“Architecture is not about things, it is about people and life,” John Portman said to the dean of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, Mohsen Mostafavi, in a wide-ranging interview that starts off the provocative book Portman’s America & Other Speculations, published last year by Lars Muller. Portman’s words are not notable in themselves—they are the kind of clichéd line almost every architect has uttered at one time or another. What makes them striking is how passionately Portman believed them, and how much he managed to do in his long career to turn this line from a banal observation into a kind of architectural talisman, a defining byword for what he would build.
Portman, who died on December 29 in Atlanta at the age of 93, was like no other figure in American architecture. For most of his career he was an outsider to the academic architecture establishment, which came to embrace him only toward the end of his life when, like Morris Lapidus, his flamboyant work could be analyzed as a cultural marker rather than feared as a disrupter. But he was every bit as much an outsider to the corporate architecture establishment, to the vast architecture and engineering firms that churn out mediocre office towers, hotels, airports, and shopping malls and make the average person believe that modern architecture has neither heart nor soul. Portman broke the model of the corporate developer hiring the corporate architect by being both of those things himself. As a developer, he bought himself the freedom to build what he wanted, which was as far from the architecture of the freeway as it was from the architecture of the salon.
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