Internal disconnect: Material memory in the John Portman originals

Author: Gregory Marinic Year: 2018 Source type: chapter (Ch. 31 of The Interior Architecture Reader, ed. Gregory Marinic, Routledge)

Raw file: raw/chapters/marinic-2018-internal-disconnect-portman.md

Summary

The Reader's thirty-first chapter — written by its editor — is a critique of the renovation of John Portman's late-Brutalist atrium hotels: the Hyatt Regency Atlanta (1967), the Westin Peachtree Plaza (1976), and the Detroit Renaissance Center (1977). Marinic argues that iconic architectural interiors present "a unique challenge and opportunity for designers who are charged with their renovation," and that in the Portman originals the "material memory" of the original interiors — their interior-exterior provenance, civic gravitas, and "unique 'Portman effect'" — has been incrementally erased by corporations, developers, managing agents, and designers pursuing trend, familiarity, and financial return. Reading the renovations through Lefebvre's The Production of Space, Baudrillard's readings of the Bonaventure and The Consumer Society, and Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, the chapter argues that the Portman originals — "temples of consumerism" and forerunners of the twenty-first-century interior hyperspaces of Las Vegas, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi — are "fading away with little notice or concern," and that "the interior renovations and manipulations of significant works of interior architecture should form part of the most vocal discourse of design theory and criticism in the field."

Key Claims

The interior-forgotten thesis: "buildings are often critiqued most rigorously in their original form – whether celebrated or derided – and changes to their interior spaces are often forgotten" — the canonical critiques of the Portman originals (by Baudrillard and Jameson) were of the original interiors, while their subsequent renovations "have not been adequately critiqued regarding stewardship of their historically significant architectural interiors." See iconic-architecture, memory.
The arcades genealogy: the atrium hotel-shopping complex descends from the nineteenth-century commercial arcade — "Parisian passages and other interior urban environments such as the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (1865) in Milan, Galerias Pacifico (1889) in Buenos Aires, and the Old Arcade (1890) in Cleveland served as forerunners of the atrium hotel-shopping complexes of the mid-twentieth century" — whose "architectural language… was appropriated by John Portman for his unique interior-exterior aesthetic in America." See arcades.
The inside-out thesis (Portman's method): Portman's complexes "embraced a Brutalist aesthetic by appropriating exterior spatial conditions and materials to create interior urban experiences" — "Building exteriors were turned outside-in to create autonomous internal plazas, encapsulated landscapes, and hermetic commercial zones." The original interiors "operated more like exteriors." See atrium-hotel, interior-urbanism, hermetic-seal.
The city-within-a-city as privatized urbanism: "As both architect and developer, Portman's hotel-retail-commercial complexes transformed downtowns into increasingly isolated, transactional, and privatized forms of urbanism" — a "city-within-a-city concept" that responded to "civil unrest, disinvestment, and abandonment" as "American inner cities shrunk from white flight." See privatised-public-space, neoliberal-metropolis.
The Brutalist ambivalence thesis: Portman's materiality was "ambivalent" — "Brutalist forms and spatial qualities alluded to utilitarian drainage easements, expressways, and social housing – places that were perceived negatively or akin to public works. For the adventurous and architecturally sophisticated, Portman interiors were sublime and avant-garde, but for many, these grandly scaled spaces appeared stark and alienating rather than welcoming and conventionally luxurious." See sublime, brutalism.
The Hyatt case — [Irreverent] dematerialization: the 2010 TVS Design renovation removed the white-glazed terracotta fan-pattern atrium floor — an "abstracted European cobblestone street that made the atrium feel both public and urban" — replaced the dark tunnel entrance (whose "concrete surface – an unfinished material that conveyed interior ambivalence") with marble, bright lighting and porcelain, dismantled the hanging follies (a "three-story birdcage with parrots and a grandly scaled, ornamental parasol"), and removed the hanging vegetation: "The overall interior architectural effect has shifted from 'exterior terraces opening onto the city' to 'interior hallways surrounding a lightwell.'" See material-memory, adaptive-reuse.
The lighting-neutrality critique: "public areas throughout the hotel have been altered to address popular expectations for uniformly bright and neutral spaces" — "As evidenced in this post-renovation statement from Hyatt, aura has been abandoned in favor of familiarity." The brightened atrium "no longer enhances spatial depth and unseen spaces; these distinctions have been neutralized and rendered equally." See atmosphere, the-neutral.
The Westin case — [Superficial] adaptation: Portman himself designed the 1986 postmodern follies ("modern interpretations of a classic Venetian piazza," reinterpreting Tivoli Gardens) that replaced the drained lobby lagoon — an episode which "reveals his hybrid architect/developer perspective on interior design" and introduced "an alternative spatial logic that recast the podium base as a context for temporal interiorities which addressed conventional preferences and consumerism." The follies "quickly collected dust and grew outmoded and worn" and "met their own demise." See kitsch, postmodernism.
The terrain-vague erosion thesis: "Like actual urban space, the early Portman hotel-shopping galleries offered voluminous, unarticulated, and unusable spaces. A maze of terrains vagues, these spatial gratuities have been reduced to minimums in the reprogramming of the Westin Peachtree Plaza. Today, there is very little terrain vague left to critique in the Portman hotels; the interior complexities and expansiveness of the podium have been value-engineered into leasable space." See terrain-vague.
The RenCen case — [Radical] intervention and "too big to fail": "John Portman's urban redevelopment projects… have been deemed too big to fail. While they have never been abandoned, each has required intensive modifications to remain economically viable. The Brutalist spirit of the Renaissance Center has been unable to withstand the forces of time, trend, financial performance, and consumer preference." See iconic-architecture, obsolescence.
The retail-economics critique: Portman's podium retail was single-loaded, dispersed, and lacked density; "visually impermeable concrete ramps, stairs, and core obstructed sight lines"; "Retail spaces were not designed for optimum financial gain, but tuned to his utopian architectural concept. Lobbies were envisioned as piazzas and corridors were conceived as streets" — the design's utopian social ambition made it "difficult to lease." See atrium-hotel.
The GM branding critique: after GM acquired the complex (1996), the "grandly scaled circulation spaces" were reprogrammed into "a promotional showroom for GM vehicles" — "the interior circulation spaces feel like a three-dimensional GM advertisement – rather than the interior urban spaces that they were designed to be," and the year-round conservatory has "given way to a glorified parking lot."
The sympathetic exception: SOM's interventions are partially exempted — the 2004 "glass-ring mezzanine walkway… dematerialized one of the most obtrusive aspects of the Renaissance Center base podium design," is "sympathetic to the original design and provides an impressive, stylistically appropriate architectural element" — the chapter's one instance of renovation done with historical integrity (see dematerialization).
The Lefebvrian frame: "In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre defines space as a commodity directly linked to production and capital," with his three spatial registers — "abstract space," responding to political and economic forces; "absolute space," created by everyday, participatory actions; and "differential space," mobilized by resistant forces — applied to the hotels: "Lefebvre's notion of differential space relates to the dynamic relationships among shifting physical conditions, material assemblies, spatial occupancies, and interior-exterior conditions in Portman's work." See space, lefebvre-henri.
The Baudrillard frame: Baudrillard named the World Trade Center, Centre Pompidou, and Portman's Los Angeles Bonaventure "as crucial buildings revealing the cultural logic of modernity and postmodernity"; he "assessed the hyperspaces of the Bonaventure as an unintentional parody of modernism," and "lauds Portman's ability to create an ideal inner world which replicates the city within a building" — the Detroit Renaissance Center going further as "a micro-world," whose "lack of a definable exteriority underscores the subliminal reading and primacy of the interior," spatializing "Baudrillard's theory of consumption, ambiguity, and postmodernity" from The Consumer Society (1970). See baudrillard-jean, simulation-hyperreality.
The Jameson frame: Jameson claims "a 'new world of multinational capital' assumes an 'impossible' representation in the interior hyperspaces of the John Portman megastructures"; his postmodern pastiche — "linked to an inability to develop new 'styles' as they are perceived to have already been invented" — and postmodern "schizophrenia" (the loss of historicity through recycling) are mapped onto Portman: he "engaged in postmodern spatiality well before the overtly literal postmodern follies," coding the glass envelopes as "modern" while experimenting "with interior spatial postmodernity." See postmodernism, jameson-fredric.
The skin/interior split: Portman's reflective glass envelope "serves as a tenuous boundary between an ordered external architecture and the ongoing aesthetic chaos of its renovated interior spaces" — the chapter's titular "internal disconnect" between enduring exterior icon and endlessly renovated interior.
The disciplinary claim (the chapter's thesis): "Building interiors, such as the Portman originals, allow social processes to be manifested, observed, and reconfigured. Accordingly, the interior renovations and manipulations of significant works of interior architecture should form part of the most vocal discourse of design theory and criticism in the field." See interior-architecture, adaptive-reuse.

Connections

Concepts: atrium-hotel · material-memory · interior-urbanism · iconic-architecture · adaptive-reuse · arcades · terrain-vague · privatised-public-space · hermetic-seal · postmodernism · kitsch · consumerism · memory · sublime · dematerialization · brutalism · space · style · interiority · obsolescence · spectacle · neoliberal-metropolis

Authors: marinic-gregory (author; also the Reader's editor) · Lefebvre — The Production of Space as the chapter's primary frame (space as commodity; abstract/absolute/differential space) · Baudrillard — the Bonaventure as crucial building, the hyperspace as unintentional parody, The Consumer Society spatialized by RenCen, Simulacra et Simulation · Jameson — the Bonaventure hyperspace, pastiche, postmodern schizophrenia · John Portman (architect-developer; no page — see log) · Paul Goldberger (cited, note 1; no page — see log) · Michel Foucault (named via Baudrillard's critique of subjectivity; foucault-michel)

Debates: postmodernism-vs-modernism (Portman's "modern" envelopes over "interior spatial postmodernity"; the follies as postmodernity-as-fashion) · spectacle-vs-function (consumer preference vs. civic gravitas) · interior-design-vs-architecture (the interior renovation as the interior discipline's critical terrain) · everyday-vs-iconic-architecture (the "expectable aesthetic" of consumer taste eroding the avant-garde interior)

Related source notes: Jameson — Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism — the Bonaventure "hyperspace" this chapter revisits from the renovation side · Baudrillard — Structures of Atmosphere — the sign-system interior at room scale vs. the chapter's hyperspace scale · Lefebvre — Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment — space produced for consumption vs. Lefebvre's differential space · Hollis — (Re)constructing Histories — the Reader's opening historiography of alteration, which this chapter extends to the iconic interior · Qureshi — Spatial therapies — adaptive reuse's therapeutic register vs. the chapter's insensitive-renovation register · Hedges — The waiting room — the heritage listing that protected the shell while "the interior changed dramatically": the same shell/interior split the Portman originals enact at icon scale · Massey — Time travel — the before-and-after conventions of interior architecture's images · McClure & McClure — Inside Looking In — the hermetic seal and persistence against obsolescence · Chase — The Role of Consumerism in American Architecture — the American consumerist architecture the Portman originals monumentalized · Jones & Moreno-Carranco — Megaprojects — megaproject urbanism vs. the "too big to fail" Portman megastructure · Stalking Detroit — Detroit's voids: terrain vague outside vs. the interiorized terrain vague of RenCen's podium · Borden — Thick Edge — Broadgate's privatised public space as the British cousin of the Portman enclave.

Direct Quotes

"Iconic architectural interiors present a unique challenge and opportunity for designers who are charged with their renovation."

"In 1967, Portman unveiled the Hyatt Regency Atlanta and redefined generational expectations for downtown development in American cities. Although his atrium hotels eventually gained stature as enduring design icons, recent interior renovations have largely ignored the original materiality and civic gravitas of the unique 'Portman effect.'"

"In the nineteenth century, the tectonic qualities and material conditions of commercial arcades blurred city streets into building interiors. Parisian passages and other interior urban environments such as the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (1865) in Milan, Galerias Pacifico (1889) in Buenos Aires, and the Old Arcade (1890) in Cleveland served as forerunners of the atrium hotel-shopping complexes of the mid-twentieth century."

"As both architect and developer, Portman's hotel-retail-commercial complexes transformed downtowns into increasingly isolated, transactional, and privatized forms of urbanism. These internally focused projects embraced a Brutalist aesthetic by appropriating exterior spatial conditions and materials to create interior urban experiences."

"As American inner cities shrunk from white flight, his city-within-a-city concept responded to increasing uncertainty. Building exteriors were turned outside-in to create autonomous internal plazas, encapsulated landscapes, and hermetic commercial zones."

"Soaring spaces, building-scale internal facades, extensive landscaping, lagoons, and exposed concrete embodied an interior-exterior aura. As temples of consumerism subjected to market pressures and changing tastes, his late modernist hotel-retail interiors were among the first to be adapted in the postmodern wave."

"The qualitative permanence of these iconic structures – their monumental, austere, and sublime interior architecture – has been incrementally diminished and interiorized by the insensitive actions of corporations, real estate developers, managing agents, and professional designers."

"Brutalist forms and spatial qualities alluded to utilitarian drainage easements, expressways, and social housing – places that were perceived negatively or akin to public works. For the adventurous and architecturally sophisticated, Portman interiors were sublime and avant-garde, but for many, these grandly scaled spaces appeared stark and alienating rather than welcoming and conventionally luxurious."

"In the past, a dark and sublime space offered a powerful transition to the atrium. Its concrete surface – an unfinished material that conveyed interior ambivalence – was removed and replaced with smooth marble; bright lighting and new porcelain flooring further diminished the original atmosphere to achieve an expectable aesthetic."

"The original fan-pattern tiles evoked an abstracted European cobblestone street that made the atrium feel both public and urban. Why was this critical interior condition replaced with conventional porcelain tile? Were the designers unaware of the historical importance of this material and its spatial intent?"

"Reorienting an interior-urban space into an ordinary interior space, the civic stature of the Portman original has been significantly diminished."

"The overall interior architectural effect has shifted from 'exterior terraces opening onto the city' to 'interior hallways surrounding a lightwell.'"

"Although the structural bones of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta remain, the uniqueness of its interior urbanity has been largely erased."

"Described by his publicists as 'modern interpretations of a classic Venetian piazza,' these polychromatic pavilions were reinterpretations of the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen… the notion that John Portman initiated the design and installation of such work is quite remarkable, but reveals his hybrid architect/developer perspective on interior design."

"Like actual urban space, the early Portman hotel-shopping galleries offered voluminous, unarticulated, and unusable spaces. A maze of terrains vagues, these spatial gratuities have been reduced to minimums in the reprogramming of the Westin Peachtree Plaza. Today, there is very little terrain vague left to critique in the Portman hotels; the interior complexities and expansiveness of the podium have been value-engineered into leasable space."

"John Portman's urban redevelopment projects, including the Atlanta Peachtree Center, San Francisco Embarcadero Center, Los Angeles Bonaventure, and Detroit Renaissance Center, have been deemed too big to fail. While they have never been abandoned, each has required intensive modifications to remain economically viable."

"Retail spaces were not designed for optimum financial gain, but tuned to his utopian architectural concept. Lobbies were envisioned as piazzas and corridors were conceived as streets; their generous scale gave the complex a sense of spaciousness, well-being, and grand interior urbanism."

"In a dramatic turn from landscaped water garden oasis to GM-branded exhibition, the podium base lobby was drained and vegetation removed. It its place – yet ironically appropriate for Detroit – a showroom of American-made GM cars and trucks stands permanently on guard. The year-round conservatory of trees, water, and filtered light envisioned by Portman in the early 1970s has given way to a glorified parking lot."

"The public reading of circulation spaces has been diminished by the extensive branding program – interior circulation spaces feel like a three-dimensional GM advertisement – rather than the interior urban spaces that they were designed to be."

"In The Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre defines space as a commodity directly linked to production and capital."

"Lefebvre's notion of differential space relates to the dynamic relationships among shifting physical conditions, material assemblies, spatial occupancies, and interior-exterior conditions in Portman's work."

"French theorist Jean Baudrillard identified the World Trade Center, Centre Pompidou, and John Portman's Los Angeles Bonaventure – cousins of the Westin Peachtree Plaza and Detroit Renaissance Center – as crucial buildings revealing the cultural logic of modernity and postmodernity."

"Baudrillard assessed the hyperspaces of the Bonaventure as an unintentional parody of modernism related to an arbitrary and misleading spatial language."

"In the Los Angeles Bonaventure, Baudrillard lauds Portman's ability to create an ideal inner world which replicates the city within a building. Similarly, the Detroit Renaissance Center isolates itself to create an even more powerful and autonomous interior world – a micro-world."

"Here, modernity marks a violent insertion into the city by coding its superiority as indifference… The reflective glass skin turns its exterior surface into a mirror of the urban context. Further dislocating the complex within the city as if to dematerialize it, the interior space has no exterior, no 'definitive' exterior. In turn, this lack of a definable exteriority underscores the subliminal reading and primacy of the interior."

"Thus, the podium base of the Detroit Renaissance Center spatializes Baudrillard's theory of consumption, ambiguity, and postmodernity envisioned in his seminal book, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures, originally published in 1970."

"He claims that a 'new world of multinational capital' assumes an 'impossible' representation in the interior hyperspaces of the John Portman megastructures."

"Claiming that capitalism and consumer commodification have destroyed the ability for contemporary culture to innovate, Jameson further rationalizes that postmodern pastiche is linked to an inability to develop new 'styles' as they are perceived to have already been invented."

"In this sense, Portman codes his reflective glass building envelopes for the Westin Peachtree Plaza and Detroit Renaissance Center as 'modern,' while simultaneously experimenting with interior spatial postmodernity. This skin serves as a tenuous boundary between an ordered external architecture and the ongoing aesthetic chaos of its renovated interior spaces."

"For Jameson, postmodern schizophrenia derives from a lack of historicity, or the disappearance of a sense of history due to postmodern recycling of the past."

"Today, Portman hotel interiors are characterized less by the permanence of their original interior architecture and more by temporality and trend-influenced interior design."

"While it may be somewhat harsh to claim that theses spaces have been entirely destroyed, as iconic works of spatial postmodernism, they are certainly fading away with little notice or concern. For the most part, the spatial complexities and terrain vague ambiguities that so entranced Jameson and Baudrillard no longer exist in the iconic John Portman originals."

"The spatial theories of Lefebvre and early critiques of Portman's work by Baudrillard and Jameson assert that buildings are often critiqued most rigorously in their original form – whether celebrated or derided – and changes to their interior spaces are often forgotten."

"Building interiors, such as the Portman originals, allow social processes to be manifested, observed, and reconfigured. Accordingly, the interior renovations and manipulations of significant works of interior architecture should form part of the most vocal discourse of design theory and criticism in the field. The critique of the renovated Portman originals has, for the most part, ground to a halt. Or have the critics simply not noticed that these iconic interior spaces have been nearly erased?"

"The transformation of the Hyatt Regency Atlanta includes a significant refresh of the hotel's soaring 22-story atrium lobby. The entrance area has a clean, open feeling upon arrival with pod-style desks providing an intimate and personalized check-in experience." (Hyatt Corporation press release, quoted)

Open Questions

The chapter's own closing question is left open: "Or have the critics simply not noticed that these iconic interior spaces have been nearly erased?" — what mechanism (critical fashion, the interior's invisibility to the heritage apparatus, the icon's exterior bias) silences interior-renovation criticism?
The chapter asserts the interior-exterior split ("internal disconnect") but does not ask whether the exterior can bear the icon's memory alone: can an iconic building whose interior has been erased still be an icon, or is iconicity always interior-dependent?
Is the "Portman effect" preservable at all, given that its defining condition — "temples of consumerism subjected to market pressures" — is the very force that erodes it? The chapter's three cases suggest consumption consumes its own temples.
Baudrillard read the Bonaventure as "an unintentional parody of modernism"; Jameson read pastiche as the inability to invent new styles. The 1986 follies were Portman's own parody. Does the chapter's critique of insensitive renovation imply that parody (critical) and kitsch (uncritical) can be distinguished in renovation practice — and who decides?
The chapter is silent on whether any renovation of an iconic interior can be legitimate beyond the SOM exceptions (Wintergarden, glass-ring mezzanine): is "sympathetic" renovation a stable category or a matter of degree?
If "there is very little terrain vague left to critique in the Portman hotels," is terrain vague a renewable interior resource — can value-engineering be reversed — or is the erasure irreversible ("largely lost to memory")?
Lefebvre's differential space is "mobilized by resistant forces existing within absolute space" — do the Portman atria, as privatized interiors, contain such resistant forces, or does their private ownership foreclose the absolute-space participation Lefebvre's category requires?