ATLANTA (Aug. 3, 2010) - You've got to love John Portman's style. Even in this current commercial real estate market, the architect/developer continues to push plans for a 1 million-square-foot office tower adjacent to SunTrust Plaza Garden Offices (below left) and SunTrust Plaza.
Portman, 85, who created downtown Atlanta's skyline with Peachtree Center, the Westin Peachtree Plaza, Marriott Marquis and Hyatt Regency, has been planning SunTrust Plaza Phase III for more than a decade. "We're trying to make that Phase III building happen," Portman Management exec Brian Hogg told me in June 2000 for an Atlanta Journal-Constitution story.
Plans for Phase III, on a tract a Portman affiliate owns with SunTrust Banks, were moved to the back-burner after Sept. 11, and they have remained there. But that hasn't stopped Portman from subtly marketing the office tower. The copy "A Proposed SunTrust Plaza Phase III" is prominently positioned on the website for SunTrust Plaza.
I found it this week after clicking on an advertisement for SunTrust Plaza in an edition of Bisnow Atlanta. The SunTrust Plaza site is filled with all kinds of good-but-outdated information about Phase III.
I won't be surprised of Portman's SunTrust Plaza Phase III is one of the first new office towers out of the ground when the current malaise ends and the market turns.
(In this photo, John Portman is shown at Atlanta's Blue Ridge Grill this spring with Ben Johnson, author of Sam Zell biography Money Talks, Bullsh*t Walks. No word on whether Johnson is angling to write Portman's biography. Maybe Maria Saporta will do it.)
Comments