John Portman’s atria are among his most celebrated and contested forms, captivating the popular imagination while also setting the tone for principles of architectural hospitality imitated worldwide. Still, both Portman’s contributions and subsequent replication inspired by his work remains difficult to assess, with no coherent theory to differentiate the subtlety and value of the originals, or even to distinguish between a copy and the real thing.

This project opens up the subject by addressing the hospitality corpus from its introduction in the emblematic and speculative 1967 Hyatt Regency in Atlanta, Georgia, Portman’s first atrium hotel. The commercial language of hollow forms initiated in the hotels is considered here as a unique iteration of the organizing principles Portman claims can be found in his 1964 personal domestic work, Entelechy I. This productive myth is one that can be engaged today in a vital way to research and remix Portman’s architectural language by looking and looking again at Entelechy I to constructively experiment with its resourcefulness as an innovation engine. This starting point is intriguing to map Portman’s claims, but more importantly to engage his work in another way and likewise inform additional applications. In all, the study here focuses on the atrium hotel language and its implicit relation to the house to begin structuring this effort. The outcomes include: a) a formal analysis of the atrium hotel; b) a parametric shape grammar for the atrium hotel; and c) a transformation grammar that explores the logic of atrium hotel composition in a variety of contexts, here simulated by a series of varied initial shapes.