Building with Air

A hotel's great glory used to be its opulent indoor patio, a spacious central courtyard roofed over with glass and studded with palm trees and fountains that was the very symbol of la belle epoque. In the U.S., none rivaled the "Grand Central Court" of San Francisco's Palace Hotel, tiled in marble, lit by gas and roofed with crystal. But as modern cost-efficiency techniques have moved into hotelkeeping, much of the drama and elegance has moved out. Since space is the greatest architectural luxury of all, most new hotel lobbies are mean and cramped--areas designed primarily to handle arriving and departing guests efficiently, but certainly not spaces to linger in.

Now there is a notable exception: Atlanta's new, $18 million, 800-room Regency Hyatt House, the city's first high-rise hotel in 40 years and the biggest in the South outside Miami. "Our main goal," says the hotel designer, Atlanta Architect John C. Portman, "was to get a feeling of complete openness--the complete antithesis of the typical hotel today."

Hanging Gardens. To do it, he simply designed the hotel around a great skylit courtyard that rises through the building's full 21-story height and is big enough, according to the hotel's ads, to contain the Statue of Liberty. Wrapped around the towering shaft of air on four sides is the hotel proper, layer after layer of rooms opening onto continuous interior balconies that take the place of traditional corridors.

Portman, 42, is an enterprising developer as well as an architect, who has played leading roles wearing both hats in creating San Francisco's projected Embarcadero Center (TIME, Feb. 24) and Atlanta's own downtown Peachtree Center, of which the hotel is a part. With an eye to both urban development and showmanship, he has gone all out toward making Regency Hyatt House a civic showpiece.

There is so much live greenery inside the hotel's courtyard that it looks like the Hanging Gardens of Babylon --and it takes two gardeners a full week to water it all. Five bubble-shaped, glass-enclosed elevators streak up and down a huge column at one side of the courtyard; they are programmed, says Portman, to create "kinetic architecture." Water from a 70-ft. fountain cascades down along strips of clear plastic.

Eighth Wonder. A three-story aviary will be filled with macaws, two types of parrots and cock-of-the-rock birds; there is an indoor sidewalk cafe open 24 hours a day on the floor of the lobby, a saucer-shaped cocktail lounge perched on a column one floor above --and 20 lobby hostesses in gold uniforms to pass out room keys and arrange for shopping tours, beauty appointments and baby sitters. For good measure, the hotel is topped by a restaurant that revolves 360DEG each hour, on a clear day gives diners a view of the Blue Ridge Mountains 90 miles away.

Portman's bold design has already paid off. Though the hotel has been accepting guests for only a month and will not open officially for another two weeks, it already has well over $30 million in advance bookings. Visitors' reactions to the courtyard range from "a fabulosity" (an Atlanta attorney) to "the eighth wonder of the world" (a Chicago businessman). Indeed, so many bowled-over guests blurt out "Jeez!"-or stronger--when they first gaze up into 21 stories of space that hotel employees have already dubbed the spot in the lobby where the full height is first glimpsed with a name of its own: Profanity Corner.

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