The Los Angeles Bonaventure Hotel

It was a long time before the word “city” seemed suited to the scale of Los Angeles. Rather, the right word was “town,” and for many Angelinos, it still is. Breadth and sprawl bespeak a township ethos; compactness, density and height, on the other hand, are the signifiers of metropolis—signifiers that, for most of its existence, LA has never had. While great Miesian highrises were being raised on the East Coast, the “Downtown” LA of the 1950s and 1960s remained little more than a train station, the Nuestra Señora Church, and a few crumbling hotels of Beaux-Arts chintz. In other words, small-town stuff. Then came the city, and in a rush too. In only a few years, the United California and Security Pacific Banks, the ARCO Center, and the Bonaventure Hotel had appeared. Suddenly it was 1976, and a certain phase of LA’s provincialism was at an end.

Of this shift to a new kind of urban modernity—or postmodernity, as some theorists would have it—the Bonaventure Hotel became the symbol par excellence. A glimmering fortress of steel and concrete, five silos clad in reflective glass and rising 33 storeys high, the hotel seemed a disorienting addition: a relic of futures past. Courting strong reactions, nostalgic Angelinos felt befuddled while progressives welcomed its cosmopolitan promise. Indeed, disorientation is a sentiment rather commonly associated with the Bonaventure, and not without reason. Upon finding his way to the low-lying pedestrian entrance, the architecture professor Ed Soja recalled thinking: “This couldn’t possibly be the entrance to a major hotel.” Once inside, things hardly get easier. The literary critic and philosopher Frederic Jameson, who considered the Bonaventure an Olympus of the postmodern style and prominently featured it in his seminal book on the topic, only came to write about it after attending a conference there and discovering that most of his fellow attendees had gotten lost somewhere between the hotel entrance and the conference room.

Perhaps the strongest objection to the postmodern label came from John C. Portman Jr., the self-proclaimed “architect-developer” who brought the Bonaventure to life. Far from discombobulating, Portman viewed his designs as merely an extended step in a lineage of architectural rationalism dating back to Palladio. He even referred to the hotel as a “Venetian village.” His notion was to infuse civic life with a striking aesthetic that could bring long-standing architectural principles into the late-industrial world. Most of the commissions Portman accepted were for large-scale public buildings—hotels and malls, offices and convention centres—and in a lengthy career that took him from the Carolinas, Atlanta and California to China, Indonesia, Malaysia and beyond, the Bonaventure marks the apotheosis of his 1970s rise, his most fertile creative period.

The hotel now strikes visitors as a gloriously Seventies building, one that could only have belonged to that decade. Its era-defining touches are everywhere: a layout that seems to recall the five-engine Saturn V rockets that sent six Apollo crews to the moon’s surface; a use of glass and steel more dexterous and playful than any strict adherence to the Miesian schema would allow; the integration of nature within a resolutely man-made space; and, ultimately, the sense that the building is less an architectural object than a concept—a dreamscape made real, what one might call the DeLorean worldview. Dreams, of course, can be perplexing, especially those at the scale Portman worked at. Of his approach to reimagining hotel architecture early in his career, Portman wrote: “I wanted to explode the hotel; to open it up; to create a grandeur of space, almost a resort… The whole idea was to open everything up; take the hotel from its closed, tight position, and explode it.” The vast spatial manipulations of the Bonaventure unfold both inside and out. On a smoggy LA day, the sky turns into a hazy, off-white miasma, against which the hotel stands resolute, its glass exterior bouncing solid light back into the California sky. Meanwhile, within the building, floors seem to float and waterfalls of light give the surfaces an irregular glow. Space becomes ever-extendable, until one reaches the top-floor bar, where it begins to shift beneath one’s feet, literally. Portman had designed rotating bars before, and he would design several more after; but only the Bonaventure’s makes one feel as though one is spinning the world’s most unwieldy of cities in the palm of one’s hand.

With such a potent bounty of aesthetic and atmospheric qualities, it is hardly surprising that, for five decades, the Bonaventure has proven catnip to artists and filmmakers. Many of today’s high priests of popular music—Usher, Rihanna, SZA, Kendrick Lamar, Harry Styles—have drawn inspiration from the hotel’s riveting and elusive character, shooting music videos or promotional material from the innards of the Bonaventure. And long before them, filmmakers also made it their own, from Walter Hill’s neo-noir film The Driver (1978) to Rob Reiner’s comedy This is Spinal Tap (1984) to the poolside scene in Barry Levinson’s prestige drama Rain Man (1988). When Interstellar (2014) required an appropriately space-age setting for the NASA offices circa 2067, Christopher Nolan chose the Bonaventure, continuing the science-fiction lineage that began with Michael Anderson’s Logan’s Run (1976), shot when the hotel had scarcely even opened. And then there’s John Carpenter’s Escape from L.A. (1996), which cements the Bonaventure as an ineffable symbol of LA. In the kind of grand fatalism LA seems to inspire, Carpenter decided to have the Bonaventure spectacularly destroyed in an apocalyptic earthquake. Many visitors, past and present, have agreed: it is a hotel made to be filmed.

Just as one gleefully loses oneself in a film, the Bonaventure’s labyrinthine depths and sense of multifariousness is all part of its ineffable draw. An enclosed world of floating gardens, skywalks, and unexpected curves opening onto vertiginous views, glass-panelled elevator shafts carry visitors up and down the voluminous atrium—one of the several larger-than-life atria upon which Portman built his renown. Unworldly by 1976 standards, the Bonaventure’s elevator climbs seven storeys; built a decade after, the one he put into the Atlanta’s Marriott Marquis climbed 46. Ideas tended to appear and reappear in Portman’s work—even the five cylindrical towers of the Bonaventure rematerialised a year later in Detroit’s Renaissance Center—but the Bonaventure always seemed an outlier, perhaps because of what it symbolised. A kind of city in and of itself, the hotel embodied a city-minded sophistication. In a way, it brought the future to LA, a place that, like so many other towns, has always run on nostalgia.