Hyatt Regency San Francisco

You walk through the doors of the Hyatt Regency San Francisco and the floor drops away. The lobby is not a room — it is a canyon. Seventeen stories of concrete balconies rise on all sides, tapering slightly as they ascend, forming a triangular atrium that feels geological rather than architectural.

The Portman Atrium

John Portman invented this. Not the atrium itself — hotels had lobbies — but the atrium as spectacle, as the primary experience of the building. The Hyatt Regency, completed in 1973, was among his first exercises in what he called "the architecture of enthusiasm."

The glass elevators ride the interior wall, capsules of light ascending through the void. From the lobby floor, you watch them rise and shrink. From the upper balconies, you look down into a space that compresses all the activity of the hotel into a single visual field.

Concrete Terraces

Each floor steps back slightly, creating a rhythm of cantilevered balconies that gives the atrium its texture. The concrete is exposed and unadorned — Portman trusted the geometry to do the work. Planters line the edges, trailing greenery down the facade like vertical gardens.

The worst thing you can do to people is put them in a box. Architecture should be an experience, not an enclosure.

The balconies are wide enough to linger on. Guests stand at the railings and look down, look up, look across. The building turns its occupants into spectators of each other — a theater where everyone is simultaneously audience and performer.

The Sphere

At the base of the atrium sits Charles O. Perry's sculptural sphere, "Eclipse" — a skeletal globe of aluminum tubes that has become the building's icon. It hovers above a reflecting pool, rotating slowly, catching the light that falls from the skylight above.

The sphere gives the vast space a center of gravity. Without it, the atrium might feel empty. With it, the emptiness becomes intentional — a clearing in the concrete forest, a place where the eye can rest before resuming its vertical journey.