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Atlanta, Georgia
Can't get there from here
Many previous AIA Conventions have featured five star tours with hard to get tickets. Maybe it was a John Lautner house or the Exeter Library or a private apartment in Marina City, something that was a real draw and reason enough alone to decide to go in the first place. Atlanta did not have anything like that. Sure, there were lots of things that were interesting and I certainly found value in all of the tours, but there wasn’t anything spectacular to see in comparison to these other cities (sorry, Atlanta). But if there was anything close to a must see tour, it was this one: ET121: A Portman Journey Through Space.
John Portman is an Atlanta architect who really doesn’t get the level of appreciation that you would expect, especially when you think about how much he built. His work is all over his home city, and this tour (led by people from his office) concentrated on downtown, on Peachtree Center and the hotels, which may very well be his best work anyway.
The office buildings and the skybridges are certainly nice, but the tour wasn’t called “A Portman Journey Through Space” because of a skybridge. Portman designed spectacular, back to back city hotels with wonderful open soaring atriums. If this seems familiar, that’s because you’re thinking of another Portman atrium hotel, or you’re thinking of a hotel designed by another architect who ripped him off.
An interesting story about the original design. On the left in the first picture is a something that looks a little like a great big open wire birdcage. In reality, that’s exactly what it is. Portman’s design was to have tropical birds flying all around the lobby but, as you might have already figured out, tropical birds crapping through a great big open wire birdcage in the middle of your lobby turns out to not be the greatest thing after all.
The Hyatt is spectacular, but the high point of Portman hotel atrium design is the Marriott Marquis Hotel next door. The space is spectacular and, even though it is now thirty years old, it is still futuristic enough to be used as a location for science fiction films.
I did not stay at the Hyatt or the Marriott Marquis but instead ended up at the Hilton next door (thanks, Hotwire). My hotel was served by an AIA shuttle bus, but each day I chose instead to take the one mile walk there. From the Hilton, I crossed through the Marquis and the Hyatt, passing through these atriums each time), then over Peachtree one block, then down the hill past the Waffle House, across Centennial Park and then over to the Convention Center. I regretted not paying the extra money and just booking the Marriott Marquis in the first place, but at least every day I was there, I still managed to walk through the greatest spaces in Georgia.
One of the tours that I added late as a fill in to my schedule was ET 105, a tour of Atlanta’s Fox Theatre. I have been to a few of these types of restored theatres before (including the Fox in St Louis), but the buildings and the spaces are always interesting enough to warrant seeing. One thing where the Fox stood out though was how they showed us seats in the upper sections that were definitely separated with their own entrance and were the worst seats available. The theatre opened in 1929 in the south, and those bad seats with their won entrance were part of the original, segregationist design, something which (thankfully) is almost impossible to imagine today.
ET 124 was a tour of the SCADpad. In this case, SCAD stands for Savannah College of Art and Design and not Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection, in case you were confused.
Even though real SCAD is in Savannah, their Atlanta outpost featured an unusual installation where students designed and lived in small, 135 square foot living pods and shared spaces on a closed floor of a parking garage. This (as you may have already guessed) is illegal in most cities, however we were told that Atlanta has a special exception where pretty much anything is legal for a year. This seems, well, not right. But if it is, that’s a good thing to remember for your next crazy ass illegal idea, or if you want to live in a parking garage for a year.
These are pictures inside and outside the SCADpads, where living is easy if you like living in parking garages.
At various conferences that I attend (I attend just enough of them that I can use the description “various” to sound more important than I am), the future and self driving electric cars often comes up. In it, there are two scenarios, a utopian one and a dystopian one. In the utopian one, no one owns a car, everything is electric, self driving and shared,, and all of that land once given up to parking garages and parking lots and gas stations and ten lane boulevards is reclaimed into liveable parkland or dense urban housing. This is the direction that SCADpad is going, looking at what to do with all of those empty garages in the utopian future. The dystopian view imagines that sprawl becomes out of control. With faster (100+ MPH) self driving communicating cars, you could easily knock down some trees and build your dream house on a lake in the woods and then still quickly and safely get back to the city every day for your dream job, without any stress or traffic jams. And while the moral arc of the universe may (eventually) bend towards justice, I fear that in the future when we are given a choice, dystopia is always far more likely than utopia.
Sandwiched between the Georgia Aquarium (which has a whale shark yet is highly noneducational) and the World of Coca-Cola (which has international sodas and a screening room of terrific old commercials) is the National Center for Civil and Human Rights. Designed by Philip Freelon, it looks kind of like a football- in fact, it looks overall more like a football than the nearby College Football Hall of Fame. Inside are all of the exhibits that you might expect at a National Center for Civil and Human Rights, although downstairs was something unexpected. The center had personal papers from Martin Luther King, Jr on display, and by personal, they mean personal. Things like airline tickets and christmas card lists were there, something which really helps make real a now mythical historical figure and is far more interesting than it might otherwise sound.
If you were to drive out into the middle of nowhere (far, far closer to the South Carolina border than anything in the Atlanta Metro area), you might very well run into the Georgia Guidestones. For 35 years they have stood in the middle of nowhere shrouded in mystery. The mysterious part is not what they are but rather why. The what is easy- they are giant stone tablets with weird ass instructions in eight different languages for a future civilization to follow. It’s the why that gets harder to explain. Why would anyone build these unless they expect an imminent all out nuclear holocaust that destroys everything except stone tablets, and leaves survivors who are looking to rebuild society from scratch but can still read languages. And another why is why the hell would you go and see this in the middle of nowhere. I had my own reasons (nothing to do with the New World Order), but questioned the other people parked and visiting the stones, wondering whether they were there to see a roadside curiosity or whether they were there to witness the(ir) truth.
So here, in an empty field in the middle of nowhere, we’re ending our time at the 2015 AIA Convention in Atlanta. We’ll see you next year when the convention is held in Philadelphia, where I imagine there will be a lot of tours about Ben Franklin or something.
But wait, there’s more
I go to these AIA Conventions almost every year, meaning that there’s lots of slideshows and pictures and stories from all sorts of different cities, showing off their best architecture and design for all to see.
