John Portman is in the House, Retro Modernism in the Pearl District

The Cosmopolitan, the 28-story glass tower between Fields Park and Tanner Springs Park, is deadening the Pearl District’s visual kaleidoscope. Rising like a giant roadway reflector, it marks the edge of an eviscerated vista. When Fields Park opened two years ago, a stunning panorama greeted visitors.  Looking south, intimate plazas, greens, walks, and a regimen of trees embellished a street grid lined with buildings that honored the neighborhood’s industrial past. The Cosmopolitan ignores history.  It pays homage to the modernist vision of a sterile hygienic city personified, in the United States, by John Portman, the 1970s starchitect who designed grandiose antiurban buildings. 

Cosmopolitan & F-50 Highway Reflector

.

Portman’s architecture did make a statement.  In fact, I remember feeling like Saul of Tarsus when I first encountered his work. I was driving from Florida to The Ohio State University to take up graduate studies in city planning. Even though the somnolent interstate had inured my senses, I was nervous with anticipation.  I was only 21 and had never been to Ohio.  My uneasiness vanished when Atlanta came into view at twilight. Rising above it was a soaring 73-story glass cylinder awash in a golden hue. The building (Westin Hotel) celebrated the city, and I was moved by the prodigious talent of the human hand.  I was also reassured; studying urban planning was going to be okay

Westin Hotel Peach Tree Plaza

After a short career as a city planner, I returned to Atlanta to work on a PhD at Emory University.  By then I perceived planning through the lens of Ian McHarg, the champion of ecology and carrying capacity analysis. http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/23 At Emory, I studied under a Frederick Law Olmsted scholar and delved into the origins of McHarg’s concepts.  My research soon centered on designing human scale, walkable communities, and John Portman, I learned, was not nearly so impressive at the ground level. 

In the mid-1980s downtown Atlanta was a dead zone, so innervating even the homeless avoided it.  Portman’s Westin Hotel set the standard.  A glut of blank walls greeted the guest, it was an impenetrable fortress that gave the impression you checked in but never out. Inside, a seven hundred foot high atrium offered an expanse of light and nature, but one felt insignificant.  Vertigo, agoraphobia, and panic attacks were not uncommon (see James Kunstler, The City in Mind). The building’s insouciance to humanity had a perverse artistic quality, as it was the setting for a memorable death scene in Sharkey’s Machine.  In this 1981 Burt Reynolds film, a villain is thrown out of an upper level window, a stark insignificant life falling to death in a soulless environment.

Villan Exiting Westin in Sharkey's Machine

Hollywood lives to recycle movies.  If Sharkey’s Machine is shot in Portland, the Cosmopolitan offers a prime location.  The top choice, however, would be the Portland Plaza, the hermetically sealed “Norelco Building” towering over Keller Fountain.  It is the definitive statement of the machine lording over nature.

Norelco Building

With its thin sliver of balconies, the Cosmopolitan has a bare human presence.  Mostly it is an amalgam of glass that will seal off Tanner Springs and cast its reflection on an oasis of restored nature.  The park will be more isolated, and in ecological systems isolated wetlands wither and die.  Tanner Springs will not suffer death but diminishment, dominated by a building that, like the Portland Plaza, is destined to be known by the mechanical device it replicates.

Tanner Springs before Cosmopolitan

Tanner Springs Today