Building Fantasies for Travelers

From the outside, it looks like something out of Buck Rogers--a 70-story silo of glass that is at once Atlanta's tallest building and the world's tallest hotel. Inside, guests enter a seven-story-high lobby big enough to hold a triple-level lounge, a forest of Ficus trees and a half-acre lagoon fed by fountains and a 100-ft.-wide waterfall. All the while, glass-enclosed elevators whiz like space capsules past the 1,100 guest rooms to a revolving rooftop restaurant.

The $55 million Peachtree Center Plaza Hotel, which opened last week, is the latest extravaganza in the career of John C. Portman Jr. Restless, driving, so egotistical that he often antagonizes his backers, Portman, 51, is an architect who not only has done more to change hoteldom than anyone since Conrad Hilton, but also is the first major talent in his profession to own as well as design buildings. His trademark is the architecture of entertainment in cities. "I have been accused of doing up a sophisticated Disneyland for adults," he says. "I plead guilty."

Picture Window. Like Disney, Portman has turned his fantasies into profit. From one of his Atlanta office towers, he rules a series of enterprises. John Portman & Associates is an architectural firm that designs buildings and oversees their construction. Portman Properties acquires land for new projects and finds financing for them. Other smaller companies operate buildings--Portman owns an estimated $250 million worth in Atlanta, Los Angeles and San Francisco--and buy furnishings for them.

Recently Portman's freewheeling plans have been slowed by recession and inflation at home and abroad. Financing difficulties have postponed a trade mart in Paris and a hotel for Times Square in New York City. How much he is hurting no one knows, since privately held companies do not make their financial statements public. But business should pick up as the economy improves, for the market seems to like his product.

Portman began brashly in 1953, after graduating from the Georgia Institute of Technology and serving his apprenticeship with an Atlanta architectural firm. Says he: "I wanted to have an impact and was too impatient to wait for someone else to hire me." So he opened his own office in Atlanta. While professional groups winced--architects were thought to be in conflict of interest if they developed property--he designed a striking medical center for rental but could not get it financed. He did better with Atlanta's Merchandise Mart, a blocky 22-story building of showrooms and sales offices.

Parcel by parcel, Portman went on to buy a rundown section of Atlanta's main drag, Peachtree Street. Visions of towers danced in his head. One by one they rose to form Peachtree Center--a complex of five office buildings, two hotels, a theater, restaurants and a shopping arcade. Atlantans who visit Portman's hilltop house now joke that he installed a picture window and then built the view to be seen through it.

As architecture, Peachtree Center is neat, competent and mostly bland. But as a boost for the center city, it has worked wonders. By zesty street designs--bright colors, flags, modern sculpture, trees and fountains--Portman created a pleasant environment that brought new life downtown. Other Atlanta developers have followed his lead. They, too, have built, not isolated towers, but large, coherent projects with hotels, apartments, shops, offices and sport facilities. Result: Atlanta has one of the healthiest downtowns in the U.S.

That success earned Portman even more ambitious jobs. In San Francisco, he joined with Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller, Dallas Developer Trammell Crow and the Prudential Investment Corp. to build Embarcadero Center, often called "Rockefeller Center West"--an 8.5-acre, $200 million office, apartment and hotel project. In Detroit, Henry Ford II called on Portman to save the city's dying downtown by designing the 32-acre, $200 million Renaissance Center.

The centerpiece of each project is a hotel, a type of building about which Portman has strong convictions. He feels that travelers do not want to go just to "a collection of bedrooms." Rather, they want a building that captures the excitement of arrival and the sense of being someplace new. His ideas were exemplified in his first hotel, the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, which opened eight years ago. Its hallmarks:

SPACE. A vast lobby measures 220 ft. high by 140 ft. across. In most hands such a space would be coldly institutional, but Portman uses bars, cafes and the registration area to divide it into intimate sections where people want to be.

NATURE. The lobby is also crowded with plants, fountains and a gigantic three-story aviary, all aimed at satisfying man's yearning for nature.

MOVEMENT. Glass-walled elevators, bedecked with lights, zip up and down--fun to watch and to ride.

The Hyatt Co. bought the hotel in 1967 for $18 million and is happy it did; the occupancy rate has been an astounding 90%. Not surprisingly, Hyatt asked Portman to repeat his formula in a hotel near Chicago's O'Hare Airport, and it worked again. Sophisticated Chicagoans make the 45-min. trip from downtown to have a cocktail and stare. In 1971, however, Portman broke with Hyatt after a quarrel and joined forces with the Western International chain, a subsidiary of U.A.L. Inc. It now runs the new Portman hotel in Atlanta.

Does Portman's flamboyant touch guarantee a profit? One answer comes from the Peachtree Center Plaza Hotel. Though just opened, it has already been 40% booked through 1981.

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