Marriott Marquis Hotel
THE ARCHITECT and developer John Portman is best known for building destination points for cities that no longer had urban centers, such as Atlanta’s Peachtree Center (1976) and Detroit’s Renaissance Center (1977). His 54-story, Hshaped concrete slab is t
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h e a r c h i t e c t and developer John Portman is best known for building destination points for cities that no longer had urban centers, such as Atlanta’s Peachtree Center (1976) and Detroit’s Renaissance Center (1977). His 54-story, Hshaped concrete slab is the closest thing New York has to the forbidding but interesting projects of the Italian futurist architects Antonio Sant’Elia and Mario Chiattone, with their multistoried blind walls. The building is situated in the bow tie of Times Square and epitomizes an era of urban planning. Although it is thoroughly un-New York in character, the building is fascinatingly effective taken on its own terms. Planned in the mid-1970s, when Times Square’s reputation was as its lowest, the whole building seems to turn its back defensively on the street. Like Ifill, Johnson & Hanchard’s awesomely hostile Harlem State Office Building (1973), the Marquis shuns the street. “We knew we had to overcome the negative image of Times Square,” Portman said, so he “created a design that looks to security, though not in a negative way.” How negative is a matter of opinion; the
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Marriott’s soulless blank concrete wall is even less giving toward the street than its neighbor, One Astor Plaza. Between them, they create a concrete wind tunnel rather than a city block. From street level, the deeply recessed windows behind concrete sills seem to close up like a giant Venetian blind, an appropriate image for an overscale hotel of 1,900 rooms. Like the Mongols, who despised cities so much they tore them down stone by stone, the architects of the Times Square revival “created a desert and called it peace,” in the words of historian Harold Lamb. The detailing is ghastly—minimally textured concrete, rough edges, and bare bulbs stuck in gutters in keeping with the “showbiz” environment. But the antiurbanism here is insidiously brilliant—the entrance is not from the Broadway front, but from a pedestrianunfriendly interior private road, so that it makes more sense to enter by car than on foot. The lobby was designed to filter out the unsavory mix of street life from Times Square: the 400foot-high atrium, one of the tallest indoor spaces in the world, does not even begin until the eighth floor; and a glass-encased ground floor, dominated by a security desk, connects with the atrium via a series of escalators. The structure, though brutal, is directly expressed: a 112foot steel truss joins two vertical, 36-foot-deep concrete-clad steel slabs. “When you are in them, Portman’s worlds are completely convincing,” Vincent Scully noted, but this building has the same kind of
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JOHN PORTMAN ,
1985
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hermetic verisimilitude of the tritest science fiction sets, like Logan’s Run. The building required so many zoning variations and easements in the course of its 12-year development that its style was already out of date by the time it was built. The atrium looks as if it was designed on laughing gas but provides the same pleasures as an amusement park: test-tube-shaped exposed glass elevators
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