Exits: A breath past potential

Are the Atlanta Hawks finally forming into something?

John C. Portman Jr. was an interiors guy. Born in Walhalla, South Carolina, a town nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Portman went south the two hours to Atlanta as soon as he could and started an architecture firm with no leads and a loan of $100. When Portman died in 2017 he’d completed projects in Shanghai, Brussels, Los Angeles, New York, Singapore, San Francisco and of course, Atlanta.

Portman merged the role of architect and developer and was not widely celebrated for it (think NBA head coach with dual president title), but viewed it as a way to learn everything about a project as much as an accelerant to gaining ground, literally, in the field. As both, Portman was able to design, and build, big. His first completed project in the dual role came in 1961 with the Atlanta Merchandise Mart, his biggest structure up to then and the largest by floor area in Atlanta. The building, now part of AmericasMart, converted a parking garage into a multi-floor, soaring open-air atrium concealed within a blocky brutalist exterior and revealed what would become Portman’s calling card.

He loved atriums. Debuted the first ever “atrium hotel” in 1967 with the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, where visitors and guests entered through a long and dimly lit tunnel that opened into a golden and soaring interior shooting up 22-storeys. The reveal was coined the “Jesus moment”, because of the word slipping unbidden from so many people’s mouths. And they only got bigger from there.

The Hyatt Regency San Francisco, the 515-foot-tall atrium of the Atlanta Marriott Marquis, and the Times Square Marriott Marquis — a building that came to be reviled by New Yorkers because the space it required meant demolishing five historic broadway theatres (Robert Redford filed an unsuccessful lawsuit to halt construction) and further isolated a then-dumpy Times Square from the public — are all glittering, exalting if iconoclastic self-contained universes. Spaces unconcerned with the world just outside their doors, that were by design wholly removed from any cultural nods or leanings. Prodigious monuments to artificiality, to making spaces large enough to fit imagined worlds into, independent from whatever else was going on in people’s lives outside the walls. In some ways, it’s what the perfect hotel hopes to instil — a monastic sense of not being at home. Though at Portman’s scale it can feel like erasure of your remembered life.

Portman said once that he liked glass elevators because in them, people talked. In regular elevators, he said, people only looked down at their feet. In glass elevators, while looking at the world (or in his case, the lobby) dropping away, they opened up. The context is that Portman designed his buildings as places where the world was meant to do that anyway. Stepping into those empyrean atriums, riding the elevators up through their yawning glow, and the mind was momentarily wiped clean, only concentrating on the sudden chasm of space, rocketing away. What was one here to do? Maybe just forget.

It’s been hard, for a few seasons now, to say what it is exactly the Atlanta Hawks are here to do.

“Compete” is the ready stock reply, but we can’t grant them that because the only time we’ve seen it was in a flashing run in the 2021 playoffs and in backs-against-the-wall bursts this time around, first in the play-in then Games 3 and 5 against Boston. “Exist” has felt correct in the stretches between those aforementioned games, so does “remind” — as in, remind you that they’re still around.

When I think of the Hawks, which I have to really focus to do, the scope of the team comes together in a wash of their people in abstract and not in action. I can picture Trae Young but I have to admit that when I do it isn’t in motion, it’s hanging back at half court, waiting and giving direction to his teammates bunched down at one end and waiting for him. Bogdan Bogdanovic I picture running, John Collins I also picture running, but whipping around from one wing to the other, repeatedly asking for the ball. Dejounte Murray is loping downhill and pulling up from the top of the key, always there. Clint Capela and Saddiq Bey are the only two I can picture caught up in and moving against the action with any authority, any success, and most of that is me superimposing watching them do the same in Houston and Detroit, respectively. Quin Snyder is there at the sidelines, pacing and watchful, eyes burrowing into each motion, but that might be clearest for me because it’s new. Because I’m watching him watch his team as a way to try and translate them into something different.

The Hawks are an interior team. A group that lives inside a world forged and prematurely secured before they were finished forming, now stalled out by those frozen expectations. That 2021 postseason run should’ve done wonders for Atlanta’s reframing of the following season. They forced the Bucks to six games before Milwaukee went on to win the title, they were the hard exit. Instead, nothing happened. Existing roles were not made any clearer, the roster stayed talented if ambiguous. The front office traded away the best role player they had in Kevin Huerter before this past season started and wondered why, as things got underway, the team looked similarly faint. Fuzzy. A group in its third straight season still coming into focus.

This is different than critiques that came pre-Finals about the Denver Nuggets not being an interesting team. I understand where it’s the job of the writer to find points of interest. What I mean with the Hawks is that I can’t make them out anymore. If it’s difficult to pinpoint what a team wants to do, then the fallback can at least be to figure out what the team is. We know what the Hawks, primarily Young, have told us. This is a team with a lot of potential. But even potential has to pull itself together at some point and step out the door, face the real world and see how it forms up, dissipates, reforms, starts over. Potential can’t be identity, only etherial antechamber.

A rich interior life can be a boundless imagination. It can also be delusion. Endless caveats to getting started. An actual caveat is that under Snyder, the Hawks have squinted and winced back into a more corporeal basketball. It was refreshing to see their discomfort, their adjustments, not to see Murray go chest first into a ref after Game 4 and get suspended, but to see Atlanta grapple with themselves in reality, in a world they are once again beholden to, all that potential be damned.

John Portman named his homes, the first in Atlanta and the second on Sea Island, on the Georgia state coast, Entelechy I and II — riffs on Aristotle’s metaphysical theory by the same name. Aristotle used the term to capture the difference between mere matter and a living body at the moment of actualization, a breath past potential. For an architect, it’s exactly the right kind of overblown, for the Hawks, it finally feels like a way forward.