John Calvin Portman Jr. (December 4, 1924 – December 29, 2017) was an American neofuturisticarchitect and real estate developer widely known for popularizing hotels and office buildings with multi-storied interior atria. Portman also had a particularly large impact on the cityscape of his hometown of Atlanta, with the Peachtree Center complex serving as downtown's business and tourism anchor from the 1970s onward.[1] The Peachtree Center area includes Portman-designed Hyatt, Westin, and Marriott hotels. Portman's plans typically deal with primitives in the forms of symmetrical squares and circles.
Early life and career
Portman was born to John C. Portman Sr. and Edna Rochester Portman. He had five sisters. He graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1950. His firm completed the Merchandise Mart (now AmericasMart) in downtown Atlanta in 1961. The multi-block Peachtree Center was begun in 1965 and would expand to become the main center of hotel and office space in Downtown Atlanta, taking over from the Five Points area just to the south. Portman would develop a similar multiblock complex at San Francisco's Embarcadero Center (1970s), which unlike its Atlanta counterpart, heavily emphasized pedestrian activity at street level.
His signature work in China, the Shanghai Centre (1990), was the first of many major projects in China and elsewhere in Asia. The 5-star hotel inside, The Portman Ritz-Carlton, Shanghai (formerly Portman Shangri-La Hotel), was named after him.
In 2009 Portman's work was featured in a major exhibition at Atlanta's High Museum of Art.
Portman married Joan "Jan" Newton. They had six children.
Portman died on December 29, 2017, aged 93.[2][3] He was survived, among others, by his wife and five of his children, as well as his daughter-in-law, actress Traylor Howard, and three of his five siblings.
2013 Four Pillar Award – Council for Quality Growth[10]
Criticism
Portman was praised for his "cinematic"[11] interiors artfully relating interior space and elements to the individual. In the 1960s and 1970s the placement of such buildings in America's decaying downtowns was considered salvation of the city centers, but some contemporary city planners are critical of such insular environments that "turn their back" on the city streets.[12] For example, the New York Marriott Marquis with its 8-floor high lobby was praised as a "town square", but is now criticized by some for turning its back to Times Square. Nonetheless, at the time the hotel was built, due to the still-seedy character of Times Square, Portman's style of inwardly-oriented spaces made logical sense. Also, he did, in fact, design buildings (like San Francisco's Embarcadero Center) that heavily emphasized pedestrian activity at street level.[13]
Bibliography
Portman, John; Barnett, Jonathan (1976). The Architect as Developer. McGraw Hill. ISBN0-07-050536-5.
