieger, 2011. © Peter J. Sieger.

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respite these spaces offered from the harshness of the winter weather in these cities. He was more concerned about Portman’s buildings: Do people go into Peachtree Plaza [Hotel] because there are spikes on its front ledge on Peachtree Street? They went in when there weren’t spikes. Do people go into Renaissance Center because of the berm? Or despite it? The evidence suggests they go in because there are attractions to enjoy. These attractions do not require separation from the city to be enjoyed, and are most enjoyable when not separated. Faneuil Hall Marketplace is a witness to this.29 As for Jacobs, the street for Whyte was about connection, not just to other people, but to the very idea of the city, and especially its downtown. Street malls and ‘festival marketplaces’ such as developer James Rouse’s Faneuil Hall in Boston (1976), or Nicollet Mall, were seen visibly to support the idea of downtown because of their connection to the street. Yet his response to Portman’s interior urban spaces shows something of a conundrum regarding Whyte’s observational methods. His interest was with people’s decisions to use particular spaces, to take themselves out of the flow of the city and into a pocket park, or to stop in its midst on a street corner. In order to map those decisions, and reveal patterns of use, Whyte had to draw a boundary around the urban space he was considering. It could be argued that Whyte created his own ‘interior’ condition through his observations. Methodologically, he separated pedestrians from the flow of the city in order to gain a digestible picture of what that larger flow produced. His anxiety about this sense of separation is revealed in his critique of Portman’s work. He didn’t deny the potential attractiveness of the space inside atriums. Rather, he was concerned with how they made manifest disconnection by being inside. He preferred Faneuil Hall, or even the Crystal Court at IDS Center, because they were visibly connected to the street. They reminded him that when he looked away from the data he was collecting, there was a city, in full flow. Whyte was caught in an interpretive bind: draw boundaries around spaces to make observational methods workable, but don’t lose sight of the street as the ultimate connector of the city as a whole. The atrium drew attention to this bind because it revealed what it meant to understand urban activity as an ‘inside’ condition, whether that inside was actual, or circumscribed by the bubble of observational method. In a similar way, Lewis Mumford argued that the street-level diversity and dynamism Jacobs praised was made possible not by the connection of streets per se, but by the historical boundedness of Greenwich Village as the empirical site of her observations. It was the scale of such a defined urban entity he believed could be – and needed to be – planned. In his critique of Death and Life he made the connection between analyzing urban forms and planning them: ‘old Greenwich Village was almost as

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much a coherent, concrete entity, with definite boundary lines, as a planned neighborhood unit in a British New Town’.30 While the work of Whyte and Jacobs was incredibly influential for architects and planners, the different disciplines and professions that had a stake in the life and form of the street did not always agree about how to research it, let alone how that research might be implemented in urban practices and policies.

Architects and sociologists on the street Perhaps the most significant multi-disciplinary research project on the street in this period was presented in the 1978 anthology On Streets, edited by architect and historian Stanford Anderson, a faculty member at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.31 Funded by a grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development as part of the Model Cities Program, the research was undertaken through the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS ) from 1970 to 1972, with Anderson as its co-director.32 Its importance stems from the way in which it staged the complexity of the problem of the street through the constitution of the research project itself. Articulating the problem, which would remain tacit for Whyte, Anderson characterized the research in terms of the street’s relation to the larger conception of the city: ‘The ambition is rather to accept our sense of the ecological wholeness of streets – the spatial and temporal contexts within which complex events occur. Examination of this system may then contribute to a similar understanding of the city.’33 Anderson and his researchers were aware of the complexities of the street and of its study; that categories of public and private, normal and aberrant behavior, were being worked through on the street (and in research on the street), rather than being known or decided in advance.34 Indeed, Anderson noted tensions within the multi-disciplinary research team regarding how disciplinary expertise was to be understood and deployed, especially on the question of the physical environment’s role in the determination, or otherwise, of human behavior.35 This was one of the defining problems of research on the street, even as the street provided a locus for different disciplines and their research. And it is precisely at the level of disciplinary knowledge that the problem of determinism could be grasped. Anderson noted claims by sociologists, including Robert Gutman (a contributor to the volume) and Herbert Gans, that the physical environment has little or no role to play in influencing or determining behavior. They believed that sociological methods could divine the shortcomings of unreflexive planners and architects by enabling an understanding of the myriad uses of spaces and structures, for and against their supposedly determined functions. Regardless of the implication that architecture and planning were, in this sociological critique, only ever functionally defined, Anderson identified a logical contradiction in the claim for the primacy of the

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sociological position, and a disciplinary determinism in its own right: ‘Ruling out a search for the interaction of physical with social, cultural, and cognitive factors as nonsense is dogmatic, encouraging the very professional chauvinism it purports to attack.’36 Turning his attention to the field of human ecology, which studies relations between humans and their environment, Anderson saw another kind of crypto-determinism playing out in its preference for a model of territory as exclusionary. Anderson argued that in his landmark The Hidden Dimension (1969), Edward T. Hall ‘reveals a fundamental mistrust of our cities’37 – Hall had used Bertrand Goldberg’s mixed-use Marina City development in Chicago (1967) to stand in for modern architecture in its production of exclusive enclosure. Together with Hall, Oscar Newman’s Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design (1972) presented for Anderson the self-fulfilling conclusion that the physical environment reinforces exclusions identifiable at a territorial level. When related to the physicality of architecture, the methodological frame of territory as itself exclusive and exclusionary constructs modern architecture’s problematic status.38 As a response to these problems, Anderson developed a model of ‘ecological sympatry, the sharing of the same region by different kinds of organism’.39 He argued that it was a particularly fertile one for assessing the environment of the street, as well as its disciplinary entanglements. In its relationality, such a model included perspectives from different disciplines as part of the street’s sympatric condition. Yet in applying this model, he was acting distinctly as an architect. Analytical work he developed with students in the Urban Ecology Program at MIT, and which was presented in On Streets, adapted conventions of architectural and urban drawing to chart what he termed ‘the space of public claim’ in quarters of cities including Paris and Cambridge, Massachusetts.40 From the perspective of both users and analysts of the street, this space was both physical, that is, defined by architectural and urban surfaces and structures, and behavioral, defined by the extent of visual and physical permeability that these structures and surfaces allowed as part of fixed or changing patterns of use and occupation. Though he deployed architectural techniques to map these patterns – coded stipples, lines and hatching on plans of urban quarters – the boundary of the space of public claim that he and his students drew was not architectural in the sense that it did not necessarily obey the lines of planners and architects. In this way Anderson and his team began without the sort of generic definitions of streets, sidewalks, parks and plazas that framed Whyte’s research. And in a nuancing of Jacobs’ ‘eyes on the street’, Anderson showed in the analysis how categories of public and private became soluble and contingent upon circumstance: The space of public claim is conceived with its boundary at what appears to be the most tangible boundary in the socially operative city. Nevertheless, one

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recognizes that any such boundary is an analytic device. If, for example, the space of public claim does include the stoop in front of a row house but draws a line at the wall of the building, it does also matter whether the domestic space beyond is for one or more families, whether kitchens or living rooms or bedrooms face the street, whether there are private gardens beyond the houses, and whether balconies or windows mitigate the closedness of a wall. That is, if we consider what is distinctly not the shared public space, we may observe, for example, that a private dwelling space may nevertheless send waves of its energy and psychic claims onto the sidewalk, the road surface, and into the neighborhood.41 Just as Anderson, as an architect, engaged with theories of human ecology, Robert Gutman in his own contribution to On Streets, responded with a sociologist’s perspective on architecture’s relation to the street.42 Initially he accounted for the resurgence of interest in the street in terms of its intermediate scale (an architectural quality), together with a renewed sense of its communicational function, one that Jacobs identified as a result of the street’s inhabitation. This represented a shift away from a modernist concern with circulation, which, if it was most readily identified in this period with Le Corbusier’s various urban proposals – Gutman also singled out Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City of 1932 – then it had its antecedents in the reform movements of the nineteenth century, which emphasized hygiene, ventilation, separation, and with this, a distinct sense that the street was not a place to inhabit; Gutman recognized that reform was about getting people off the street and into decent housing. A renewed interest in the street did not mean establishing a continuity with historic urban patterns, as Rudofsky would have it, and Gutman was wary of the nostalgia for the street as inhabited place prior to modern reforms. Rather, the renewed interest rested upon a historically new set of encounters, including the empirical encounters of community life which Jacobs took to be fundamental (and applicable to all),43 and in which Gutman saw the historically specific circumstance of the street becoming a ‘political rallying cry for the trapped poor population and those people in the middle class who still prefer the advantages of life in the inner city.’44 The renewed interest also brought with it new encounters for architects, and it was here that architecture and social factors became linked in ways Gutman found problematic. He cited the interest of Team 10, and in particular Alison and Peter Smithson, in patterns of human association and the street as social mediator, exemplified in their Golden Lane project in London of 1952. Also of interest were the community planning initiatives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, in particular their intervention in 1968 in the action to stop a crosstown expressway through South Street in Philadelphia. These were initiatives that raised a historically new problem in the encounter between the

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Figure 5.2 Alison and Peter Smithson, Golden Lane, London, Deck. Perspective photomontage with Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, Peter Ustinov, etc. © Smithson Family Collection. Photograph © Musée nationale d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou. Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais.

architectural project and a user influencing that project, whether directly in a participatory process, or conceptually as a subject of architectural interest.45 While he was able to forgive the earlier generation of modernists their social naiveté, the postwar generation looking for user engagement, or popular or historical references to bolster a sense of community and contextualism, came in for particularly harsh criticism: ‘in their discussion of such early postwar schemes as Golden Lane, the Smithsons claimed that the pedestrian balconies could bring about a pattern of association among the residents and produce a sense of community. Similarly, the Venturis [sic] argued that participation in the planning of South Street will make people develop a sense of identity with the area.’46 Despite this critique of architecture, there was perhaps some rapprochement between Gutman and Anderson in terms of Gutman’s identification of the emergence of multi-disciplinary design teams, which marked the work of Venturi and Scott Brown and the Smithsons, as well as the institutionalization of design he saw in the housing authorities of the UK and parts of Europe. These teams would go some way to constituting a ‘sympatric’ condition at the level of practice.47 This condition had already been manifest closer to home, in the architectural work of Gutman’s colleagues at the IAUS . Commenting on a 1973 design for low-rise housing in Brooklyn and Staten Island, Gutman wrote: There is probably no group of architects in this country with closer ties to the Corbusian tradition or with better credentials to represent the mainstream of the European architecture, but how firmly they have come out in favor of the

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street. Of course, in part they were following a line set for them by their client, the New York State Urban Development Corporation, which, while it still was operating, was the closest approximation we had in the United States to the public building authorities of England, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia. However, the inclination of Frampton and Eisenman to go along with, and even reaffirm the demands of, their client also stemmed from their familiarity and sympathy with the theoretical shift indicated by the ideas of Team 10. Perhaps it should also be mentioned that both the institute and UDC were responding to the criticisms of social scientists and to the political activity of the ethnic and black populations of New York.48 This appraisal crystalizes the entanglements or ‘sympatry’ the street produced as a condition of social, political and disciplinary contestation. And in this context, the design proposal undertaken by the IAUS team would try to ask a question that still seemed risky at that time, despite the experiments of Team 10: what stake did architecture have in the street as a design question?

Incorporating the street In his contribution to On Streets, Kenneth Frampton approached architecture’s disciplinary responsibility toward the street with an almost Jacobs-ian tone of lament. In characterizing current urban problems, he invoked the dominance of the ‘nonplace urban realm’, a term coined by Melvin Webber to describe the effects of metropolitan expansion.49 Despite this dominance Frampton saw that ‘an existential need for something that may be identified as a street seems to persist’.50 This need could be absorbed within the architectural project, a key example once again being the Smithsons’ Golden Lane. The impetus for this project was found in their interest in the London streets surrounding what was known as ‘bye-law’ housing, the rows of terraces emerging in England after the Public Health Act of 1875 which required bye-laws regulating the sanitary provisions and self-contained nature of individual dwellings. These were precisely the laws that strengthened the domestic realm as private and removed from the street, which then became the conduit for services, and its visual organization registering regularity and conformity to domestic norms. According to Frampton, in the post-CIAM re-encounter with ‘bye-law streets’, the Smithsons ‘formulated for the first time in modern theory the idea of the generic street; that is, of a street that may not be recognizable as such but would have, nonetheless, many of the psychosocial attributes of the traditional street’.51 In this move, the street became an inherently architectural problem, the Smithsons and their Team 10 colleagues working out how to give it form. Scale was again the factor announcing the problem. In its deployment of ‘streets in the

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air’, housing such as Golden Lane attempted to match the scale of what Frampton called the megalopolis, haunted as it was by Corbusian gestures of architecture as infrastructure, where, in his 1932 Obus Plan for Algiers, expressway and housing intersected. For the Smithsons, the street in the sky attempted spatially to situate its domestic subjects within this megastructural scale in order to mark out a locational identity; however Frampton saw Golden Lane and its built derivatives as failures in that they did not recognize the inherent characteristics of the street, even in this generic condition: its double-sidedness, and its connection to the ground. A whole range of projects in the megastructural idiom also failed, largely due to a surfeit of pedestrian possibility as against programmed, location-enhancing content. Frampton’s call, then, was for ‘the possibility of the limited intervention of the generic street or enclave’.52 To this end he analyzed a suite of projects that attempted this limited intervention by incorporating street forms into the architectural project. Among them were A.J. Diamond and Barton Myers’ Students’ Union Housing in Edmonton (1973), a raised linear arcade incorporating shops and housing with lateral links to other university functions; Nigel Greenhill and John Jenner’s Royal Mint Housing project in London (1974), a mat of arcades incorporating housing units; Candilis, Josic and Woods’ plan for the University of Bochum (1962), where branching pedestrian arcades linked functions across the site; their scheme for FrankfurtRömerberg (1963), a urban infill megastructure organized around grids of pedestrian circulation, and Patrick Hodgkinson’s Brunswick Centre in London (1974), a linear megastructure with inward-facing stepped housing terraces above a multi-level mixed-use podium. The analyses of these projects had to do with the very possibility, indeed the necessity (given Frampton’s diagnosis of the dominance of the ‘non-place urban realm’), that the street must become architectural, literally internal and integral to architectural structures. The prevalence of arcade-like schemes was underscored by Frampton’s inclusion as an epigraph a quotation from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, announcing the arcades as new kinds of spaces within the city. As he somewhat fatalistically surmised in the preamble to the analysis of the projects: ‘Thus while we cannot hope to revoke the loss of the traditional street at a global level, we may hope still to maintain within limits, those physical continuities that are capable of sustaining something of its living social history.’53 Looking across the Streets research, one might conclude that ‘living social history’ was only available under artificial – that is, research-based – conditions. As much as Frampton – and Whyte – might have disavowed it, the potential for its continued sustenance under those ideal – or idealized – conditions could perhaps come only from the enclosure and integration given by architecture. The Streets research culminated in a ‘demonstration project’ undertaken by a team of IAUS architects headed by Peter Eisenman. The project’s coordinates were developed from the papers and positions developed by the Streets

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research team.54 The project, including a proposal for a housing scheme for a street in Binghamton, New York, sought to incorporate the space of the street, considered volumetrically, into the parceling of land, the definition of development controls, and the design of buildings. Tacitly drawing on Anderson’s concept of ‘the space of public claim’, at stake in the project was what the team called the public/private interface, which was not simply the exterior space of the street, but would include interior elements that were ‘semi-public’, such as building lobbies, which would then become subject to design constraint and control. Frampton’s analysis and the IAUS team’s demonstration project recognized ‘the space of public claim’ as a complex issue, one where a concept of volume joined surface as the locus of design intervention, while neither simply accorded with given delineations of inside or outside, street or building. With the potential that interior spaces such as building lobbies, and, by extension, atriums, could be subject to design constraint, we are returned to the issue Hirst raised regarding correlation between spatial and political structures. That the idea of this constraint and control would necessitate the political recognition of something like ‘the space of public claim’ highlights the importance of thinking in terms of a correlation between space and politics, where relations are not given in advance, but are worked through as each transforms in practice. In this sense, the abstractions of a demonstration project and the realities of city politics both indicate that the future of the street remained an open question in this period, even if its traditional form and urban value were widely perceived to be under threat. In this period, as much was revealed about the interaction of disciplinary knowledge, practice and politics as about the interaction of citizens on the street.

Plate 25 John Portman and Associates, Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel, Atlanta, 1976. Exterior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 26 John Portman and Associates, Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel, Atlanta, 1976. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 27 John Portman and Associates, Marriott Marquis, Atlanta, 1985. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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Plate 28 John Portman and Associates, Marriott Marquis, Atlanta, 1985. Interior view. Photograph by Charles Rice, 2009.

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EPILOGUE: ON HOLLOW FORMS As a way to begin research for this book, like many others, I went on a pilgrimage to the Bonaventure Hotel. Departing from Sydney on a Thursday afternoon, I arrived in Los Angeles on Thursday morning. Crossing the International Date Line, I had gone back in time. Waiting for my room to be prepared, I wandered the atrium in a strange lacunary time, not quite sure when I was. In this state, the Bonaventure atrium appeared as a strangely muted world of bubbling pools, neat foliage and discreet neon signs advertising an outmoded array of shops and eating places. As postmodern hyperspace however, it felt distinctly of the 1970s. I half expected young men and women dressed in flimsy robes to gather along the terraces for ‘Carousel’, the ritual of sacrifice in Michael Anderson’s 1976 film Logan’s Run, much of which was filmed in the Great Hall of Trammell Crow’s Dallas Apparel Mart. In their relaxed cavorting, these young people appeared to possess the correctly evolved sensoria for successfully navigating these spaces; living in a domed city, they had no concept of an outside at all. I spent time in Portman’s buildings and stayed in many of the hotels. By the nature of their function, and the business imperatives which enable them to continue to function, the buildings have been regularly renovated and ‘updated’. This has largely meant stripping the atrium spaces of much of the decor and detail which, in photographs published on their completion, presented them as quintessentially ‘of the moment’: no more aviary or mature trees at the Atlanta Hyatt, no more conversation pit in the San Francisco Hyatt, no more indoor lake at the Peachtree Plaza Hotel or Renaissance Center, and much less cascading foliage in general. I found in my travels an architecture hollowed out, holding few of the surprises, bewilderments or pleasures that colored their reception.1 What remained, however, was the robustness of the geometry, carried in the buildings’ literal concrete form and structure. My particular strategy for occupying the hotel atriums was to photograph them. Even though this might be said to have produced what Fredric Jameson has called ‘ “bad” reification – the illicit substitution of one order of things for 117

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another, the transformation of the building into an image of itself, and a spurious image at that’,2 the act of photographing the buildings produced a particular reading of the spaces that now might seem obvious given the theme of this book: they photographed more like city views than conventional interiors. I certainly engaged with the photographic techniques inherent to ‘bad reification’. I used a shift lens to emphasize the verticality of the elements and spaces within the atriums, reinforcing the idea that I was actually photographing exterior, urban forms. In this way I repeated the tropes of the photographers whose images adorned the pages of Interiors through the 1970s, images that would ‘become a mere pretext for the intensities of the color stock and the gloss of the stiff paper’,3 as Jameson would have it. In his discussion of architectural photography, Jameson used Frank Gehry’s own house in Santa Monica (1978) to discuss how an ‘architectural thought’ might be produced from within the medium and materiality of architecture. Gehry’s complex geometries and clashing materials refused the heroic, allencompassing photograph that would ‘capture’ the building in the way a glossy magazine would want. The non-orthogonality of the building’s elements made a mockery of what a shift lens was meant to do. In the building’s refusal of such easy, visual consumption, it was seen to meditate on the coming apart of codes that would make sense of its placedness in its suburban location and also within what Jameson called the ‘superstate’,4 another name for what he termed, via his experience in the Bonaventure Hotel, ‘the great global multinational and decentered communication network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects’.5 In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, the Bonaventure is discussed in the chapter entitled ‘Culture’, while Gehry’s house is discussed in a chapter devoted to ‘Architecture’. While Jameson did not acknowledge it, this different classification helps position what is specific about Portman’s work. The Bonaventure’s putative (pop-) ‘cultural’ presence means that it is not bound to the sense of architecture as ‘experimental folly’, which, as with Gehry’s house, would reinforce its link to the artistic or the cultural in a special sense. Rather, as Chapter 4 showed, in its proliferation through Portman’s projects, the geometry of interior urbanism is irreducible to such a sense of authorship, notwithstanding Portman’s own prominent position in the various domains in which he worked. In this way, geometry might be understood as an apparatus, not unlike the camera apparatus, one that channels the multiple forces and effects – social, political, economic, technical, material, visual – from which an architecture and an urbanism emerge. As an apparatus, geometry is non-scalar. It is materialized at various different scales, but does not belong to any. My photographs fixed as symbolic particular views of the apparatus solidified. And it is here, in relation to this symbolic fixing, that the critique of the apparatus of interior urbanism is manifest. In geometry’s organization of materials and functions according to

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economic principles, Reinhold Martin has seen the conflation of money and meaning in Portman’s work.6 Such a reading implies that there can be a good symbolism, just as there is supposedly a ‘good reification’. In Jameson’s terms this would be possible in the ‘paper architecture’ that, precisely because it is withheld from an instrumental reality, ‘makes infinite Utopian freedom possible’.7 In this way, Portman’s architecture seems inevitably bound to the critique of reification Jameson announced and Martin reinforced, and in which I too am implicated through my photography. Yet Jameson did glimpse something redemptive within the Bonaventure, precisely the problem he ascribed to the ‘material thought’ of Gehry’s house: the difficulty in mapping ‘the great global multinational and decentred communication network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects’. Is there a way, then, of approaching the project of mapping from within the geometric apparatus of interior urbanism, from within its instrumental organization of space? And to what purpose? One part of the answer lies in another technique of visualization I employed: the analytical drawings presented in Chapter  4. The aim of these was to approach geometry head on, to make visible sets of spatial relationships and effects not easily discernable in the published photographs and drawings of the projects. The analytical drawings deliberately lack indications of scale and function in order to emphasize the trans-scalarity and trans-functionality of interior urbanism. All the while they show the consistency of the geometry at work across the projects discussed. Rather than reinforce a symbolic reading, these drawings are intended to intensify an understanding of architecture’s instrumentality as the basis for a spatial and organizational analysis. In this way the drawings play off against the photographs, undoing the fixity of the symbolic – and its attendant critique – in order to open up the instrumental as what positions the importance of the work historically. The other part of the answer lies here, in this historical treatment, in the way in which the book discussed these projects as no longer active in a direct way in the present, despite the persistence of many of these buildings as commercial entities; indeed, this tension between the outmoded and the persistent is a key ‘symbolic effect’ of my photographs. It is worth reprising the debate in critical urban studies, discussed in Chapter 1, to draw out this sense of the historical. Jameson’s initial foray into the Bonaventure atrium captured the sensibility of Walter Benjamin’s encounter with that other well-known transformer of the city, the nineteenth-century Parisian shopping arcade.8 In his critique of Jameson, Mike Davis noted this, remarking on how the arcade figured for Benjamin as ‘an exemplary prism that refracts and clarifies the constituent totalities of a particular “urbanity” ’.9 Rather than be detained in the atrium, however, Davis wanted Jameson to ‘[reconstruct] the specific political and economic conditions’ that Benjamin achieved for the age of Baudelaire, linking ‘the phantasmagoria of the boulevards, crowds and arcades to the famous precursor to modern urban

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renewal: Baron Haussmann’s counter-revolutionary restructuring of Paris in the 1850s’.10 Yet, in his own desire to have the truth of urban restructuring in Los Angeles uncovered, Davis did not pause to reflect further upon the complex temporal construction of Benjamin’s work.11 In Benjamin’s account, the arcades of Paris opened a new condition in the spatial development of the city. Products of private finance, they developed new urban experiences two generations before Haussmann’s boulevards began to reorganize circulation in the city. The phantasmagorical effects emergent in the arcades were amplified and also generalized in their projection onto the illuminated, clean, straight, safe, (supposedly) controllable streets.12 For Benjamin, the arcades were doubly distanced in time. They were already in decline by the time of Haussmann’s reordering, even as the arcade type proliferated globally right up to the beginning of the twentieth century. What could have been a city of arcades became a city of boulevards,13 with its concomitant social and political organization.14 This sense of their being outmoded became even more palpable in Benjamin’s time, when they could be seen to promise again a whole range of new ways of being in and experiencing the city, but only as promises of paths not taken.15 By the time Louis Aragon wrote his own paean to the arcade, Paris Peasant, in 1926, the threat to it by the remnants of Haussmann-style planning was still palpable.16 At the moment of its total obsolescence, the arcade was transfigured by the kind of surreal spatial occupations and juxtapositions Aragon documented. The imminent destruction of the Passage de l’Opéra offered, if only as a fleeting, somewhat tragic thought, a new kind of potential in the experience of the city. As Aragon wrote: ‘Today, the Boulevard Haussmann has reached the Rue Lafitte’ remarked L’Intransigeant the other day. A few more paces forward by this giant rodent and, after it has devoured the block of houses separating it from the Rue Le Peletier, it will inexorably gash open the thicket whose twin arcades run through the Passage de l’Opéra, before finally emerging diagonally on to the Boulevard des Italiens. It will unite itself to that broad avenue somewhere near where the Café Louis XVI now stands, with a singular kind of kiss whose cumulative effect on the vast body of Paris is quite unpredictable. It seems possible, though, that a good part of the human river which carries incredible floods of dreamers and dawdlers from the Bastille to the Madeleine may divert itself through this new channel, and thus modify the ways of thought of a whole district, perhaps of a whole world. We are doubtless about to witness a complete upheaval of the established fashions in casual strolling and prostitution, and it may well be that this thoroughfare, which is bound to make the Boulevards and the Quartier Saint-Lazare far more easily accessible to each other, will see entirely new types of persons saunter along its sidewalks, hitherto unknown specimens whose whole lives will hesitate between the two

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zones of attraction in which they are equally involved, and who will be the chief protagonists of tomorrow’s mysteries.17 This passage conveys the inexorability and violence Davis would recognize in his own accounts of urban transformation. Aragon’s imagining of the imminent destruction of the Passage de l’Opéra even laid bare a conspiracy at the heart of this late phase of Haussmannization: Galeries Lafayette is implicated together with ‘a secret consortium of all the local merchants who count upon this perforation to produce a new flow of traffic through the neighborhood and thus increase their turnover astronomically’.18 Yet what Aragon saw meeting ‘with a singular kind of kiss’ are two ends of a historical process, ‘whose cumulative effect on the vast body of Paris is quite unpredictable’. He cast this effect in terms of urban experience, city dwellers hesitating between ‘two zones of attraction’ that remained incommensurable, and, in some way, belonged to different temporalities of the city being brought into violent juxtaposition. For Aragon, the result of this juxtaposition was still undecidable, the city open to the surreal potentiality of ‘tomorrow’s mysteries’. While Davis would align the violence of Hanssmannization with the erasure of Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill neighborhood and its annexation into a new downtown, it is worth thinking of the atrium of the Bonaventure as more like the arcade in order to capture what Aragon’s thoughts imply about the temporality of urban development. It would be to recognize that what are generally seen as inexorable and inevitable processes of urban change once found a prototypical form, one whose effects played out relative to specific instances of transformation and upheaval, instances where the future of the city was unknown, and therefore at stake. To return to Portman’s work of the 1960s and 1970s now, and to attempt, literally, to draw out these effects, is to return to a prototypical form as a historical site, one on the edge of the kind of destructive moment Aragon documented for the Passage de l’Opéra. This is not because of any imminent project to destroy the Bonaventure Hotel, but because the city outside its walls has effected a transformation that renders outmoded the spatial developments that so bewildered Fredric Jameson. Today, a short stroll from the Bonaventure will take you past buildings by Diller, Scofidio and Renfro, Frank Gehry, Coop Himmelblau, Arata Isozaki, Rafael Moneo, and Morphosis. In Martin’s terms, these architects are all caught in postmodernism’s discursive net. When ‘each “signature” signs a private language in the attentive presence of the mass media, architecture reenters the culture industry through the back door, as autonomous form’.19 Juxtaposed with this work, Portman’s architecture appears ordinary, the atrium struggling to maintain itself as a signature in the world of architecture’s media over-exposure; as far as Martin (and Davis) are concerned, it can easily be critiqued for the directness of its mythologizing of capital. Yet wandering the atrium as I first did in that strange temporal ‘before-time’ in 2009 revealed surreal

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moments, à la Aragon: a quaint array of ‘multicultural’ restaurants, discreet neon, gift stores seemingly lost in time, and exercise equipment incongruously arrayed where seating pods once invited the milling hypercrowd. In this light, Portman’s work has become a discarded remnant in debates which, in search of new revelations, have quickly moved on to more contemporary manifestations of architecture’s relation to capital.20 To return to Portman’s work in order to experience it, photograph it, draw it, and situate it within the field of action and debate that constituted the problem of the downtown in the 1960s and 1970s has been an effort to recapture a sense of how the future of the city was conceived in this period, and, as such, to allow subsequent transformations to be situated against the contestations which marked this negotiation of the future. It is instructive to note that Aragon, as an ardent critic of the urban transformation he was witnessing, could still hold onto a sense of undecidability with respect to what the outcome of the upheaval might bring, with the potential, even, for a kiss.21 In turn, the now-hollow forms of Portman’s atriums provide a version of the future that opens, historically, the question of undecidability, the question of orientations toward ‘tomorrow’s mysteries’. To analyze the present with only the most up-to-date cases is to foreclose on this historical value, and, as such, on the very problem of understanding – and proposing – the city’s future.

NOTES

PROLOGUE: THE ATRIUM EFFECT 1

Reyner Banham noted the uncanny closeness of Renaissance Center’s atrium to the city interiors in William Cameron Menzies’ film Things to Come (1936). Reyner Banham, ‘Hotel Deja-Quoi’, New Society, 5 April 1979, pp. 26–7. See also Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), p. 135.

2

Jerry Herron, ‘The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit’, Places (January 2012). https://placesjournal.org/article/the-forgetting-machine-notestoward-a-history-of-detroit/ [accessed 23 March 2015].

3

Renaissance Center was depicted as a giant vacuum sucking up surrounding urban fabric in a satirical cartoon by Joseph Scrofani accompanying the article by Roger M. Williams, ‘Facelift for Detroit’, Saturday Review, 14 May 1977, pp. 6–7.

4

For an account of the building and its critical reception, see Rachel B. Mullen, ‘Renaissance Center’, in Tod A. Marder (ed.), The Critical Edge: Controversy in Recent American Architecture (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1985), pp. 175–87.

5

Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi have called this the ‘atrium principle’, the effects of which they trace through the suburbanization of corporate environments internationally. See Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi, Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries (Barcelona: Actar, 2007).

6

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962 [1961]).

7

William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (New York: Project for Public Spaces, 1980).

8

Constantinos Doxiadis, Emergence and Growth of an Urban Region: The Developing Urban Detroit Area, 3 vols (Detroit: Detroit Edison Company, 1966–70); Constantinos Doxiadis, Urban Renewal and the Future of the American City (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1966); Jay Forrester, Urban Dynamics (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1969).

9

Manfredo Tafuri, ‘L’architecture dans le boudoir’, in The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-Gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, (trans.) Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1987), pp. 267–90.

10 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1972). 123

124

NOTES

11 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978). 12 Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1978); Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, (trans.) Diane Ghirardo and Joan Ockman (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1982 [1978]). 13 For a discussion of the way race politics played out differently in relation to deindustrialization in northern US cities and suburbanization in southern cities, see Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 10–13. 14 Richard Nixon, ‘State of the Union Message to the Congress on Community Development’, 8 March 1973. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pld=4134 [accessed 27 October 2013]. See the discussion of the withdrawal of federal funding in relation to grass-roots and advocacy planning in the early 1970s in Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011), pp. 202–16. 15 See David Gissen, Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), pp. 71–82; Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). Frank Lloyd Wright’s Larkin Administration Building (Buffalo, NY, 1906) remains a key early precursor for its full-height internal atrium. 16 This fractured image is as much the result of the differentiation of disciplinary knowledge with respect to cities as it is a verifiable urban condition, what Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin have called ‘splintering urbanism’, a term which is itself circumscribed by particular ways of knowing and understanding the city. See Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge, 2001). 17 For a discussion of architecture as a material practice, and of relationships between theory and practice, see Stan Allen, ‘Practice vs. Project’, in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation (Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1999), pp. xiii–xxv. 18 On the urban as a terrain of dispute wherein the future of the city remains an open question, see Tarsha Finney, ‘Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York [review]’, The Journal of Architecture 13, 4 (2008), pp. 515–19.

1 TRANSFORMATIONS IN MODERN ARCHITECTURE 1

Arthur Drexler, Transformations in Modern Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1979), p. 90.

2

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), p. 38. The account of the Bonaventure developed in this book is a revised version of two earlier texts: Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism: the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’, New Left Review 146 (1984), pp. 53–92; and Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Postmodernism and its Discontents (London: Verso, 1988), pp. 13–29.

NOTES

125

3

Arthur Drexler, ‘Response: Arthur Drexler on “Transformations”’, Skyline, April 1979, p. 6. Compare the 1985 exhibition ‘The Critical Edge: Controversy in Recent American Architecture’, curated by Tod A. Marder and Jeffrey Wechsler, which opened at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and then toured several galleries in 1985 and 1986. While the curators acknowledged that the previous fifteen years had seen architecture become more prominent in the public consciousness, that prominence was marked by a sense of controversy. While limited to only twelve buildings (including Portman’s Renaissance Center of 1977), the list is as eclectic as Drexler’s, though leaning towards stylistic postmodernism. In addition to Portman, buildings included were by Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman, Harrison and Abramovitz, Philip Johnson, Langdon Wilson Mumper, Maya Lin, Richard Meier, Charles Moore, I.M. Pei and SITE (James Wines). See Tod A. Marder (ed.), The Critical Edge: Controversy in Recent American Architecture (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1985).

4

Drexler, Transformations, p. 4.

5

Ibid.

6

Ibid.

7

Ibid., p. 7.

8

Drexler, ‘Response’, p. 6.

9

Drexler, Transformations, p. 8.

10 Kenneth Frampton, ‘Blow Up’, Skyline, April 1979, p. 5. See also Reyner Banham, ‘MoMA’s Architectural Mystery Tour’, AIA Journal 69, 7 (1980), p. 56–7. 11 Drexler, ‘Response’, p. 6. 12 For a discussion of this exhibition, see Stanford Anderson, ‘CASE and MIT: Engagement’, in Arindam Dutta (ed.), A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the ‘Techno-Social’ Moment (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2013), pp. 624–33. Anderson links the exhibition to the emergence of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS ) in 1967. For comment on the exhibition, which he called a ‘diagrammatic cultural poultice’, see Reyner Banham, ‘Vitruvius over Manhattan’, New Society, 7 December 1967, pp. 827–8. Banham’s article is a typically acerbic review of the formation and role of the IAUS . See Chapter 5 for a discussion of the IAUS Streets research, of which Anderson was co-director. 13 Architectural exhibitions in this period were largely devoted to single architects or groups of architects. One exception was the 1975 exhibition ‘The Phenomenal City – Shinjuku, Japan’, curated by Peter Gluck, Henry Smith and Koji Taki. 14 There is perhaps an echo here of the English sensibility of ‘visual planning’ or ‘townscape’, which arose in the postwar period in the pages of the Architectural Review. Kenneth Frampton situates this sensibility relative to the American experience, especially of Kevin Lynch’s theory of images and the perception of the city in his 1960 book The Image of the City, which, for Frampton appeared ‘in retrospect as a pioneering piece of populist urbanism, (almost in anticipation of advocacy planning)’. (Kenneth Frampton, ‘America 1960–1970: Notes on Urban Images and Theory’, Casabella 359/360 [1971], pp. 25–27.) 15 Colin Rowe, ‘Introduction’, in Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975 [1972]), p. 8.

126

NOTES

16 Drexler, Transformations, p. 42. See also Rowe, ‘Introduction’, p. 7. 17 See the discussion of ‘The Architecture of the École des Beaux-Arts’ and ‘Transformations’ exhibitions in the context of Drexler’s MoMA curatorship in Felicity D. Scott, ‘When Systems Fail’, in Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics After Modernism (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2007), pp. 59–87. 18 Ibid. 19 Drexler, Transformations, p. 9. 20 Ibid., p. 2. 21 Portman’s Fort Worth National Bank Building, completed in 1974, is included in the section on ‘Structure: Glass Skins’, while the Bonaventure Hotel straddles both sections, though is represented only by one exterior photograph. 22 Henry-Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996 [1932]). 23 Drexler, Transformations, p. 4. 24 It should be noted, however, that the academicization of theory did not simply point to a retreat from the need for what Louis Martin has called a politicized critique of a conservative, commercially oriented American postmodernism. See Louis Martin, ‘Fredric Jameson and Critical Architecture’, in Nadir Lahiji (ed.), The Political Unconscious of Architecture: Reopening Jameson’s Narrative (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 169–207. 25 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 44. In relation to my reading of Jameson below, see Albert Pope, Ladders (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), pp. 119-47. 26 Ibid., pp. 39–40. 27 Ibid., p. 42. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., p. 40. Note also his thoughts on the contemporary architecture of the early 1990s in Fredric Jameson and Michael Speaks, ‘Envelopes and Enclaves: The Space of Post-Civil Society (An Architectural Conversation)’, Assemblage 17 (1992), pp. 30–7. 30 See Fredric Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (London: Macmillan, 1988), p. 353. See the attempt to map cognitively the field of planning as a response to Jameson’s text in Michael Dear, ‘Postmodernism and Planning’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 4, 3 (1986), pp. 367–84. See also the account of Lynch’s and Jameson’s versions of the cognitive map in Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (Washington, DC : Zero Books, 2015), pp. 6–12; and Stephen Cairns, ‘Cognitive Mapping the Dispersed City’, in Christoph Lindner (ed.), Urban Space and Cityscapes: Perspectives from Modern and Contemporary Culture (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 192–205. Lynch and the cognitive map are situated at the origin of the ‘experience economy’ in Brian Lonsway, ‘Spatial Experience and the Instruments of Architectural Theory’, in Kenny Cupers (ed.), Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 85–100. 31 Jameson saw that Lynch’s concept was itself ‘[absent] of any conception of political agency or historical process’ (Jameson, ‘Cognitive Mapping’, p. 353). See also the account of Lynch’s research in Hashim Sarkis, ‘Disoriented: Kevin Lynch, around 1960’, in Dutta (ed.), A Second Modernism, pp. 394–433, where he argues that

NOTES

127

Lynch remained ‘rather vague about what constituted the link between the social and the physical’ (p. 398), but did retain the political goal of a democratic cooperation amongst citizens, which cognitive mapping would support (p. 402). Sarkis critiques Jameson’s uptake of cognitive mapping for missing this political dimension, and employing it toward a totalizing rather than a situated project (pp. 403–4). 32 See especially Fredric Jameson, ‘The Brick and the Balloon: Architecture, Idealism and Land Speculation’, New Left Review 228 (1998), pp. 25–46. See also Jameson’s questioning of this autonomy in Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 48. 33 Mike Davis, ‘Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism’, New Left Review 151 (1985), pp. 109–10. See Davis’ own critique of urban development practices in Los Angeles in Mike Davis, ‘The Infinite Game: Redeveloping Downtown L.A.’, in Diane Ghirardo (ed.), Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), pp. 77–113; Mike Davis, ‘Chinatown, Part Two? The “Internationalisation” of Downtown Los Angeles’, New Left Review 164 (1987), pp. 65–86; Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990). 34 Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-and-Imagined Places (Malden, MA : Blackwell, 1996), p. 196 n. 8; and Edward Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 243–4. Soja himself later included the Bonaventure in his own critical project to characterize postmodern geography, literally twinning it with Paris’ Bastille prison in a model made for a 1989 exhibition spatializing the theme of historical change between Paris and Los Angeles. See Soja, Thirdspace, p. 197. 35 Ibid., p. 199. See also Soja, Postmodern Geographies, especially pp. 10–42. While Soja comments on the theoretical battle between Davis and Jameson, he engages in a battle of his own with his colleague Derek Gregory, who critiqued Soja’s earlier formulations of the discipline of geography, ones which take Los Angeles as a central figure. See Derek Gregory, Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 257–82. 36 Soja, Thirdspace, p. 200 n. 11. 37 See Gregory, Geographical Imaginations, pp. 257–82, and Donald Preziosi, ‘La Vi(ll)e en rose: Reading Jameson mapping space’, in The Aftermath of Art: Ethics, Aesthetics, Politics (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 7–28. Recently Terry Smith has revisited Jameson’s text, as well as one of his own written about Renaissance Center, in an analysis of Jameson’s writing about architecture. See Terry Smith, ‘Botanizing the Bonaventura [sic]: Base and Superstructure in Jamesonian Architectural Theory’, in Lahiji (ed.), The Political Unconscious of Architecture, pp. 297–314. 38 Soja, Thirdspace, p. 203. 39 Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1996), pp. 198–9. This struggle for totality is seen differently by Toscano and Kinkle, who remark: ‘Among other protocols, this mapping project involves projecting a virtual external point from which to grasp and navigate a situation in which one finds oneself multiply embedded. Such an attempt at economic cognitive mapping is thus a kind of transcendence laboriously extorted from immanence, a painstakingly constructed dis-embedding’ (Toscano and Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute, p. 34).

128

NOTES

40 In the to and fro between these authors, Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown emerged as a figure for how the city was cast as ‘noir’ territory. See, in order: Davis, ‘Chinatown, Part Two?’; Gregory, ‘Chinatown, Part Three? Uncovering Postmodern Geographies’, in Geographical Imaginations, pp. 257–82; and Deutsche, ‘Chinatown, Part Four? What Jake Forgets about Downtown’, in Evictions, pp. 245–53. 41 Reinhold Martin, ‘Money and Meaning: The Case of John Portman’, Hunch 12 (2009), p. 37. 42 Ibid., p. 42. For a further discussion of Jameson’s reading of the Bonaventure, see also Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), pp. 73–6. 43 Martin, Utopia’s Ghost, p. 169. 44 Ibid., p. xviii. 45 Ibid., p. xiv. 46 Marc Augé, Non-places. An Introduction to Supermodernity, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2008). 47 ‘Interview: John Portman and Peter Eisenman’, Skyline, January 1983, p. 12. 48 Lawrence Barth, ‘The Complications of Type’, in Christopher C.M. Lee and Sam Jacoby (eds), Typological Formations: Renewable Building Types and the City (London: Architectural Association, 2007), p. 158. 49 Tendencies are not the same as typological formations, which are the substance of Barth’s interest in his account of architecture’s relation to urbanism. The atrium hotel does not have the same status as a building type, yet one of the claims of this book is that it is formed as a material, geometric and economic proposition in the context of urban transformation in the specific context of the American downtown, and, in line with Drexler’s diagnosis, the atrium also proliferates as a known and workable solution across different genres of building. See the discussion of type in Barth, Typological Formations, pp. 153–64.

2 THE BUSINESS OF ARCHITECTURE AND DEVELOPMENT 1

Kelly Morris and Rachel Bohan (eds), John Portman: Art and Architecture (Atlanta: High Museum of Art and University of Georgia Press, 2009), p. 26. For the phasing of the different components of the center over time, see Emily Abruzzo (ed.), Workbook. Official Catalog for Workshopping: An American Model of Architectural Practice. The U.S. Pavilion for La Biennale di Venezia, Biennale Architettura 2010 (Atlanta and New York: High Museum of Art and 306090, 2010), pp. 90–3.

2

I am describing this as a reinvention because examples of hotels with large internal atriums exist from the nineteenth century, e.g. the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver (1892) and the Great Central Hotel (now the Landmark Hotel) in London (1898); however, what Portman set in place with the Hyatt Regency Atlanta was a spatial development that related to a historically new set of urban conditions.

3

John Portman and Jonathan Barnett, The Architect as Developer (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), p. 130. While the last major building, the commercial tower at

NOTES

129

One Peachtree Center, was completed in 1992, Peachtree Center’s development has been ongoing, the latest extension of the mart complex, now known as Americas Mart, completed in 2009. 4

Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 25 June 1967, p. 1-R. See also Portman’s description in Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, p. 28.

5

Diane Thomas, ‘Walk into the lobby, look up . . . bet you’ll say something’, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 25 June 1967, p. 2-R.

6

Harold H. Martin, Atlanta and Environs: A Chronicle of its People and Events. Years of Change and Challenge, 1940–1976, vol. III (Atlanta: Atlanta Historical Society and University of Georgia Press, 1987), p. 393.

7

Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 25 June 1967, p. 16-R. Many of these details and observations are included in ‘Building with Air’, Time, 2 June 1967, p. 54. Due to the hotel’s sale to the Hyatt corporation just prior to completion, the interior design of the hotel was carried out by Boston-based designer Roland Jutras.

8

‘Building with Air’, p. 54.

9

Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 25 June 1967, pp. 6-R, 12-R, 14-R. For a further discussion of the air-conditioning system, see Engineering News Record, 29 July 1965, pp. 26–7. For a study of conditioned atrium environments in New York in this period, see David Gissen, Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

10 ‘The Rise of Atlanta’, Progressive Architecture 48, 7 (1967), pp. 160–2. 11 David Rockefeller himself likened Embarcadero Center to his father’s development of Rockefeller Center in New York. See David Rockefeller, Memoirs (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 491. The San Francisco development was initially known as ‘Rockefeller Center West’, the title of a business item in Time, 24 February 1967, p. 57. 12 Peter Cook, ‘The Hotel is Really a Small City’, Architectural Design 38, 1 (1968), pp. 90–1. See also Bodil W. Neilsen, ‘Back to Babylon’, Interiors 126, 12 (1967), pp. 68–77. 13 Gurney Breckenfeld, ‘The Architects Want a Voice in Redesigning America’, Fortune 84, 5 (1971), p. 144. 14 On Caudill Rowlett Scott, see Avigail Sachs, ‘Marketing Through Research: William Caudill and Caudill, Rowlett Scott (CRS )’, The Journal of Architecture 13, 6 (2008), pp. 737–52; Paolo Tombesi, ‘Capital Gains and Architectural Losses: The Transformative Journey of Caudill Rowlett Scott (1948–1994)’, The Journal of Architecture 11, 2 (2006), pp. 145–68. 15 ‘Charles Center’, Architectural Forum 130, 4 (1969), pp. 48–57. 16 On Luckman, see Elihu Rubin, Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 172–82. Rubin notes that the merger of Luckman’s office with the Ogden Corporation was short-lived, Luckman buying back his architectural firm after five years (p. 238, n. 39). 17 The Fortune feature also noted that involvement in grass-roots activity, advocacy planning and political engagement represented moves to make the profession more relevant in tackling the major urban problems of the period. See the account of

130

NOTES

the rise of urban entrepreneurialism in David Harvey, ‘From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism’, Geografiska Annaler. Series B, Human Geography 71, 1 (1989), pp. 3–17. More broadly, Jason Hackworth sees these conditions as the context for the rise of what he calls the neoliberal city. See Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007). It is worth noting that Peachtree Center did not benefit directly from urban renewal funding, as did Embarcadero Center. 18 Breckenfeld, ‘The Architects Want a Voice’, p. 146. 19 Morris Lapidus, ‘The Architect as Developer [review]’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 37, 4 (1978), p. 304. See also Rem Koolhaas, ‘Atlanta’, in S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli Press, 1995), pp. 833–59. 20 Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, p. 7. See also the PhD by former Portman employee Edward Henry, ‘Portman, Architect and Entrepreneur: The Opportunities, Advantages and Disadvantages of His Design-Development Process’, PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1985, which is an attempt to study and apply this model in a theoretical development scenario. 21 Compare William Wayne Caudill, Architecture by Team: A New Concept for the Practice of Architecture (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971), which discusses the approach of Caudill Rowlett Scott. For Caudill, the idea of a design team is one which would include clients and also other built environment professionals, such as developers, in the design process. 22 Barnett was a founding member of the Urban Design Group of New York City’s City Planning Commission. He outlined this group’s role and his thoughts on urban design in the mid-1970s in Jonathan Barnett, Urban Design as Public Policy: Practical Methods for Improving Cities (New York: Architectural Record Publications, 1974). 23 Lapidus suggested that Portman’s interests are broadly similar to those which backed his own work a generation earlier, and for which he was severely criticized. Lapidus, ‘The Architect as Developer [review]’, p. 304. 24 Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, p. 23. 25 Engineering News Record, 29 July 1965, p. 38. 26 Ibid. See also Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, pp. 186–7. 27 Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, p. 15. 28 Ibid., p. 15. See the review of the office design by Olga Gueft, ‘Efficient Grandeur at 225 Peachtree’, Interiors 131, 2 (1971), pp. 120–5. 29 Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, p. 25. Harold Martin put the price of the plot at $1.8 million. Martin, Atlanta and Environs: A Chronicle of its People and Events, p. 334. 30 In the 1950s, Ben Massell was thought to be the largest private landholder in downtown Atlanta. His support was crucial to Portman’s beginnings in the development business. See Floyd Hunter, Community Power Succession: Atlanta’s Policy Makers Revisited (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), pp. 10–11, 85, 90. 31 Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, pp. 25–6.

NOTES

131

32 There is a slightly different version of events given in Crow’s biography. See David Sobel, Trammell Crow, Master Builder. The Story of America’s Largest Real Estate Empire (New York: John Wiley, 1989), p. 83. 33 Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, p. 30. 34 The scale and extent of the Hyatt business at this time was outlined in the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 25 June 1967, pp. 2-R, 10-R, 19-R. 35 For a review of Peachtree Center in the context of Atlanta’s, and the South’s, rise in the American consciousness, see: ‘The Supercities: 1. Atlanta’, Saturday Review, 4 September 1976, pp. 14–15. 36 The office and its earlier incarnations also completed a number of school, community, institutional and commercial buildings for outside clients from the 1950s onwards. See Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, pp. 192–4, for a full listing of projects up to 1976. 37 Robert Witherspoon, Jon Abbet and Robert Gladstone, Mixed Use Developments: New Ways of Land Use (Technical Bulletin 71) (Washington, DC : Urban Land Institute, 1976), p. xi. See Robert Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 237, on the establishment of the Urban Land Institute as an organization of business leaders charged with the task of ‘helping cities reduce the impact of decentralization’. 38 Witherspoon et al., Mixed Use Developments, p. 35. For a development to be defined as mixed use, it must contain ‘three or more significant revenue-producing uses (such as retail, office, residential, hotel/motel, and recreation); . . . significant functional and physical integration of project components (and thus highly intensive use of land), including uninterrupted pedestrian connections; and development in conformance with a coherent plan’ (p. 9). The ‘newness’ of these configurations (notwithstanding the earlier example of Rockefeller Center) related to how their impact was seen as new. The ULI report stated that: ‘successful development requires creation of a large-scale, essentially new physical environment in order to overcome blighting influences of adjacent areas’ (p. 12). ‘The opportunities in this newness included achieving higher densities, faster development (than considering each use developed separately), product differentiation, shared infrastructure, superior economic performance, economies of scale, and varied impacts on the community through revitalization’ (p. 13). All of these aspects represented the application of new understandings across development and subsequent ownership practices, and economic performance indicators. 39 Colden Florance, ‘MXD ’ and ‘The MXD as a “Tool for Treating Blight” and a Design Challenge’, AIA Journal 66, 10 (1977), pp. 28–31 and 32–3; Florance situates Portman’s Detroit Renaissance Center, then newly constructed, as the key exemplar of the MXD . On Peachtree Center and other examples in Atlanta, see Allen Freeman, ‘Introverted Trio of MXD s Dominates Atlanta’s new Downtown’, AIA Journal 66, 10 (1977), pp. 34–7. 40 Witherspoon et al., Mixed Use Developments, p. 35. The report went on to note that ‘Leases are normally negotiated with provisions requiring development within a specific period (e.g. ten years).’ 41 Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, p. 27. 42 Tom Walker, ‘City’s skyline to leap: $700 million international flavor’, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 13 February 1972, p. 1.

132

NOTES

43 In the ULI report Portman had remarked on the need for housing as part of downtown development. See Witherspoon et al., Mixed Use Developments, p. 49. 44 Olga Gueft, ‘A Tree Grows in Atlanta’, Interiors 131, 2 (1971), p. 119. 45 Ibid. The article also mentioned Peachtree Center would include a park designed by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin. 46 Before the expansion of the existing Hartsfield airport site was decided, other options for a new airport were being discussed. At this time, Portman was said to be arguing against proposals to site it to the north of the city, including one proposal by developer Tom Cousins. See Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff, Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (Washington, DC : The Brookings Institution, 2003), pp. 146–50. 47 Witherspoon et al., Mixed Use Developments, p. 36. See Barnett’s account of what he called the ‘building birth cycle’ for the Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, pp. 148–87. 48 By the time The Architect as Developer was published, Portman and Crow had parted ways, in 1973, both men selling their share in the Embarcadero Center development. Prior to Portman having operational control over the architecture and development sides of the business, each was a partnership; Edwards and Portman the architecture firm, and Crow and Portman, the development firm (see Engineering News Record, p. 38). Crow would go on to develop Atlanta Center in 1976, an MXD situated a block away from the Hyatt Regency, and incorporating retail, office space and a 2,250-room Hilton hotel designed by Wong & Tung and Maskin & Associates, complete with 28-story, glazed atrium. See Freeman, ‘Introverted Trio of MXD s Dominates Atlanta’s new Downtown’, p. 36. In 1985 Portman completed the Atlanta Marriott Marquis on a site between the Hilton and the Hyatt Regency. More recently a skybridge linking the hotels together has been constructed. 49 This diagram evolved in subsequent years as the structure of Portman’s companies changed. For organizational diagrams from the mid-1980s, see Abruzzo, Workbook, pp. 94–5. 50 Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, p. 156. 51 Ibid., p. 163. Barnett recognized that this level of control conflicted with the complexity of the office operation: ‘Portman’s complex schedule compromises his ability to control every detail of the design, although this is a difficulty familiar to any architect who has more than one or two major buildings in his office at the same time.’ 52 Ibid., p. 15. 53 Ibid., p. 19. 54 Ibid., pp. 188–9. 55 Ibid., p. 150. 56 Ibid., p. 151. 57 Witherspoon et al., Mixed Use Developments, p. 5. 58 Charles Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams (New York: Verso, 1996), p. 185. See also the case study of Colony Square in Witherspoon et al., Mixed Use Developments, pp. 129–33, which gives a detailed analysis. The phases from conception through to completion of the complex

NOTES

133

coincided with the recessions of 1966, 1970 and 1975. Despite its initial economic failure, the interest the ULI report editors found in the complex was that it was neither in a traditional downtown, nor a suburban setting. See also the user-centered analysis of Colony Square in Robert J. Young, ‘Evaluation: A Bristling Concrete MXD in a Transitional Area’, AIA Journal 66, 10 (1977), pp. 42–7. 59 The ULI report noted that by the mid-1970s, Atlanta had a ‘3 million square-foot oversupply of new downtown office space and an uncertain economic outlook’. (Witherspoon et al., Mixed Use Developments, p. 36.) Henson and King argue that the 1974 recession was the worst for Atlanta since the 1930s, and was the result of overbuilding. By 1977 they put the vacancy of office space in the city at 30 percent. See M. Dale Henson and James King, ‘The Atlanta Public–Private Romance: An Abrupt Transformation’, in R. Scott Fosler and Renee Berger (eds), Public–Private Partnerships in American Cities (Lexington, MA : Lexington Books, 1982), p. 308. Despite the prevailing economic conditions, Portman’s office and hotel occupancy rates were well above average, and above market price. Only the retail spaces were reported as performing below expectation, with, however, ‘rental rates well in excess of Atlanta norms’ (Witherspoon et al., Mixed Use Developments, p. 37). A second ULI report on mixed-use development, published in 1983, listed seven projects completed or under construction in Atlanta. See J. Thomas Black, Catherine Brown, Stuart L. Rogel and Fred Glickman, Mixed-Use Development Projects in North America: Project Profiles (Washington, DC : Urban Land Institute, 1983). 60 Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, p. 164. The Omni complex was eventually sold to Ted Turner in 1987 for development into the headquarters of CNN .

3 ATLANTA, NEW AMERICAN CITY 1

For a discussion of the twin forces of centralization and suburbanization in Atlanta’s postwar development, see Clarence Stone, Economic Growth and Neighborhood Discontent: System Bias in the Urban Renewal Program of Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976), pp. 45–7. On Atlanta’s ‘edge city’ characteristics see Joel Garreau, ‘Atlanta’, in Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Anchor Books, 1991), pp. 139–78. For a concise discussion of Atlanta’s growth from the late nineteenth century until World War II , see Dana F. White and Timothy J. Crimmins, ‘Urban Structure, Atlanta’, Journal of Urban History 2, 2 (1976), pp. 231–52. They chart suburbanization and segregation developing from the early twentieth century.

2

‘Atlanta’, Architectural Forum 130, 3 (1969), p. 42. See also ‘Atlanta, the Hopeful City’, Fortune 74, 3 (1966), pp. 155–6, 160, 162; Olga Gueft, ‘Atlanta: The Scene and the Challenge’, Interiors 129, 1 (1969), pp. 99–101, 160, 166; ‘A pictorial tour of the city’s spectacular and still-growing downtown’, AIA Journal 63, 4 (1975), pp. 34–45; Allen Freeman, ‘Introverted Trio of MXD s Dominates Atlanta’s new Downtown’, AIA Journal 66, 10 (1977), pp. 34–7.

3

‘Atlanta’, p. 50.

4

Ada Louise Huxtable, ‘The New American City’, New York Times, 5 May 1974, p. AL -21.

5

Huxtable, ‘The New American City’.

134

NOTES

6

Donald Canty, ‘Learning from Atlanta’, AIA Journal 63, 4 (1975), p. 33. Canty quotes from Huxtable’s New York Times article.

7

For a contemporaneous account of the social, political and economic constituents of urban growth, see Harvey Molotch, ‘The City as a Growth Machine: Towards a Political Economy of Place’, American Journal of Sociology 82, 2 (1976), pp. 309–32. For comparative discussions of urban development in American cities in the 1960s and 1970s, see Kenneth Halpern, Downtown USA: Urban Design in Nine American Cities (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1978); R. Scott Fosler and Renee A. Berger (eds), Public–Private Partnership in American Cities: Seven Case Studies (Lexington, MA : Lexington Books, 1982). See also Susan S. Fainstein, Norman I. Fainstein, Richard Child-Hill, Dennis R. Judd, Michael Peter Smith, Restructuring the City: The Political Economy of Urban Redevelopment, revised ed. (New York: Longman, 1986). For a broader transatlantic perspective see Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

8

On the history and fate of traditional American downtowns defined by the commercial engine of ‘main street’, see Alison Isenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). For broader accounts of downtown urban development see: Bernard J. Frieden and Lynn B. Sagalyn, Downtown Inc. How America Rebuilds Cities (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1989); Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Tridib Banerjee, Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

9

See Clarence Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988 (Lawrence, KS : University Press of Kansas, 1989), p. 16, and Charles Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta: The Politics of Place in the City of Dreams (London: Verso, 1996), p. 147. A few American cities formed business leaders’ organizations in the 1930s. See Robert Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 235.

10 See Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, p. 117. For an account of the effect of this plan on the displacement of African American communities from the development area, see Stone, Regime Politics, pp. 32–3 and 40. 11 Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, p. 149; Stone, Regime Politics, pp. 30–1. 12 Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), p. 7. 13 Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 3–5; Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, p. 149. Rutheiser notes that further incorporation of adjacent municipalities into the city was unsuccessful due to opposition by suburban constituencies. The metropolitan area of Atlanta has grown massively since the 1960s, with the population of the municipal City of Atlanta comprising only 14 percent of that population by the mid-1990s (p. 76), and approximately 10 percent by 2000. See Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff, Mega-Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Public Investment (Washington, DC : Brookings Institution Press, 2003), p. 70. Metropolitan DeKalb and Cobb counties, together with Gwinnett County had, by the mid-1990s, larger populations than the City of Atlanta. At this time the Metropolitan Statistical Area of Atlanta was defined by Fulton, DeKalb, Cobb, Gwinnett and Clayton counties. See Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, p. 76.

NOTES

135

14 Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta, p. 7. See also maps of African American population distribution from 1940 to 1970 in Kruse, White Flight, pp. 16–17. In his analysis of this distribution, Kruse argues that by 1970, spatially ‘the city remained highly segregated’ (p. 237). 15 Stone, Regime Politics, p. 60. This should also be seen in light of post-1960s provisions allowing urban renewal funding to be put toward infrastructure and public projects rather than simply housing. Stone argues that during Hartsfield’s mayoralty, there was ‘an informal understanding that no public housing would be built on urban renewal land’ (Stone, Regime Politics, p. 40, emphasis in original). 16 Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, p. 153. 17 Stone, Regime Politics, p. 82. 18 M. Dale Henson and James King argue that ‘During a relatively short time span, about twenty years [ca. 1960 to 1980], an agrarian Southeastern economy was replaced by a new industrial-technological society. This fast-paced change has forced (and is still forcing) Atlanta to quickly develop the complex management apparatus necessary to give direction to this regional transformation’ (M. Dale Henson and James King, ‘The Atlanta Public–Private Romance: An Abrupt Transformation’, in Fosler and Berger (eds), Public–Private Partnerships in American Cities, pp. 293–4). 19 Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, p. 49. 20 Henson and King, ‘The Atlanta Public–Private Romance’, p. 299. 21 Stone, Regime Politics, p. 40. Stone’s Regime Politics is an account of the structure and actions of this biracial governing coalition. Regarding the urban renewal programs, he notes that ‘a great deal of social and political conflict had to be managed in order for Atlanta’s urban-renewal programme to be launched. Opposition was ineffective because it never aggregated into a sustained and unified force. Biracial support for urban renewal took shape, biracial opposition did not – even though there was substantial disapproval by blacks and whites’ (Stone, Regime Politics, p. 41). For an analysis of Stone’s influence on the study of urban politics, see Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal, pp. 240–1; and Jennifer Hochschild, ‘Clarence N. Stone and the Study of Urban Politics’, in Marion Orr and Valerie C. Johnson (eds), Power in the City: Clarence Stone and the Politics of Inequality (Lawrence, KS : University Press of Kansas, 2008), pp. 317–34. See the critique of Stone’s theory of regimes in its sole emphasis on dominant political coalitions in the context of mainstream politics in Kruse, White Flight, p. 14. See also the critique of Stone’s emphasis on regime continuity rather than different levels of political change in Altshuler and Luberoff, Mega-Projects, pp. 68–72. 22 Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, p. 155. For an account of CAP ’s genesis, see also Henson and King, ‘The Atlanta Public–Private Romance’, pp. 309–10. 23 Stone, Regime Politics, pp. 136–7. 24 On competition from new developments on the northern perimeter of the city, see Henson and King, ‘The Atlanta Public–Private Romance’, p. 295. 25 Stone, Regime Politics, p. 137. See also Clarence Stone, ‘Partnership New South Style: Central Atlanta Progress’, Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science 36, 2 (1986), pp. 100–10. Here Stone notes the political value the city administration was able to gain in aligning itself with this project- and results-oriented approach.

136

NOTES

26 ‘Central Atlanta Opportunities and Responses’, Atlanta: City of Atlanta Department of Planning, 1971. 27 This study should be seen in light of an earlier one put together by CAIA and the Metropolitan Planning Commission (MPC ), a body established by the Georgia General Assembly in 1947. In 1950, the MPC embarked upon a master-planning study for the metropolitan region, releasing a draft plan in 1952, and a revised report in 1954, entitled ‘Now for Tomorrow’. According to Rutheiser, the plan entailed a ‘vision of a dispersed suburban hinterland linked to the city’s “Golden Heart” by a vast web of free-flowing arterial highways far more extensive than those projected by the Lochner Plan’ (Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, p. 151). He argues, however, that there was no political mechanism for enacting the plan. 28 See Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta, pp. 191–3; Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, pp. 155–6. 29 See Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta, pp. 194–5; Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, p. 156; Altshuler and Luberoff, Mega-Projects, p. 71; Stone, Regime Politics, pp. 98–101. 30 Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta, p. 193. See also Stone, Regime Politics, pp. 96–8. 31 Stone, Regime Politics, p. 98. Stone puts the emergence of Action Forum in the context of biracial cooperation, before Maynard Jackson, Atlanta’s first African American mayor, took office in 1974. He also suggests that the MARTA plan was a way for Mayor Sam Massell to leverage business support for the implementation of a scheme, with substantial federal funding, to enhance the importance of downtown, and thereby to make a mark politically as mayor (pp. 101–2). 32 ‘Central Atlanta Opportunities and Responses’, p. 29. 33 Ibid., p. 41. 34 Meeting agendas, Central Atlanta Progress Inc. Records, Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center, MSS 591, Box 50, folder 14. 35 On the Atlanta Regional Commission, see Rutheiser, Imagineering Atlanta, pp. 76–7. 36 See Altshuler and Luberoff, Mega-Projects, p. 183. 37 Peachtree Mall: Background Notes of Meetings and Correspondence from CAP files as of 4/13/73, Central Atlanta Progress Inc. Records, Box 50, folder 14. 38 Around this time CAP ’s implementation task force broadened its participation with business leaders and elected officials in an effort to implement the proposals and projects from the Central Area Study. By June 1975, however, Peachtree Mall would no longer appear on the list of priority projects for the task force. Central Area Study Implementation Taskforce meeting minutes, Central Atlanta Progress Inc. Records, Box 50, folder 13. 39 In 1976, CAP adopted a resolution that MARTA should be constructed via tunneling, and that a ‘mixing box’ just below Peachtree Street be constructed to allow pedestrian access to the station. MARTA Construction Technique Resolution, 2 February 1976. Central Atlanta Progress Inc. Records, Box 184, folder 7. For Portman’s account of the eventual tunneling of MARTA , see John Portman and Jonathan Barnett, The Architect as Developer (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976), pp. 52–4. On the depth of the eventual tunnel, and the political wrangling over its costs, see Larry Keating, Atlanta: Race, Class and Urban Expansion (Philadelphia:

NOTES

137

Temple University Press, 2001), pp. 130–1. The overall implementation of MARTA , especially land use guidelines for station areas and rail corridors, was guided by the Urban Framework Plan, adopted by the city in 1973. See Richard C. Collins and Elizabeth B. Waters, America’s Downtowns: Growth, Politics, Preservation (Washington, DC : Preservation Press, 1990), p. 27. For a contemporaneous report about MARTA’s implementation plans by the mid-1970s, see Beth Dunlop, ‘An Accidental City with a Laissez-faire Approach to Planning’, AIA Journal 63, 4 (April 1975), pp. 52–5. 40 Tom Walker, ‘City’s skyline to leap: $700 million international flavor’, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 13 February 1972, p. 1. 41 On the zoning ordinances that allowed skybridge construction, see Halpern, ‘Atlanta’, in Downtown USA, p. 205. The city had had experience with developing air rights over railway tracks from early in the twentieth century, and continued this practice as part of urban renewal developments, most notably with the Omni International development. 42 Stone, Regime Politics, p. 170. 43 Ibid., p. 171. Stone notes that the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, which represents a wider body of business interests, including those of small business, had rarely been out of step with CAP (p. 169). 44 Ibid., p. 171. 45 Stone, ‘Partnership New South Style: Central Atlanta Progress’, p. 100. 46 By 1983, in a review of the success of the Central Area Study that heralded the beginning of a second study that would be known as CAS II , CAP would claim that ‘of the more than 100 specific projects recommended by the Central Area Study more than 75 percent had been implemented, or were in the process of development. Of the remaining projects, most were no longer feasible or applicable.’ Summary Update, Central Area Study, Central Atlanta Progress Inc. Records, Box 51, folder 3. 47 With the election of Maynard Jackson as Atlanta’s first African American mayor in 1973, the white business elite was seen to have less direct influence on City Hall, and this upset a sense of the governing regime’s traditional stability. This was also seen as the period in which Atlanta’s boom was ending, with concerns that businesses were leaving downtown amid racial tensions. As Harold Martin writes: ‘The papers [the Atlanta Journal and Constitution] that in 1970 had put out a special issue glorifying the metropolis as “Amazing Atlanta” in 1975 were publishing a doleful requiem called “City in Crisis” ’ (Harold H. Martin, Atlanta and Environs: A Chronicle of its People and Events. Years of Change and Challenge, 1940–1976, vol. III [Atlanta: Atlanta Historical Society and University of Georgia Press, 1987], p. 596). See the account of Jackson’s relation to the business community in Stone, Regime Politics, pp. 85–98, where he argues that despite Jackson’s perceived independence, the governing coalition was restored, albeit on a reworked basis. See the contemporaneous account of this period, and especially the relations between CAP and Jackson, in Fred Powledge, ‘Atlanta Begins to Sense the Loss of its Seeming Immunity to Urban Problems’, AIA Journal 63, 4 (1975), pp. 46–51. Harvey K. Newman has analyzed this period in terms of the conflicting dynamic between hospitality, the idea that Atlanta’s downtown economy was based on a rapidly expanding convention business, and violence, a rubric around Atlanta’s crime rate

138

NOTES

which was adopted by the Constitution newspaper in its opposition to Jackson. Harvey K. Newman, ‘Hospitality and Violence: Contradictions in a Southern City’, Urban Affairs Review 35, 4 (2000), pp. 541–58. 48 For the context of this work see Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal, p. 111; Peter L. Laurence, ‘Jane Jacobs before Death and Life’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 66, 1 (2007), p. 12. 49 Jane Jacobs, ‘Downtown is for People’, in The Editors of Fortune (eds), The Exploding Metropolis (New York: Doubleday, 1958), p. 141. See also an account of her support for James Rouse’s Charles Center development proposal in Baltimore, in Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Merchant of Illusion: James Rouse, America’s Salesman of the Businessman’s Utopia (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), p. 42. 50 Significantly, this image appears in Bernard Rudofsky, Streets For People: A Primer for Americans (New York: Doubleday, 1969), p. 114. 51 Alex Wall, Victor Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City (Barcelona: Actar, 2004), pp. 116–38. See also Victor Gruen, Centers for the Urban Environment: Survival of the Cities (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973).

4 THE GEOMETRY OF INTERIOR URBANISM 1

Olga Gueft, ‘The Air-conditioned Hanging Garden’, Interiors 124, 7 (1965), p. 101. See Gregory L. Heller, Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics and the Building of Modern Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), p. 142. Heller discusses Giurgola’s role in providing architectural renderings for the Market East urban renewal project in Philadelphia in 1963.

2

Gueft, ‘The Air-conditioned Hanging Garden’, p. 101.

3

Ibid.

4

Ibid.

5

Ibid. On the shift towards environmental design in interior design pedagogy, see Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, ‘Interior Design as Environmental Design: The Parsons Program in the 1960s’, in Kent Kleinman, Joanna Merwood-Salisbury and Lois Weinthal (eds), After Taste: Expanded Practice in Interior Design (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2012), pp. 110–29.

6

Olga Gueft, ‘Metropolitanizing Atlanta: John Portman’s Continuing Peachtree Center Program Weaves Intimate Human Amenities into a Major Urban Core’, Interiors 128, 4 (1968), pp. 122–34.

7

Interiors 129, 1 (1969), p. 102. Emphasis in original.

8

Olga Gueft, ‘A Tree Grows in Atlanta’, Interiors 131, 2 (1971), p. 119. See also Jonathan Barnett, ‘Atlanta’s One Man Urban Renewal Program’, Architectural Record 139, 1 (1966), pp. 133–40. Barnett’s article offers an account of Portman’s design and development methods, and is a precursor to the themes Barnett writes about in John Portman and Jonathan Barnett, The Architect as Developer (New York: McGraw Hill, 1976).

9

Olga Gueft, ‘24 Hollow Columns and the Space Between Them’, Interiors 124, 9 (1965), pp. 92–9.

NOTES

139

10 Each of Portman’s projects discussed exists or existed as a completed building or urban complex, and for the purposes of the analysis each project has been read through published plans, renderings and photographs, as well as site visits where possible. Several of the buildings have changed since their completion, especially the interior arrangements of the publically accessible areas of the hotels and mixed-use complexes. The analysis refers to the original arrangements where possible. 11 From the perspective of development, Portman and Barnett stressed the uniqueness of each project proposition; however the consistency of the structuring of design and development, as discussed in Chapter 2, can be seen in the design coherence across projects. See Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, p. 171. 12 Note Portman’s own position on this: ‘The floor plans of the hotels I designed for Chicago [Hyatt O’Hare Airport] and Los Angeles [Bonaventure Hotel] can be compared, not for their superficial resemblances, which are misleading, but for their systems of order.’ Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, p. 68. Compare also the reading of Portman’s developments in Albert Pope, Ladders (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), especially pp. 125–31. Of particular interest is Pope’s account of the ‘outside’ of the closed system of interior urbanism, what he calls the ‘inner-city ellipsis’ or ‘native urban space’ that is the other of the imploded, centripetal ‘ladder’ space of the atrium, tunnel and skybridge (pp. 139–47). 13 See Portman’s own description of the house in Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, pp. 62–8. 14 Portman constructed another house, Entelechy II , in 1986, developing the basic schema of the first Entelechy on an even larger scale. 15 A circular tower (200 rooms) and an orthogonal block (350 rooms) were subsequently added to the site, in 1971 and 1982 respectively. 16 Before the current atrium scheme was arrived at, a conventional hotel with double-loaded corridors was designed for the site. A precedent for the atrium existed in Portman’s Antoine Graves Homes of 1965, where compact accommodation for the elderly was arranged on eight levels around two naturally ventilated, roofed atriums. Barnett suggests that this solution gave Portman a way of organizing the Hyatt. It maximized the number of rooms within the site constraints in a way that a double-loaded slab could not. Portman and Barnett, The Architect as Developer, p. 28. 17 Trammell Crow’s biographer David Sobel suggests that: ‘Crow recalls Portman’s visit to [Crow’s] Dallas [trade] mart: as he and his guest walked through a low-ceilinged entrance, the great cavernous hall exploded before them, and Portman was suitably impressed.’ David Sobel, Trammell Crow, Master Builder: The Story of America’s Largest Real Estate Empire (New York: Wiley, 1989), p. 83. 18 Compare the reading of Peachtree Center in: Mahbub Rashid, ‘Revisiting John Portman’s Peachtree Center Complex in Atlanta: A Study of the Effects of the Spatial Configuration of the Off-Grade Pedestrian Movement System on Downtown Urbanism’, in Space Syntax: First International Symposium Proceedings, University College London, 1997, pp. 17.1–17.9; John Peponis, Catherine Ross and Mahbub Rashid, ‘The Structure of Urban Space, Movement and Co-presence: The Case of Atlanta’, Geoforum 28, 3–4 (1997), pp. 341–58. These authors use space syntax methods to analyze movement patterns within and around Peachtree Center. They argue that understanding what they term spatial configuration can lead to better

140

NOTES

design outcomes for integrating internal and external pedestrian linkages and movement paths. 19 On the development of Embarcadero Center see Kenneth Halpern, Downtown USA: Urban Design in Nine American Cities (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1978), pp. 169–73. 20 An adjacent podium contains two further office buildings, and housing was planned as part of the center, but wasn’t constructed. 21 Hyatt clearly maintained a commitment to the atrium hotel, if not always to Portman himself. See Harvey Chipkin, ‘Portman’s Atrium turns 30’, Hotel and Motel Management, 3 March 1997, pp. 3, 39. In an essay to commemorate Interiors’ thirty-five years of publication, George Nelson assigned Portman’s Hyatt Regency Atlanta atrium a pivotal position in the interior’s rise as an urban condition through the twentieth century. George Nelson, ‘Interiors: The Emerging Dominant Reality’, Interiors 135, 4 (1975), pp. 58–65. 22 Among others, these architects (along with Portman) would also export the atrium hotel internationally into the 1980s and 1990s. 23 ‘Contract’ was dropped from the title in 1978, and a subheading ‘For the Contract Design Professional’ was added below the main title Interiors. 24 Stanley Abercrombie, ‘A Changing Magazine for a Changing Profession’, Interiors 137, 12 (1978), p. 59.

5 URBAN STUDIES ON THE STREET 1

Trevor Boddy, ‘Underground and Overhead: Building the Analogous City’, in Michael Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), pp. 123–53. He discusses Minneapolis, Calgary and Montreal in particular. For a comparative study of grade separated developments in Houston, Minneapolis and Toronto, see John Patrick Byers, ‘Breaking the Ground Plane: The Evolution of Grade Separated Cities in North America’, PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1998. With a focus on Minneapolis, St Paul, Dallas and Houston, see the special issue ‘Skyways’, Design Quarterly 129 (1985). Also of note are the exhibitions and ensuing publications focusing on Canadian cities: Detlef Mertins (ed.), Metropolitan Mutations: The Architecture of Emerging Public Spaces (Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1989); André Lortie (ed.), The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big (Montreal: Canadian Center for Architecture, 2005). The effects of such developments have been cast in terms of a splintering urbanism in Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 217–303. See also the discussion of the ‘continuous interior’ in Mark Pimlott, Without and Within: Essays on Territory and the Interior (Rotterdam: Episode, 2007). More recently, Bryony Roberts has turned the mapping of Houston’s ‘analogous city’ towards a series of design interventions. Bryony Roberts, ‘Lobby Urbanism’, online at: http://bryonyroberts.com/index.php/project/lobby-urbanism/ [accessed 25 March 2015].

2

Boddy, ‘Underground and Overhead’, p. 125.

NOTES

141

3

Paul Hirst, ‘Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space [review]’, AA Files 25 (1993), p. 97. Note also Pier Vittorio Aureli’s remark that ‘the search for the contemporary agora is a pathetic endeavor that only manifests the weakness of our political understanding of the city’ (Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Possibility of an Absolute Architecture [Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2011], p. 32). See also the discussion of postwar architecture’s complex relation to concepts of public space, including a comment on Sorkin’s anthology, in George Baird, The Space of Appearance (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1995), pp. 303–47. An earlier version of Baird’s essay appeared in Mertins, Metropolitan Mutations, pp. 135–52. For a longer historical trajectory of streets and sidewalks in relation to definitions of public space, see Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht, Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2009). The thoughts of Denise Scott Brown on interior streets are also important to note, as she describes herself and Robert Venturi as ‘interior urbanists’. See Maurice Harteveld and Denise Scott Brown, ‘On Public Interior Space’, AA Files 56 (2007): pp. 64–73.

4

Hirst, ‘Variations on a Theme Park [review]’, p. 98.

5

Hirst argues that this pluralism ‘has two main sources: the individualism of the successful, who have made geographical and social mobility a way of life, and who move between different groups on the basis of choice, and the ethnic identification of excluded and lower-class blacks and the new migrants who, in resisting the dominant groups’ social systems, make ethnic community the basis for survival.’ (Hirst, ‘Variations on a Theme Park [review]’, p. 98).

6

See especially Nancy Fraser, ‘What’s Critical about Critical Theory: The Case of Habermas and Gender’, New German Critique 35 (1985), pp. 97–131.

7

Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1996), p. 289. See also Neil Smith and Setha Low, ‘Introduction: the Imperative of Public Space’, in Setha Low and Neil Smith (eds), The Politics of Public Space (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 1–16.

8

Hirst, ‘Variations on a Theme Park [review]’, p. 98. For the broader context of his conception of politics and its relation to governance, see Paul Hirst, Associative Democracy: New Forms of Economic and Social Governance (London: Polity, 1994). Graham and Marvin would disagree with Hirst’s political positioning around associative democracy, but they have gone some way to recognizing the need to reimagine the urban relative to the complexity and inequality inherent in contemporary social, political and economic forces as they bear on cities. They suggest that there are limitations to the concepts of the urban and the city themselves, especially as representational practices are apt to constrain thinking and action to particular scales. See Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism, pp. 403–20.

9

From an earlier generation, the writings of Lewis Mumford are of particular note. See especially Lewis Mumford, From The Ground Up: Observations on Contemporary Architecture, Housing, Highway Building, and Civic Design (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1947) and Lewis Mumford, The Highway and the City (London: Secker & Warburg, 1953). Death and Life, and Jacobs, were seen as the inheritors of Mumford’s mantle, Mumford himself writing in support of a grant to fund the research for the book. See Peter L. Laurence, ‘Jane Jacobs before Death and Life’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 66, 1 (2007), p. 13. On the context of the

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book’s research funding, see Peter L. Laurence, ‘The Death and Life of Urban Design. Jane Jacobs, The Rockefeller Foundation and the New Research in Urbanism, 1955–1965’, Journal of Urban Design 11, 2 (2006), pp. 145–72. Mumford, however, turned against Jacobs in a review of Death and Life in Lewis Mumford, ‘Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies’, The New Yorker, 1 December 1962, pp. 148–79. See also Christopher Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal: Postwar Urbanism from New York to Berlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 116. 10 At the point Jacobs had submitted the final manuscript for Death and Life to the publisher, the West Village was slated for urban renewal’s bulldozer. Jacobs successfully led the community campaign to stop the plan. See Jennifer Hock, ‘Jane Jacobs and the West Village. The Neighborhood Against Urban Renewal’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 66, 1 (2007), pp. 16–19. 11 See Steven Johnson, Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities and Software (New York: Penguin, 2002), pp. 91–7; Laurence, ‘The Death and Life of Urban Design’, pp. 164–6. 12 For the best examples of this, see Jacobs, Death and Life, pp. 38–9, 50–4. Klemek notes that academics at the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies encouraged Jacobs to adopt a social-scientific methodology. Jacobs instead pursued her own critical insights, believing social science legitimated urban renewal. Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal, p. 111. 13 Bernard Rudofsky, Streets for People: A Primer for Americans (New York: Doubleday, 1969). 14 Jacobs, Death and Life, prefacing note. 15 Laurence, ‘Jane Jacobs before Death and Life’, p. 12; Klemek, The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal, p. 111. 16 William H. Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (New York: Project for Public Spaces, 1980), p. 28. 17 There exists an earlier study of this phenomenon: Whitney North Seymour, Jr (ed.), Small Urban Spaces: The Philosophy, Design, Sociology and Politics of Vest-Pocket Parks and Other Small Urban Spaces (New York: New York University Press, 1969). The volume was sponsored by the Park Association of New York City, of which Seymour had been president in the mid-1960s. Contributors to the volume included Simon Breines, Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs (with excerpts from The Highway and the City, and The Death and Life of Great American Cities, respectively), as well as Robert C. Weaver, Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development between 1966 and 1968, and Thomas P. Hoving, Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and former Commissioner of Parks in New York City under Mayor Robert Lindsay. In his introduction, Seymour noted that the resurgence of interest in small urban parks in New York City was related to larger-scale shifts in the urban landscape: ‘It was this [Robert] Moses fixation with parks as adjuncts to highways which really provoked the recent awakening of citizen interest in urban park and recreation needs’ (p. 5). 18 William H. Whyte, City: Rediscovering the Center (New York: Doubleday, 1988). 19 Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, p. 14. 20 Ibid., p. 19.

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21 Indeed, Whyte claimed that his study of pedestrian activity in Tokyo and Milan pointed to very similar patterns of urban sociability as found in American cities. Ibid., p. 23. 22 Jacobs, Death and Life, p. 54. 23 Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, pp. 102–11. 24 Ibid., p. 112. Emphasis in original. Full details of the amendments are given, pp. 112–19. In relation to this legislative outcome, it is noteworthy that Whyte was the lead author of the 1969 Plan for New York City. For a broader background of Whyte’s professional engagements, see Eugenie L. Birch, ‘The Observation Man, a Study of William H. Whyte’, Planning Magazine, March 1986, pp. 4–8. See the charting of the progressive enclosure of open spaces in 1970s and 1980s Manhattan in David Gissen, Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), pp. 67–105. For a perspective of this as a spreading phenomenon, see Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi, Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries (Barcelona: Actar, 2007). 25 Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, p. 110. 26 Simon Breines and William J. Dean, The Pedestrian Revolution – Streets without Cars (New York: Vintage, 1974); Roberto Brambilla and Gianni Longo, For Pedestrians Only: Planning, Design and Management of Traffic-Free Zones (New York: Whitney Library of Design, 1977); More Streets for People (New York: Italian Art and Landscape Foundation, 1972). David Smiley notes that this concern for the pedestrian emerged as ‘a recurring idea in the conception and implementation of the modernist American city’ (David Smiley, Pedestrian Modern: Shopping and American Architecture, 1925–1956 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013], p. 245). He goes on to position Victor Gruen as the major protagonist of pedestrian-centered developments in downtowns from the 1950s, and the development of Simon Breines’ advocacy for pedestrianization from 1948. In this way the 1970s publications bear out a longer trajectory of development (pp. 246–8). These publications may be compared to a similar set that emerged in the 1980s, focusing in particular on the atrium as an urban design element. See for example: Michael J. Bednar, The New Atrium (New York: McGraw Hill, 1986); Richard Saxon, Atrium Buildings: Development and Design (London: Architectural Press, 1983). 27 Jacobs’ support for (and Rudofsky’s inclusion of an image of) Victor Gruen’s 1956 plan ‘A Greater Fort Worth Tomorrow’ should again be noted in this context. See the discussion in Chapter 3. 28 Whyte, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, p. 76. 29 Ibid., p. 88. 30 Mumford, ‘Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies’, p. 164. 31 Stanford Anderson (ed.), On Streets (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1978). 32 See Stanford Anderson, ‘CASE and MIT: Engagement’, in Arindam Dutta (ed.), A Second Modernism: MIT, Architecture, and the ‘Techno-Social’ Moment (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2013), pp. 641–42. He notes that this funding was crucial to IAUS as an institution, director Peter Eisenman himself conceiving of the project, though as Anderson notes, ‘research on this topic was not attractive to Eisenman

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personally’ (p. 641). Research from members of the IAUS and the Streets research team was featured in an issue of Casabella 359/360 (1971). Anderson continued his own streets research as part of the Urban Ecology Program in the Department of Architecture at MIT. See his chapter, ‘Studies Toward an Ecological Model of the Urban Environment’, in On Streets, pp. 267–307. 33 Anderson, ‘People in the Physical Environment’, in On Streets, p. 1. 34 While this is the clear framing given by Anderson as the editor of the volume (and as co-director of the research project), not all contributors take a questioning attitude to these categories. See for instance Joseph Rykwert, ‘The Street: The Use of its History’, in On Streets, pp. 15–28. This perhaps only indicates the complexity upon which Anderson is commenting. 35 Anderson, ‘People in the Physical Environment’, pp. 1; 10, n. 1. 36 Ibid., p. 1. 37 Ibid., p. 3. 38 Anderson notes that contemporaneous studies by architects, architectural historians and social scientists in Italy, France and Germany were much less bound to exclusionary models of space. Ibid., p. 10, n. 12. For an in-depth study of the use of social scientific knowledge and methods in architectural and urban planning in postwar France, see Kenny Cupers, The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 39 Anderson, ‘People in the Physical Environment’, p. 3. 40 Anderson, ‘Studies Toward an Ecological Model of the Urban Environment’. 41 Ibid., p. 286. 42 Robert Gutman, ‘The Street Generation’, in On Streets, pp. 249–64. 43 In this sense see the critique of Jacobs by Herbert Gans, ‘Urban Vitality and the Fallacy of Physical Determinism’, in People and Plans: Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions (New York: Basic Books, 1968), pp. 25–33. 44 Gutman, ‘The Street Generation’, p. 252. 45 See Adrian Forty, ‘ “Dead or Alive” – Describing the “Social” ’, and ‘User’, in Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), pp. 103–117; 312–15. For a discussion of the user in a specifically American context, see Avigail Sachs, ‘Architects, Users, and the Social Sciences in Postwar America’, in Kenny Cupers (ed.), Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture (London: Routledge, 2013), pp. 69–84. 46 Gutman, ‘The Street Generation’, p. 253. 47 Ibid., p. 260. 48 Ibid., pp. 257–8. 49 Melvin Webber et al. (eds), Explorations into Urban Structure (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964). 50 Kenneth Frampton, ‘The Generic Street as a Continuous Built Form’, in On Streets, p. 309. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., p. 312. 53 Ibid., pp. 310–12.

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54 Peter Eisenman, Vincent Moore, Peter Wolf, Victor Caliandro, Thomas Schumacher, Judith Magel, ‘Streets in the Central Area of a Small American City’, in On Streets, pp. 340–83.

EPILOGUE: ON HOLLOW FORMS 1

See the attempt to read the Bonaventure Hotel ‘libidinally’ in the present in Richard J. Williams, Sex and Buildings: Modern Architecture and the Sexual Revolution (London: Reaktion, 2013), pp. 132–45.

2

Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 124–5. The following thoughts have developed in relation to the detailed discussion of Jameson’s argument about architectural photography in Robin Wilson, ‘A Photography “Not Quite Right:” Fredric Jameson’s Discussion of Architectural Photography in “Spatial Equivalents in the World System” ’, in Nadir Lahiji (ed.), The Political Unconscious of Architecture: Reopening Jameson’s Narrative (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), pp. 233–50.

3

Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 125. In the case of a magazine such as Interiors, intensity of color would be aligned with the glossiness rather than the stiffness of paper stock.

4

Ibid., p. 128.

5

Ibid., p. 44.

6

Reinhold Martin, ‘Money and Meaning: The Case of John Portman’, Hunch 12 (2009), pp. 36–51.

7

Jameson, Postmodernism, p. 124.

8

This is not to argue for a typological or developmental link between arcades and atriums, as the urban conditions attending development in each epoch were vastly different. It is true, however, that the nineteenth century did bear witness to a massive interiorization of urban space and spatial experience, from railway sheds to department stores, market places, and, most significantly, many truly colossal world’s fair and international exposition buildings. The first comprehensive history of arcades was written by an architect who had been designing one in the 1970s, and he noted the resurgence of interest in the building type from that time. See Johan Geist, Arcades: The History of a Building Type, Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (trans.) (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1983), p. vii. See also Michael J. Bednar, The New Atrium (New York: McGraw Hill, 1986); Richard Saxon, Atrium Buildings: Development and Design (London: Architectural Press, 1983); Richard Saxon, The Atrium Comes of Age (Harlow: Longman, 1994). Jameson himself notes the parallel with Benjamin when he moves from his account of the Bonaventure atrium to ‘its analogue in a very different area, namely, the space of postmodern warfare, in particular as Michael Herr evokes it in Dispatches [. . .] Benjamin’s account of Baudelaire, and of the emergence of modernism from a new experience of city technology which transcends all the older habits of bodily perception, is both singularly relevant and singularly antiquated in the light of this new and virtually unimaginable quantum leap in technological alienation’ (Jameson, Postmodernism, pp. 44–5).

9

Mike Davis, ‘Urban Renaissance and the Spirit of Postmodernism’, New Left Review 151 (1985), p. 110.

146

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10 Ibid. 11 Note, however, the dialectic pairing of Paris and Los Angeles in Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Malden, MA : Blackwell, 1996), pp. 186–236. 12 See Anthony Vidler, ‘The Scenes of the Street: Transformations in Ideal and Reality, 1750–1871’, in Stanford Anderson (ed.), On Streets (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press 1978), p. 95. 13 In his ‘Convolute’ entitled ‘Arcades, Magazins de Nouveautés, Sales Clerks’, Benjamin documents a ‘vaudeville in one act’ called ‘Les Passages et les rues, ou La Guerre déclarée’, which was performed in Paris in 1827, and in which streets and arcades are personified by performers. When ‘les rues’ are victorious, ‘A ballet of streets and arcades concludes the vaudeville.’ Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, (ed.) Rolf Tiedemann, (trans.) Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), pp. 56–7 [A10a,1]. 14 See T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985); David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003); David Harvey, ‘The Political Economy of Public Space’, in Setha Low and Neil Smith (eds), The Politics of Public Space (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 2–34. 15 See for example Benjamin’s quotation from Tony Moilin’s book Paris en l’an 2000 (1869), where he envisages a system of ‘street galleries’ constructed by architects ‘on the second story of every house’ (Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 53 [A8a,2]). 16 A further ‘threat’ emerged at this time: Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin for Paris, announced in 1925, a year before Aragon’s text, was intended to kill off the boulevard at the moment of its apotheosis. 17 Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, (trans.) Simon Watson Taylor (London: Jonathan Cape, 1971 [1926]), p. 29. 18 Ibid., p. 40. 19 Reinhold Martin, Utopia’s Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), p. xx. 20 Mike Davis and Daniel Bertrand Monk (eds), Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism (New York: New Press, 2007); Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi, Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries (Barcelona: Actar, 2007). 21 See the account of architecture’s discursive and disciplinary entanglements through the rubric of kissing in Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

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156

INDEX

Abercrombie, Stanley 92, 93 academicization of architecture 16, 20, 25 acoustics 74 affective dimensions 41 African Americans 51, 54–5 AIA Journal 38, 49 air conditioning 33 airlocks 77, 80 air rights 58 Allen, Ivan 51, 70 American Institute of Interior Designers (AID ) 70 ‘analogous city’ 99, 100 analytical drawings 119 Anderson, Stanford 106–7, 112 apartment buildings 39 Aragon, Louis 120–1, 122 arcades 111, 120–1 Architect as Developer, The (Portman and Barnett, 1976) 2, 34–5, 37–8, 40 architectural agency 5 Architectural Forum 49 ‘Architecture of the École des BeauxArts, The’ 19 architecture profession 16, 19, 25, 33–4, 106–10 Arendt, Hannah 100 Atlanta, see also Central Atlanta; Hyatt Regency Atlanta; Peachtree Center Action Forum 54–5 aerial view 42 Central Business District 52 Chamber of Commerce 51, 58 development of 3, 49–68 failed mixed-use developments 41–2 Marriott Marquis 3, 80, 115, 116 MARTA 39, 51, 53–7, 59

Merchandise Mart 31, 32, 36–7, 39, 56, 58, 70 public–private partnerships 6–7 social problems 49–50 Atlanta Center 42, 132 n.48 Atlanta Journal and Constitution 39, 57 Atlanta Regional Commission 56 atriums atrium effect 1–8 Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles 20–6, 86–7, 117, 121 and geometry 91 Hyatt Hotels 80 Hyatt Regency Atlanta 1, 3, 4–5, 31–2, 72–6 Hyatt Regency San Francisco 80–1 nineteenth century 128 n.2 and politics 112 proliferation of atrium hotels 92 Renaissance Center, Detroit 88 and urban renewal 4 Whyte on 104, 105 Augé, Marc 25 Bacon, Edmund 69 ‘ballet of Hudson St’ 103 Baltimore 33 Barnett, Jonathan 2, 34–5, 36, 40 Barth, Lawrence 25 behavior and the physical environment 106–10 Benjamin, Walter 111, 119–20 Binghamton housing scheme 112 bird life 32–3, 41, 117 ‘blockbusting’ 50 Boddy, Trevor 99 Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles atrium 20–6, 86–7, 117, 121 157

158

author’s visit to 117 completion of 38 interior design 84–7 Jameson’s visit to 6, 15, 20–6, 118 modern day 121 in ‘Transformations’ exhibition 19 Boston 33 boundaries 105–6, 107–8, 112 Broadacre City 108 Brussels 38 Burgee, John 19, 104 bus transportation 54 ‘bye-law’ housing 110 Cairo 38 capitalism 4, 15, 22–3, 118 car intercept strategies 52–3, 61 Caudill Rowlett Scott 33 Central Area Study (Atlanta, 1969-71) 52, 53, 55, 58, 59, 61–2 Central Atlanta Association (CAA) 52, 53 Central Atlanta Improvement Association (CAIA ) 52, 57 ‘Central Atlanta Opportunities and Responses’ 56 Central Atlanta Progress (CAP ) 7, 49, 52–7, 58–9 Charles Center, Baltimore 33 circular constructions 1, 75, 77, 80–2, 84–7, 88 City: Rediscovering the Center (Whyte, 1988) 102 cognitive mapping 22, 23–4, 25 Colony Square, Atlanta 41, 43 columnar designs 71–2, 77, 90 commercial architecture practice 20, 26 communities 101 concourses 4, 80 connections between buildings 18, 25, 31, 61–2, 105, see also skybridges Contract Interiors 92–3 conversation pits 81, 117 Cook, Peter 33 cost estimates 40 courtyards 70, 72, 76, 77 crisis of the American city 3–4 critical urban studies 22, 24 Crow, Trammell 33, 37, 39 crowding 102–3

INDEX

cultural criticism 20–1 cultural issues 15–16 Davis, Mike 22–4, 119–21 Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs, 1961) 59, 61, 99, 101 decongestion of the city 25 Defensible Space (Newman, 1972) 107 demographics, changing 50–1 Detroit, see Renaissance Center, Detroit Deutsche, Rosalyn 23–4, 100 devalued modernism 19 development 33–8, 40–1 diamond constructions 88 Dinkeloo, John 4, 20 downtown development 49–68, 105 downtowns, crisis of 3–4, 49–50 drawings 18, 119 Drexler, Arthur 6, 7, 15–20, 23, 24–5, 25 ecology 107 Edwards, Griffith 35 Edwards and Portman 35 efficiency 71, 85–6 Eisenman, Peter 25, 110, 111–12 elevators 22, 31, 33, 74, 85 Embarcadero Center, San Francisco 33, 38, 39, 65, 80–4 Engineering News Record 35 Entelechy 70, 71–2, 77, 81, 90, 91, 99 entryways 21–2, 72–3, 80 environmental practice, design as 69, 92 escalators 43, 81 exceptionalism 25 exits 24 externalities 41, 43, 69, 71–2 façades 73–4, 80 Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Boston 105 feasibility studies 40 Federal Urban Renewal 4, 43, 50 fee-for-service model 33–4 Five Architects: Eisenman, Graves, Gwathmey, Hejduk, Meier (1972) 18 Ford Foundation 4 Ford Jnr, Henry 1 Fortune 33, 102 Fort Worth Fort Worth National Bank 38, 88

INDEX

159

‘A Greater Fort Worth Tomorrow’ 53, 59 pedestrianization plan 59–61 Frampton, Kenneth 17–18, 23, 110–11 Fraser, Nancy 100 furniture 40, 75, 82 Futagawa, Yukio 1, 3

investors 37 in ‘Transformations’ exhibition 19 and urban planning in Atlanta 49 Hyatt Regency O’Hare 25, 38, 80 Hyatt Regency San Francisco 19, 38, 63, 64, 80–4, 117 hyperspace, postmodern x, 20–6, 117

Gans, Herbert 106 Gas Light Tower, Atlanta 32, 36, 56 Gehry, Frank 118–19 geometry 69–98, 119 Giurgola, Romaldo 69 globalization 21 Goldberg, Bertrand 107 Golden Lane, London 108–9, 110–11 gondola elevators 22, 33, 43 grands projets 4 ‘Greater Fort Worth Tomorrow, A’ 53, 59 ‘greenhouses and other public spaces’ 19–20, 92 Greenwich Village 105–6 Gregory, Derek 23, 24 Gruen, Victor 53, 59–60, 61 Gueft, Olga 69–70, 92 Gutman, Robert 106, 108–9

IDS Center, Minneapolis 104, 105 Image of the City (Lynch, 1960) 22, 61 inequality 4 infrastructure development 50–1, 61, 111 Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS ) 106, 109–10, 111–12 interior design 69–98 Interiors 39, 69–70, 92, 118 International Style 20 investors 57–9

Habermas, Jurgen 100 Hall, Edward T. 107 Hartsfield, William 50 Harvey, David 24 Hastings, Robert 33 Haussmann, Baron 119–20 Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum 20 Hidden Dimension, The (Hall, 1969) 107 highway planning 50–1 Hilton, Conrad 37 Hirst, Paul 99–100, 112 history 23, 23–4, 101, 109, 119 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell 20 house building 70, 109–12 Howard, Ebenezer 1 Hursley, Timothy 1, 2 Huxtable, Ada Louise 49 Hyatt Regency Atlanta architecture-development link 35, 37, 41 atrium 1, 3, 4–5, 31–2, 72–6 interior design 72–80

Jackson, Maynard 50 Jacobs, Jane 4, 7, 59–60, 61, 99, 101–5, 107 Jameson, Frederic 6, 15, 20–6, 117–19, 121 Jencks, Charles 19 John Portman and Associates 40 Johnson, Philip 19, 20, 104 Kahn, Louis 18, 72 kinetic pleasures 22, 33 La Guardia Terrace Restaurant, New York 69 Language of Postmodern Architecture, The (Jencks, 1977) 19 Lapidus, Morris 34 leaseholds 39 Le Corbusier 108, 111 Lefebvre, Henri 23 lobbies 31, 81, 104, 112 Lochner Report 50 Los Angeles, see Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles Luckman, Charles 33 Lynch, Kevin 22, 61 Marina City, Chicago 107

160

Marriott Marquis, Atlanta 3, 80, 115, 116 MARTA (Atlanta mass-transit system) 39, 51, 53–7, 59 Martin, Reinhold 24–5, 118, 121 Massell, Ben 36 Massell, Sam 52 materials 35, 77, 81, 83 megalopolis 111 megastructures 4 ‘men in space’ 23 Merchandise Mart, Atlanta 31, 32, 36–7, 39, 56, 58, 70 metro systems 39, 51, see also MARTA (Atlanta mass-transit system) Midnight Sun, Atlanta 32, 36, 38, 40, 76, 77, 80 Minneapolis 104, 105 mixed-use development (MXD ) 38, 41, 43 Model Cities Program 106 Montreal 104 Moore, Charles 18 mortgages 36 Mumford, Lewis 105 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ) 1, 15, 16–20 networks 21–2, 25, 50, 58, 60, 101, 105, 119 ‘New City, Architecture and Urban Renewal, The’ 18 Newman, Oscar 107 New Towns, British 106 New York Binghamton housing scheme 112 Greenwich Village 105–6 La Guardia Terrace Restaurant 69 parks and open spaces 102 New York Five 18, 25 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis 104, 105 non-place urban realm 111 Obus Plan for Algiers 111 office buildings 35, 39, 76–7, 82 Omni International Complex 41–3 On Streets (Anderson, 1978) 106, 107, 108, 110 organizational charts 40

INDEX

Organization Man, The (Whyte, 1956) 102 Paris 107, 119–21 parking reservoirs 52–3, 54, 59 Parsons, Brinckerhoff, Tudor & Bechtel (PBTB ) 56 partnerships between architectural firms 20, 33 Peachtree Center development of 6–7, 31, 35–9, 49, 57–9 Gas Light Tower 32, 36, 56 interior design 72–80 Interiors 69–70 Midnight Sun 32, 36, 38, 40, 76, 77, 80 Peachtree Plaza Hotel (Westin) 37, 40, 80, 85–6, 105, 113, 114, 117 Peachtree Promenade/Mall 55, 56–7, 58–9, 61–2 and pedestrianism 59–62 Shopping Gallery (Peachtree) 76 skybridges 31, 38, 41, 58, 61, 80 Peachtree Purchasing 40, 70 Peachtree Street 39, 55–6, 58 pedestrianism 59–62, 104 pedestrian links 4, 31, 52–3, 55, 57, 58–9, see also skybridges Pei, I.M. 20 Pelli, Cesar 19 people movers 52, 54, 55, 57 Philadelphia 108–9 photography xii, 17–18, 102–3, 117–19 pinwheel formations 72–3 planning 6–7 plant life 32–3, 75, 117 ‘platform cities’ 49 plazas 32, 36, 60, 91, 102–3 podiums 21, 59–61, 72–3, 76, 82, 84–5, 86 politics and urban space 99–100, 112 Portman Properties 40 postmodernism x, 6, 15, 18–19, 20–6, 117 prefabrication 39 Preziosi, Donald 23 Pritzker family 37 ‘profanity corner’ 32

INDEX

Prudential Center, Boston 33 public, as audience 16, 18 public-private partnerships 6–7, 43, 50–1, 58 public space, threats to 99–100 qualitative dimensions 41 racialized geography 43, 49–50, 54, 59 racial violence 1, 4 railroad development 50–1, 54 rapid transit systems 53–7 recession 43 redundancy 60, 61 Renaissance Center, Detroit development of 38 interior design 87–9, 90, 91 modern day 117 pictures of 2, 3, 95, 96, 97, 98 sociology of the street 105 in ‘Transformations’ exhibition 1, 19 Roche, Kevin 4, 19 Rockefeller, David 33 Rogers, Archibald 33 Rouse, James 105 Rowe, Colin 18 Rudofsky, Bernard 7, 101, 103, 104, 108 Rutheiser, Charles 43 San Francisco Embarcadero Center 33, 38, 39, 65, 80–4 Hyatt Regency San Francisco 19, 38, 63, 64, 80–4, 117 Scott Brown, Denise 108, 109 self congestion 102–3 Shopping Gallery (Peachtree) 76 shopping malls 60, 61 Skyline 17, 25 skybridges Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles 84–5 Peachtree Center 31, 38, 41, 58, 61, 80 and the politics of urban space 100 Whyte on 104 Smith, C. Ray 92 Smith, James Merrick 70 Smithson, Alison and Peter 108–9, 110, 111

161

Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, The (Whyte, 1980) 102 social theory 23 sociology of the street 106–10 Soja, Edward 23, 24 Sorkin, Michael 99 South Street, Philadelphia 108–9 ‘space of public claim’ 112 spatial effects 4, 41, 80, 87, 91–2 spatiality 23, 59, 61, 71–2, 74, 80, 91 sports arenas 43 Steinberg, Stanley (Mickey) 35 Stirling, James 18 Stone, Clarence 51, 52, 58 Street Life Project 102 streets displacement of the street 7 street life 101–6 street planning 52–3, 59, 59–62 and urban studies 99–116 Streets for People (Rudofsky, 1969) 101 sunken spaces 72, 76–7, 81–2 supermodernity 25 task-force approaches 52, 56 Team 10 108, 110, 110–11 temporal experience 75 tendencies 6, 7, 17, 25–6, 92 Thompson, Ventulett and Stainback 41–3 Trammell Crow 33, 37, 42 ‘Transformations in Modern Architecture’ exhibition 6, 15, 16–20 transportation 52–7 trellis structures 81–2 urban development 33–4 urbanism 25–6 urbanity 4, 18, 119 Urban Land Institute (ULI ) 38, 39 urban planning 49, 49–68 urban renewal 69, 99 urban strategy 50 urban studies 22, 25 Variations on a Theme Park (Sorkin, 1992) 99, 100 Venturi, Robert 18, 108, 109 verticality 74, 118

162

Webber, Melvin 110 Westin Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles, see Bonaventure Hotel, Los Angeles Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel 37, 40, 80, 113, 114, 117 ‘Whites’ vs. ‘Grays’ 18–19

INDEX

Whyte, William H. 7, 102–3, 104–5 World Trade Center, Atlanta 39 Wright, Frank Lloyd 108 ziggurat shapes 80–1 zoning 103

163

164