Atlanta is the future. At least, makers of films and TV series think so, especially those who create visions of times to come. In The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead and Divergent, the city appears, unnamed, as the setting for omnipotent rulers and dark deeds. Sometimes you see its towers; sometimes soaring, swirling atria of unreadable scale. They tend to convey megalomania, dystopia and disorientation.

This cinematic Atlanta was shaped by one man in particular, the architect-developer John Portman, who until he died last year spent almost all his 93 years in the city. The hotels, malls and offices that from the early 1960s started to define the downtown – the Merchandise Mart, the Hyatt Regency hotel, the Peachtree Center, the Marriott Marquis – are his work. These were not just profitable commercial ventures – Portman ended up with a personal wealth of hundreds of millions of dollars – but, in his eyes, works of art.

The atrium of Portman’s Atlanta Hyatt Regency hotel

They were also engines to stop Atlanta becoming one of America’s “donut cities”, their centres hollowed out by the flight to the suburbs of middle classes and the taxes they paid. For Andrew Young, the city’s mayor from 1982 to 1990, the architect’s designs contributed (as an Esquire article once reported) to Atlanta’s “peaceful passage” through the turbulent 60s.

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Portman incurred the mistrust of critics and his fellow professionals, in particular for combining the role of developer and architect. He was dangerously conflicted, they thought. For Portman, development was a means to achieve his artistic goals. “Architecture is what I’m about,” was one of his declarations. He also said: “I came to the conclusion that if I were to have an impact – and not be just part of a process I could not control – I should understand the entire project from conception through completion. That led me to real estate.” On another occasion he put the same point, pithily but grandiosely, like this: “I’m the Medici to my own Leonardo.”

Atlanta’s Downtown skyline in a still from the TV show The Walking Dead

He liked to paint and sculpt as well. He took to heart the advice Frank Lloyd Wright gave him when a student – “young man, go seek Emerson” – by which the famous old architect meant that Portman should learn from the famous dead poet’s self-reliance and faith in nature. And so – first in Atlanta, later in several more American cities, and later again in China – he came to create the hotels for which he is most famous, whose dynamic and vertiginous atria are garnished with vegetation and animated by water features. Sometimes piped birdsong plays. It’s nature, if not as Emerson would have known it.

Portman was a pioneer of the devices with which somber modernism was given glitz: mirror-glass, wall-climbing glass lifts, sky bridges, swooping curves. He described some gaudy candelabra he put around a piano stage in the Atlanta Marriott Marquis as a “homage to Liberace”. His buildings became known for their “Jesus moments”, those times when, emerging from a deliberately understated entry into some architectural emulation of the Grand Canyon, a visitor would reliably exclaim, “Jesus!”

The rewards for his audacity included his projects’ filmography. There were, as well as the recent movies and television shows listed above, The Towering Inferno (1974), Sharky’s Machine (1981), True Lies (1994), Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) and Mission: Impossible III (2006). Mel Brooks’s Hitchcock spoof High Anxiety (1977) exploited the vertiginous properties of Portman’s Hyatt Regency in San Francisco. Critics, in a classic standoff of specialist and popular taste, were less impressed. “Disneyland for adults”, his works were called. Portman would retort by pointing to signs of their popular success, such as their high occupancy rates and the people queuing just to get a look inside.

The most significant effects of Portman’s work go beyond taste. He was a city-shaper who remade his home town in ways that few architects get to do. In addition to his prolific output, he used his position on planning groups to campaign for the wider interests of the city, as well as his own. He successfully opposed the relocation of Atlanta’s airport – which would have taken jobs away from an area that needed them – and successfully advocated deep tunnelling for its subway, which minimised disruption to his properties.

As Young said, Portman reinvigorated Atlanta’s downtown at a time when other city centers went into decline. “My idea was that I just couldn’t see abandoning the cities to the poor,” was Portman’s way of putting it. “I want to bring the middle class back.” But this statement is two-edged – the wish to help downtowns comes with an unfriendly tone towards “the poor” – and his developments came with conditions attached. The price of competing with the suburbs was to make the center more suburb-like: managed, secure, controlling. The traditional street was seen as threatening – “sidewalks and congested areas have a lot of anxiety,” he said, “and I wanted to create a release from that anxiety.”

What he created were internalised, self-sufficient worlds, where every need is satisfied, where the paying customer has as little need as possible to stray outside. His architecture is notably interior; the exteriors can be as blunt and anonymous as tax-collecting offices. “I’m building a city that will become the modern Venice,” was how Portman put it. “The streets down there are canals for cars, while these bridges are clean, safe, climate-controlled. People can walk here at any hour.”

The Marriott Marquis atrium

Some points in his defense: an obituary in a local news outlet reported that his developments included some of the first integrated restaurants in racially segregated Atlanta; a recent study by Harvard’s Graduate School of Design argues that his projects offer “lots of opportunities to link back to the city, to link back to the street outside”; Portman made modest efforts to encourage people to walk inside his complexes.

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But he was also a leading progenitor of what is now a ubiquitous way of building, to be seen in the US, the Gulf, south-east Asia and pretty much everywhere else – those bland, soothing, air-conditioned, all-encompassing environments that first exclude what Portman called the turmoil of city life and then repackage it as visual spectacle. Perhaps this is why all those film-makers, even though Portman often said that he was only trying to make people feel good, see a dark side in his spaces. For they are driven in part by fear, an anxiety about the world outside that is manifested in the architecture.

Guardian Cities is live in Atlanta for a special series of in-depth reporting. Share your experiences of the city in the comments below, on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram using #GuardianATL, or via email to cities@theguardian.com