LOBBY NYC / HOTEL MARRIOTT MARQUIS (1985)

The hotel is located at 1535 Broadway, New York City, right on Times Square. Walking on Times Square the hotel is only visible by signs of the hotel. The signs are almost disappearing in the thousand of other signs lighting up Times Square, giving a surrealistic impression of time and space. Looking up while standing in front of what is supposed to be the entrance to the Marriott hotel, you only see huge Kodak store and no sign of a hotel. Then entering the small passage under a lot of buildings you suddenly see something that resembles a hotel lobby. The light is warm and yellow, which matches the gold on the swing doors and window frames. The floor is opposite cold and dark marble, giving a contrast between these two. 

This is only the front lobby containing a huge hollow cylinder in the middle with the entrances to the elevators inside and the elevators operating on the outside. The elevators lead up to the theaters on the third floor. The cold marble floors have changed to a warmer carpet floor, still having the cold blue color. It is a room with high ceilings and a circle opening surrounding the cylinder in the middle giving a peak into the main lobby. 

Entering the main lobby from cylinder in the middle, the light still yellow and the floor dark marble. When enter the room you feel very little. Looking up you see all the way to the top, at 48th floor. The building is an atrium formed as a square with all the rooms placed at the rim of the square, leaving a huge space in the middle only containing the elevators in the middle.  This wasted space becomes without scale and the floors only a thin line. Times Square has on of the most expensive square feet on Manhattan and in the world. By having so much wasted space in a place with so expensive square feet emphasizes the superiority surrounding this hotel. The building turns its focus inward and turns its back on the street, again emphasizing the feeling of us versus them. 

Andreas Gursky, a German artist known for his large format photographs, both containing the small details and the big picture. In 1997 he made an image of the Marriott Hotel Marquis, where he combines two photographs from each side of the building. This huge picture is 186 x 250.5 cm and shows the rhythm and depth in the building making it look like a city in itself, again a reference to the diversion from Times Square.          

From the main lobby you can see the circled platform of the sky bar at the 48th floor. The platform turns 360 degrees in one hour giving you the best view of the city, no matter where in the bar you sit. I do not know if John Portman thought of this in 1985, but in the Buddhist religion a square containing a circle is called a tantra and is a symbol for the monism or something sublime. Whether he knew about the tantra or not it is still supporting the thought of superiority.