John Portman is one of those great figures in architecture
whom other architects do not quite know what to make of. Clearly a brilliant designer
who invented novel forms of space, much like Jon Jerde his incredible
commercial success, and the unapologetically vast scale of his projects, has
rendered him somewhat suspect in a profession that is beholden to the mystique
of the uncompromising artiste, of the creator who somehow manages to not sell
out.
This is of course a myth as silly and dangerous as that of
that of the deified symbol of Libertarian Individualism, Howard Roark. True
architecture, the stuff that changes the way we go about our daily lives, the
stuff that bends societies in new directions, is always hand in fist with
capital of the largest scale and most inscrutable might.
No one has managed to straddle the divide between the raw
might of money and finance, and the artistic perfectionism of the Roark-ian
visionary better than Portman. Both architect and (spectacularly successful) developer,
he refashioned an entire city -Atlanta- in his image, as well as creating
megacomplexes in others, from Detroit to Shanghai and San Francisco, finally
realising the Modernist megastructural dream at scales unimaginable up to that
point.
Not only did these projects generate vast wealth for himself
and other investors, they also consistently (and profitably) pushed the
boundaries of how dramatic, theatrical, and awe-inspiring otherwise banal
programs could become when joined together and supersized. John Portman never
answered to a client, John Portman answered to John Portman, and in an age
where so many are lamenting the death of the role of the architect, of the
profession’s being side-lined and of its general ineffectuality, Portman’s fusion
of the roles of client and architect seem to show a uniquely appropriate way
out of that impotent impasse.
“Portman’s America & Other Speculations” is a timely and
welcome publication for such an iconic figure who on the one hand designed what
Frederic Jameson has cited as the most emblematically Postmodern of building
interiors -his Westin Bonaventure Hotel- and whom on the other can be seen as
the apotheosis of corporate American Modernism. The book is deliciously
illustrated with a series of new photos by Iwan Baan, which manage to perfectly
capture the inventive bravura, and lost-era feel of Portman’s works, as well as
the kind of future-past urban environments that they generated.
A fascinating fly-on-the-wall conversation with Portman reveals
his upbeat, relentlessly positive and charming personality, as well as some of
the stories behind his singular path, from when he’d just completed two or
three houses and he decided he’d “never making a living on this,” to his
relationship with financiers in which he states, “I don’t get to know bankers,
they get to know me.” His projects are shown in a rather concise and matter-of-fact
manner, and while It would have been wonderful for the architectural drawings
to be given more space, and for further anecdotal and interpretative
information or material to be provided on each, they present the coherence of
his output well.
The two essays, and series of Portman-inspired projects by
Preston Scott Cohen’s students, are positive first steps towards
architecturally and critically re-engaging with Portman’s body of work. They
perhaps however work better as illustrations of quite how much fertile ground
there is for further critical assessments and formal analyses of his oeuvre and
methodologies, than they do as robust investigations in their own right.
As Mohsen Mostafavi points out in his introduction to the
book, even Rem Koolhaas could only bring himself to partially appreciate the
city of Atlanta and Portman’s work when visiting in the 90s, stating that it
was “a convulsive architecture that will eventually acquire beauty.” As this
book now makes clear, and hopefully this will be the first of several assessing
his profuse legacy, we now have enough distance from their inception to look
upon these projects and see in them the terrible beauty -a uniquely American
beauty- that they embody.
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