The Last Word
THE LAST WORD A tale of two cities Jonathan Schlefer Iohn Portman, Atlanta architect and developer, believes the architect should be "total master of the physical environment." That's what he...
...We shudder at "streetwalkers...
...Continual repetition of any one designer's style inevitably palls...
...The Omni International is worse...
...We "keep kids off the streets...
...New towns and urban renewal programs were variations on this theme, and such private mini-cities as Atlanta's Peachtree Center and nearby Omni International represent its most recent phase...
...Sometimes the walls are subtle...
...That's what he told the Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects a few years ago, and that's what he practices at Peachtree Center, a complex that covers dozens of acres and forms downtown Atlanta's spine...
...er looms over the skylights above, a gigantic circle of columns plunges into the lake below, voices echo and lights reflect—is an amazing Star Wars of a place...
...Atlantans have learned their lesson...
...What a mess...
...But by concentrating development inside walls, megastructures raise this fear to a dimension larger than life...
...The buildings of Portman's Peachtree Center are relatively open to Peachtree Street, which runs through their midst, but public bus stops just happen not to be located on the block of Portman's gem, the Peachtree Plaza hotel...
...Other street renovations are going forward in the formerly desolate northern section between the two big megastructures...
...Inside the sole pedestrian entrance to the walled fortress, discreet signs warn, "Persons under eighteen years old must be accompanied by an adult...
...The megastructures' walls cause harm not only by attempting to keep "undesirables" out, but by tending to keep convention-goers inside and off the city streets...
...An article in Progressive Architecture magazine maintains that MXDs provide "the diversity and liveliness synonymous with urban life," but really, MXDs are all the same damned thing...
...The streets make the city...
...Atlanta bus riders tend to be black and poor...
...As I made my way through Peachtree Center, and each grand space attempted to excite the emotions, and clear-glassed bulbs bordered everything imaginable, and the Muzak played its non-music, I only grew weary...
...The upshot is that the Gulch will stay essentially as it is, except that, for the first time since the 1920s, the city is putting money in for street improvements, and has given the area the prettied-up name "Heart of Atlanta...
...In the Shopping Gallery, you could not buy anything as useful as axle grease or as handsome as an antique rocker...
...That should stop a few black teen-agers...
...We worry about "street crime...
...But Richard Rothman, an Atlanta architect, found that the Gulch had interesting elements that the megastructures lacked...
...So much for the value of megastructures in rejuvenating commerce...
...The developers who devise these complexes of offices, hotels, and shopping malls call them "mixed-use developments" or "MXDs," but Atlan-tans call them "megastruc-tures...
...The solution Atlanta Magazine suggested was, of course, megastructures...
...Americans have a phobia about streets anyway...
...When Peachtree Center's great rival megastructure in Atlanta, the Omni International, opened, The New York Times reported, "The suburban couple can ice skate, dine, go to a movie, meditate, get chased by a witch, shop, get their hair done, and drink on a lily pad without once going out of doors where undesirables might-be...
...At one of Peachtree Center's outlying walls, I saw Conventioneers staring nervously across a wasteland of parking lots toward a smaller MXD called Atlanta Center...
...The Urban Land Institute counts about 100 MXDs in North America...
...But there is a limit to how much John Port-man one town can stand...
...This sameness results from the straitjacket planning MXD managements prize...
...Peachtree Center demonstrates some extraordinary architecture...
...It presented drawings of towering buildings, "people movers," and multi-level malls...
...Atlanta Magazine, a Chamber of Commerce publication, described it as an "old, deteriorated, forbidding, crime-ridden habitat for the city's public drunks, criminals, parked automobiles, and poor citizens who are served by cheap bars, 'flop houses,' blood banks, hiring halls, small loan offices, missions, and parking lots...
...Portman, who built Peachtree, is total master of a physical environment that includes hotels with vast atriums and mirror-clad towers, concrete office high-rise buildings, multi-tiered plazas, galleried shopping malls, space-age pedestrian passages running through midair, and parking garages fed by interstate highway exits...
...They did not hazard the trek...
...In an attempt to keep "undesirables" out of their safe and ordered world, MXD managements erect walls, both physical and legal...
...Such planning is not only tedious but ominous in larger social and political ways...
...Except at the actual entrance, a planter runs between the hotel and the sidewalk, and the planter is bordered by an elegant spiked fence—an apt way to discourage idle sitting by "undesirables...
...Upper floors were boarded up, and the stores appeared messy, but shoppers walked the streets, music blared from hi-fi vendors, religious shops sold incense, and in jewelry stores you saw the men wearing green eyeshades in the back...
...MXD managements want to establish beachheads of a renovated society within the chaos of the older city...
...The Gulch contained all the city's late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century buildings: brick-and-glass commercial fronts, cast-iron facades and lattice-work balconies, the arcaded freight depot by the tracks...
...The idea of creating such a mini-city as a tidy answer to the chaos of aging urban centers goes back to the early years of this century...
...What's the difference between "Terrace Room Restaurant: Cocktails and Dining," announced in bland modern lettering, and "Sun Dial: Cocktails and Fine Dining," announced in identical lettering...
...The seven-story lobby of the Peachtree Plaza hotel—where the mirrored towJonathan Schlefer is a contributing writer for The Real Paper in Boston...
...you could buy only the sort of stuff sold by high-turnover chain stores...
...Rothman also discovered that the Gulch, which served some 100,000 mostly black Atlantans, was actually doing more business than the megastructures, and paying the city more in sales taxes...
...In the early 1970s, Atlanta's business leaders couldn't figure out what to do with the shopping district called the Gulch, just south of the megastructures, which was patronized mostly by blacks...
Vol. 45 • June 1991 • No. 7
