If you’re craning your neck as severely when you step inside a building as you did outside it, you might be in an atrium hotel, an intensely American structure for sleep, conferences, cocktails, and much more. These are facilities built around a massive central chamber stretching a dozen or several dozen stories into the sky; at the lobby level, you’ll find bars, restaurants, gardens, live birds, and maybe even a boat or two.
We don’t build them much anymore, but Americans invented, perfected and exported this unique building style to the world (where it continues to prosper). Birthed in brash excess, atrium hotels were first seen as too gaudy by the modernist architectural establishment and as too profligate by penny-pinching chain hoteliers. To varying observers, they suggest everything from Disney to dystopia. But in their heyday, these buildings promised — and delivered — a spectacle like no other.
Real estate developer Trammell Crow, the man with the most Dallas-sounding name you’ve ever heard, provided early inspiration for the form with his Dallas Trade Mart atrium, built in 1958. But it was Atlanta architect-developer John Portman, his occasional partner, who adapted and built the form into a colossus. Portman’s Hyatt Recency Atlanta opened in 1967, and was an immediate sensation. Atriums became a signature of the Hyatt Regency brand, and Portman went on to work for a variety of other chains, including Marriott and Westin. Atriums later became a standard feature of most Embassy Suites.
Portman wasn’t taking half measures with his hotels. Consider their majestic heights: his first, the Hyatt Regency Atlanta: 22 stories; Marriott Marquis in New York City: 37 stories; Marriott Marquis Atlanta: 50 stories. Only Dubai’s Burj Al Arab, which opened in 1999, eventually topped Portman’s tallest atrium.
The benefit wasn’t just grand views from the lobby, but from every floor; each hallway was suddenly a balcony. Inside that central volume of space, hotels stuffed a range of embellishments. “One would move through a set of functions and experiences as one might a city: from home, to garden, to urban plaza, cafe, and bar,” wrote University of Technology, Sydney architectural historian Charles Rice in his book Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman, and Downtown America.
The trouble was, some critics saw, that these atrium hotels tended to be creating, as Rice’s title indicates, a new urbanism that was purely inside. Amenities that once faced streets were pulled indoors and replaced with blank walls and hard-to-find entrances. That formula — so irresistible during an era of urban crisis and decay in the 1970s and ’80s — lost some appeal when cities staged a comeback and the streets again beckoned with their own attractions.
So how, exactly, did the great atrium hotel boom happen?
Bringing the city indoors
The atrium is an ancient architectural feature. It’s fairly rare in skyscrapers, however, as it inevitably involves a waste of leasable space. There are a few direct hospitality antecedents: The Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, built in 1892, boats a seven-story atrium topped with stained glass, and the West Baden Springs Hotel in French Lick, Indiana, which opened in 1902, features a 200-foot diameter atrium.
Portman’s first atrium wasn’t in a hotel at all, but in the now-demolished Antoine Graves public housing tower in Atlanta, built in 1965. The idea was simple, says Mickey Steinberg, a structural engineer on many of Portman’s early projects. The architect was just trying to provide some sociable space and ventilation to tenants. (The building was not air conditioned.) “If I had a hole down the center of the building,” Steinberg recalls Portman saying, “people could come out and talk to each other and I might be able to get some air through the building.”
That notion recurred to Portman two years later for the Hyatt Regency. “It wasn’t any grand philosophy about a style of architecture,” Steinberg says. “He was designing for people to want to be there.”
He was also designing for people who might not have wanted to be in Atlanta, whose central business district was in decline. Steinberg recalled Portman’s intention: “I’m going to create a space for them to want to be in, because downtown Atlanta doesn’t have it anymore.”
The Portman-style skyscraper atrium revived a 19th century tradition: the grand hotel lobby, with its adjoining restaurants, ballrooms and other such attractions. In the motel age, these spaces had often been pared back to a mere desk for paperwork. (You’d even usually go elsewhere for that one ineradicable amenity of the ice machine.) Portman bet that guests would embrace spectacle and activity again.
His method was different, to be sure. Portman explained in an interview in Portman’s America and Other Speculations:
I wanted to open it up. I said, “well, hell, let’s pull the elevators out of the wall.” I pull the elevators out of the wall. One thing leads to another. It’s going to be like a moveable sculpture. A space within a space.
The atrium concept didn’t initially enthrall the moneymen, Steinberg says.
“Bill Marriott had one look and he said, ‘Don’t bother with it. Motels are the thing.’” Conrad Hilton famously called it a “concrete monster.” A then-unknown savior turned up in the form of Don Pritzker, whose nascent Hyatt chain then had only three locations.
That bet paid off once the Hyatt Regency Atlanta opened: Visits to the hotel in the first four months of operation exceeded their expectation of the first five years. Guests lined up just to go up and down in the glass elevators. And Hyatt ran with the formula, building additional atrium-equipped Regency locations into the 1970s and ’80s.
Sheer space was a vast lure, opening up the typical dark double-loaded urban hotel corridor, Steinberg says. “It was different than having a little bitty lobby where you enter and then you take an elevator to where you’re shelved.”
As Portman built bigger, more elaborate atrium hotels, he began to play with the form. “He wanted the atriums to be more interesting,” Steinberg says, “so we broke them into smaller spaces.” Rectilinear geometries shifted to circular ones. Piranesian and Escherian repetition gave way to constructivist circles and skeletal forms.
To take the edge off these harsh edges and angles, Portman turned to another ancient idea: the hanging garden. “It was all concrete, so we put ivy in planters; it was hanging down everywhere and softened the building up,” Steinberg says.
All that flora probably wasn’t easy to maintain in Babylon, and it proved to be even more work in Detroit and Atlanta.
A great green headache
For 34 years, Brooks O’Brien has been a horticulturalist at the Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville. The building, built in 1977 as the Opryland Hotel and repeatedly expanded, includes an atrium filled with more than 10,000 plants. Inside, the temperature is a reliable 72 degrees. The fixed constraints, he says, are the health and comfort of the guests; plants must adapt to this. One simple maxim explains his work. “Planting an item inside is simply not the same as planting it outside,” he says.
In Portman’s early atrium hotels, extensive tube systems were devised to keep plants watered. But that was only the start of the challenge. Large-scale interior gardening in that era didn’t happen much outside of botanical gardens (where it was easier to set temperatures or humidity levels that would be disagreeable to humans for hours). Architects initially hoped that, cloistered from the vagaries of outdoor weather, plants might prosper indoors.
That was not the case. Early experiments in indoor landscaping involved considerable failures as plants died in artificial environments. The main misstep was trying to plant items from temperate climates inside. The oversight was that these species rely on colder dormant periods, and died. So the focus shifted south, but could not become fully tropical — no one wants a hotel atrium at 90 percent humidity. Semitropical plants from central America and Asia became the indoor standard.
But some items grow too fast, says O’Brien. “There are some trees that I will prune 10 to 12 feet every year because they’re trying to get to that light.” Some trees can’t be pruned and have to be removed when they reach the roof. Others defoliate repeatedly throughout the year. An Afrocarpus is a troublesome guest. “We would never ever plant that tree again. It drops a thousand leaves a day. The gardener spends an hour every day cleaning those leaves.”
There are other challenges. Soil decomposes inside and must be replaced. Conventional insecticides can’t be used because they’d be a threat to guest health (insecticidal soap is the alternative). In the absence of rainfall, you have to dust plants like you might a desk. Variations in required light can be inscrutable, especially in tall atria. “You can have a 30 story building if it depends on what way you’re facing. You can have 2 or 3 plants within 10 feet of each other that are getting different light.”
O’Brien has acquired a good sense of what some plants need, but with others it’s still a mystery, “Guests will leave a comment,” he says. “Plants can’t tell us.”
From dazzlement to de rigueur
As more Hyatt Regencies opened — in Houston, New Orleans, Dallas, Milwaukee, Chicago and so on — imitators began cropping up everywhere. The Disney World Contemporary Resort might have been the only one with a monorail through its center, but it was arguably less prodigal than a number of peers.
Atria proved to be grand settings for art; animator Mary Blair’s wonderful Grand Canyon mural aimed to leaven the concrete canyon effect at the Disney hotel. Richard Haas has a splendid mural inside Graham Gund’s Cambridge Hyatt. The Hyatt Regency Grand Cypress in Orlando featured parrots. The JW Marriott Desert Springs in Palm Springs has a pond with boats. Harry Weese’s Crown Center Hotel in Kansas City was built over a 70-foot limestone bluff which was left exposed as the building’s atrium centerpiece. Revolving restaurants, as in Atlanta and New York City, were a frequent accentuation.
In atrium hotels, riotous things once unimaginable were suddenly commonplace. In the New Yorker, Calvin Trillin wrote that “an experienced Travelling Person would never betray astonishment at an invitation to have a drink — or to ‘enjoy a convivial cocktail,’ as a hotel brochure is more likely to put it — on a ‘cocktail island’ that extends into the half-acre lake in the lobby.”
Portman was, of course, a Tom Wolfe hero, and a likely model for the fictional Atlanta developer Charlie Croker in his novel A Man In Full. In From Bauhaus to Our House, he writes:
His enormous Babylonian ziggurat hotels, with their thirty-story atriums and hanging gardens and crystal elevators, have succeeded, more than any other sort of architecture, in establishing the look of Downtown, of Urban Glamour in the 1970s and 1980s.
Donald Trump demanded an atrium when he reskinned the Commodore Hotel in New York City and turned it into the mirror-clad Grand Hyatt Hotel in 1980, his first big real estate deal. That turned out to be structurally impossible, however, since Trump left the building’s 1919 bones untouched in the renovation.
The “interior urbanism” at work in downtown hotels proved to be easily transplanted to suburban locations, and atria sprouted next to airports and at freeway interchanges. Alongside the architecturally distinguished examples, cheaper knockoffs began to rise. They’re everywhere, but often not very well known (some surprisingly fun locations endure in unlikely places — try the Saskatoon Inn). How many exactly? That’s hard to say.
“One of the great difficulties with this era is that we know there are so many examples it’s just really difficult to put your finger on any specific one,” says Charles Rice. “It’s a very difficult era to research because you can’t necessarily just look up atrium buildings; it's not a typology in the way that a hotel is or an office building is.”
The growth of the form was unusual in architectural terms, driven by a few large operators whose interest was in one very general feature. Rice explained the spread of the atrium form as architectural in only the vaguest of senses; hotel operators “got in the game because they hoped that they would be making a lot of money,” he says, “because the spaces would be really interesting and attract people. It’s not how a style matures or how a spatial condition becomes more interesting. It just kind of grew rapidly.”
The era that the atrium hotels emerged from is also important. In the 1970s, “you have business travel emerging as a thing,” Rice says. The point of this was to offer a standard experience. “A Sheraton or a Hyatt or whatever you’re always there to be going to the same kind of place wherever you are. And they built a brand off the back of similarity.”
The atrium became a part of this corporate model for a time: briefly a novelty, then ubiquitous — first in North America, and then around the world.
What the future (still) looks like
In one of the more famous theoretical analyses of a building, literary critic Frederic Jameson describes the corporate nature of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles. Portman’s building “aspires to be a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city,” he writes in his 1984 essay-then-book Postmodernism, the gold standard for people who like to insert “neoliberalism” in their references to everything.
Jameson addresses the isolation from the street that the hotel complex (which he calls Bonaventura) achieves:
[I]deally the mini-city of Portman’s Bonaventura ought not to have entrances at all, since the entryway is always the seam that links the building to the rest of the city that surrounds it: for it does not wish to be a part of the city, but rather its equivalent and its replacement or substitute.
He read something sinister in its glass elevators:
Here the narrative stroll has been underscored, symbolized, reified and replaced by a transportation machine which becomes the allegorical signifier of that older promenade we are no longer allowed to conduct on our own.
And he addressed the confusion of navigating the hotel:
So I come finally to my principal point here, that this latest mutation in space — postmodern hyperspace — has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world.
This, he concludes, mirrors “the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentred communication network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects.”
And yet every postmodern hyperspace starts to get old the moment you’ve actually built it. Architectural trends moved on to other things, and the frightening vision of 1984 that atrium hotels once seemed to represent became a sort of goofy relic of the actual 1980s. If you’ve been in a few atrium hotels recently, some of them are actively frowsy, if their great merits still shine through. Others continue to glitter. But none, clearly, represent the hot new thing. “You’d rather stay at the Standard or the Ace Hotel,” Rice says, citing a pair of boutique Los Angeles hotels. “Now downtown L.A. is a very different proposition from what it was in the ’70s.”
Portman’s approach changed with the times, too. In his later career, he began to design buildings that interacted more effectively with the streetscape. Many of his earlier hotels have been modified to feature clearer entrances.
Among the major hotel brands, the atrium fad sputtered out in North America: The Roxy in New York City, built as the Tribeca Grand in 2000, is one rare retro-styled new-ish atrium hotel. The trend in elaborate interior plantings, which had became common in offices and malls, also declined, as it tended to be expensive. Jameson pointed out that many retailers located inside atrium hotels were hard to find; they still are, and many have closed.
As new construction, you are now likelier to see atrium hotels in the Middle East or Asia. Still, the company that pioneered the form remains enthusiastic about its virtues. “This concept changed the idea of what a hotel experience could be by converting lobbies from transactional spaces that guests passed through on their way to check in or check out,” Sarah Klymson, vice-president of product and brand development at Hyatt, wrote in a statement. “The architectural form of atrium hotels acts as a stage that can evolve, allowing the lobby to be just as relevant now as it was in 1967.”
In the popular imagination, the grip of these hotels remains strong: They are iconic film sets. We recall Mel Brooks in the San Francisco Hyatt in High Anxiety; that hotel also provided the doomed glass elevators of The Towering Inferno. The Bonaventure Hotel is particularly popular. In film, its futurism is frozen forever, via roles in Interstellar and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. As this video points out, Clint Eastwood and Johnny Depp both pause to look up to gawk at its lobby, just as we do.
These spaces are often a bit confusing, sometimes alienating, but often enthralling and majestic. They cannot help but dazzle. An atrium is, above all, an extravagance — most buildings cannot so indulgently squander their floor space. Though they might not be the wave of the future, they deserve to remain a valued part of the past.
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