When he was still alive, Becket developed a philosophy he called “ total design,” in which the firm would control every aspect of a project, from conception down to the smallest detail of furnishing. Though the firm name suggested he was still present, and that the firm was run like an old-fashioned architectural atelier, it was in fact one of the largest practices in the world, and a model of corporate organization. Although the firm retained his name, Becket had died in 1969, years before the Dallas Hyatt project was even on the boards. Welton Becket was not so much a him as a them. It opened in 1959 and was distinguished by its pastel-colored exterior panels (painted over in a dull gray in 1997, when the building changed hands). Nearly two decades earlier, the firm designed downtown’s Sheraton Dallas Hotel, a 28-story, 600-room tower that was a part of the $25 million Southland Center. This was not the first time Welton Becket would build one of the largest hotels in Dallas. Hyatt retained his atrium concept, but began farming the designs out to other architects, among them Los Angeles-based Welton Becket and Associates, which had already designed Hyatts in Knoxville and New Orleans when it was selected for the Dallas project. Portman continued building atrium hotels - most famously, the Bonaventure in Los Angeles - but the Hyatt Regency in Dallas was not one of them, although many incorrectly presume that it is. Reunion Tower and the Hyatt Regency overlook Houston St. In 1977, the vertiginous atrium of the latter achieved big-screen notoriety as a setting and essential plot point in the Mel Brooks spoof High Anxiety. His first, the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, was completed in 1967, followed in 1973 by the Hyatt Regency San Francisco. In Portman’s buildings, the only danger was the frisson of plunging views. That design was drawn from the imagination of John Portman, the Atlanta architect whose self-contained structures brought the drama of the city indoors at a moment when America’s urban spaces were perceived to be dirty and dangerous. “They were younger they were smaller they were more nimble.” They had also established a brand that was driven by a dramatic architectural signature: soaring internal atriums with futuristic glass-capsule elevator cabs and revolving rooftop restaurants. “They were kind of the new kid on the block,” Scovell says. Eschewing more established brands like Marriott and Hilton, Woodbine chose Hyatt as its partner. Planning began in the early 1970s, with a hotel as the centerpiece for what was initially conceived as a larger, mixed-use development. John Scovell (left) and Ray Hunt opened the Hyatt Regency and Reunion Tower on April 15, 1978. There was something quintessentially Dallas in this appropriation the city that envisioned itself as a beacon of business managed to transform a place of socialist idealism into a purely capitalist enterprise. The most ironic feature of the development was its name, a reference to the short-lived utopian community of La Reunion, founded across the Trinity River by European immigrants in the 1850s. And so in 1975, the Hotel Dallas (originally the Jefferson Hotel), a 12-story block built in 1917 on the southwest corner of Houston and Wood streets, was summarily demolished, goodbye and good riddance. Clearing a path for that road entailed a bit of historic erasure - never too much of an impediment in a city happy to bulldoze its past to build its future. The city’s contribution entailed the construction of Reunion Boulevard, which would create a vehicular loop around the building site. Depending on one’s perspective, those can be seen as an illustration of the city bureaucracy’s foresighted willingness to provide taxpayer support to spur development or the city bureaucracy’s insipid fealty to its wealthiest residents. There were other perks, as well, including land swaps and tax abatements. The venture was audacious but also well-subsidized by the public, with the city kicking in $30 million from its 1975 bond package to pay for access roads and infrastructural improvements.
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