Villages in the Sky

In the heart of Atlanta is rising Peachtree Center, a $175 million com plex that already includes the 22-story Merchandise Mart, three office build ings, a bus terminal with a 2,000-seat theater, and the new, 800-room Regency Hyatt House. Soon to be added are a 70-story office skyscraper and sev eral high-rise apartment buildings. As a civic enterprise, it would do justice to any U.S. city. What makes it all the more remarkable is that the whole of Peachtree Center has gone up without a penny of public funds.

Prime mover behind Atlanta's "oneman urban-renewal plan" is Architect John Portman, 43, who has won hometown honors, architectural awards--and become a millionaire to boot--by insisting that he be both promoter and part owner as well as designer for all of Peachtree Center. Making himself his own client is the only way, Portman has found, to retain "the authority to see that the project is carried out properly and not botched along the way." In his multiple role, he has seen to it that the buildings are a far cry from the run-of-the-drafting-board, speculate buildings. Instead, they are full of novel concepts, from aerial pedestrian walkways to 23-story interior courts, none of which Portman thinks would have been realized if he had not maintained complete control.

Exploding Space. Portman had to earn his right to what he calls "total creativity" in the hard dollars-and-cents market. Soon after graduating from Georgia Tech's architectural school ('50), he decided: "If I come up with an idea and promote and develop it myself, there won't be any question about who is going to be the architect." His first venture was a new medical building. It gained him the kudos of the medical profession but was a promotional failure. Recalls Portman wryly: "I lost about $7,500, which I didn't have." His next venture was vastly more successful. Encouraged by the success of a furniture exhibition he organized in 1957, he made plans to build the $15 million Merchandise Mart--the first structure of what was to become Peachtree Center.

Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. loaned him $8,000,000 for the new Mart, and additional backing came from Atlanta Real Estate Man Ben Massell and Dallas Multimillionaire Trammell Crow. Portman ended up being the president and a major stockholder of the Mart, a structure built precisely according to his specifications. In the case of the new Regency Hyatt House (TIME, June 2), Portman formed a development corporation that gave him design and financial control right from the start. As a result, he was able to demonstrate his concept of "exploded space," by which he means dramatizing the flow and interpenetration of space from one area to the next. In Hyatt House, the elevated cocktail lounge is defined within the great interior court by an umbrella-like cover suspended from the ceiling; the man in the bar can still see the glass-bubble elevators whizzing up and down the court's columns and the fountain jetting high into the lobby from two stories below.

Life on a Podium. If Portman could have one wish, it would be "to get man out from under the steering wheel and back on his feet again." Says he: "We've got to design our cities into coordinate, self-contained units, to create molecules of pedestrian villages." Peachtree Center is already becoming such a village. The buildings are linked by pedestrian bridges, and soon a resident will be able to walk to work, to church or to the theater, go shopping, see his dentist or stockbroker, and never leave the center.

To make it even more of a haven, Portman is now pushing for an entirely new street to be built under the center for vehicular traffic, thus freeing the present surface streets for conversion into a pedestrian mall. And in San Francisco, Portman, in partnership with Trammell Crow and David Rockefeller, is building the $150 million Embarcadero Center; he is placing the entire five-block development atop a podium, thus enabling people to live and work two stories above the rushing street traffic below.

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