High art with a human touch
Legendary Atlanta architect and developer John C. Portman Jr. — inventor of soaring atria in city hotels — stopped by Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) this week to offer advice and wisdom. “It’s all about people,” he said of architecture, a practice meant to “enhance life,” but which more commonly may call to mind showmanship and technology. His signature hotels, starting with the 1967 Hyatt Regency Atlanta, feature bold interior spaces. They bring the outdoors inside, adding grandeur to the traditional hotel paradigm: boxes within a box. His brand of architecture, along with its holistic relationship to cities, rewrote hotel design, and in the decades that followed made Portman among the most widely imitated architects in the world. His work appears in 60 cities on four continents. In 1979, he delivered this new vision of dramatic interiors to China. At GSD on Tuesday, Portman visited a studio class, listened to student proposals,...