"This is a BIG hotel. Not convention-center big, but tall and wide, like a roll of toilet-paper if the toilet-paper was skyscraper-sized, sliced in half, and covered with windows. And was made of hotel rooms instead of toilet paper."
- Liza May
I love this description of the newly-flagged Adoba Hotel in Dearborn, Michigan. All toilet roll comparisons aside, this 772-room property, with over 60,000 square feet of meeting space (formerly owned by the Ford Motor Company, and operated as a Hyatt) does in fact feel like a Hyatt.
I thought it might have been built by the famous Atlanta architect, John Portman responsible for the iconic Hyatt Atlanta - as well as the Hyatt O'Hare, the New York Marriott Marquis, the Atlanta Marriott Marquis and many other large, atrium-style convention hotels.
Detail from the Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Nope. It was built 1976 by Charles Luckman, who became an architect after a wildly successful career in business. President of the Pepsodent Toothpaste company, later Lever Brothers, by age 30 he was dubbed "The Boy Wonder of American Business". His diverse architectural portfolio includes Madison Square Gardens in New York, the Hyatt Regency Dearborn (now the Adoba), the Hyatt Regency Phoenix, and the Chicago Marriott Magnificent Mile.
There's a wonderful story quoted on Wikipedia about how Luckman had been drawn to architecture:
"As a nine-year-old paper boy outside the Muehlebach Hotel [currently operated as one of the three wings of the Kansas City Marriott Downtown] in Kansas City, he asked a customer about the pretty lights and was told they were called "chandeliers". Then he asked, "Who does...Who decides on things like that?" "An architect", came the reply. "He designs the hotel and says to put the chandeliers there." Luckman wrote in his memoir, "Right then and there I decided to become an architect."
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