Between the late 1960s and early 1980s, few architects or developers could rival John Portman’s impact on America’s downtowns. And few built in such intensely polarizing ways.
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Perhaps the best example of a Portman do-over is one of Whyte’s subjects—Detroit’s Renaissance Center. In the mid-1990s, General Motors agreed to relocate its headquarters into the vast downtown complex, which opened in 1977 but struggled to live up to its promise. So the company asked Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) to come up with a plan.
“We had to help GM understand how they would take seven of their product lines, merge them into one facility, and integrate the facility into Detroit,” says Bill Baker, engineer at SOM. “It had its back turned to the city and riverfront when it was conceived, so the goal was to change all of that and embrace those elements.”