ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre, Jean Baudrillard, and Fredric Jameson to discern broader socioeconomic forces impacting materiality in John Portman's late Brutalist architectural interiors. It also considers the temporal nature of building interiors in relation to forces of consumption and trend. In the nineteenth century, the tectonic qualities and material conditions of commercial arcades blurred city streets into building interiors. The Hyatt Regency Atlanta forms part of the fourteen-block Peachtree Center master plan, which restructured the central core of Atlanta into an interiorized downtown environment. The efforts to make RenCen’s voluminous spaces economically viable have resulted in highly compromised interior architectural qualities. The Detroit Renaissance Center isolates itself to create an even more powerful and autonomous interior world – a micro-world. The interior renovations and manipulations of significant works of interior architecture should form part of the most vocal discourse of design theory and criticism in the field.
