“[Directors are] projecting a future by imagining how it would look in ruins,” said Michael Hays, a professor of architectural theory at Harvard. “All the flesh has been removed and you just see the architectural bones. I’ve always thought Portman’s buildings would make very beautiful ruins, because the essence of them is so powerful and so direct.”

Portman’s use of scale expands spatial perceptions from the human level to the colossal. In multistory buildings, elevators are the primary mode of transport from the lobby through a vast atrium; most of Portman’s elevators are made of glass. Both Clint Eastwood’s In the Line of Fire (1993) and James Cameron’s True Lies (1994) utilized the elevators in Portman’s Westin Bonaventure to convey the importance of scale and take viewers along for the ride.

“Directors refer to Portman’s famous glass elevators because they translate the idea of motion through large spaces,” Hays said. “It’s a parallax and contributes to the hallucinatory element of his work. This gives his buildings movement, and he choreographs that movement through space.”

Hays also believes filmmakers use architecture to represent societies that are forming or collapsing, and conceptual structures are too eccentric to symbolize the collective groups that dominate dystopian storylines. Portman’s work fits on film in part because his design philosophy straddles the modernism and brutalism handed down to his generation from predecessors such as Le Corbusier and Marcel Breuer, who strove to incorporate functionality and community into their buildings.

While Portman was earning his degree in architecture at Georgia Tech in Atlanta in the late 1940s, Frank Lloyd Wright visited the university. Portman asked Wright for advice, and the famous architect told him, “Young man, go seek Emerson.” Portman then set out to balance the tenets of scale and self-reliance in his blueprints—a direction that ultimately gave his work a humanistic touch and saved him from experimenting too deeply with post-modernism in the mixed-use commercial properties, offices, and upscale hotels he designed later in his career.

The Atlanta Marriott Marquis/Jaime Ardiles-Arce

“It’s important to understand how we use and experience architecture,” Portman told me in an interview at one of his offices inside Atlanta’s 60-story SunTrust Plaza, which he designed. “The [buildings] serve the human being, not the other way around. I don’t think architects have spent enough time thinking holistically about how architecture affects people. Hopefully we are headed in the way of developing our physical world into a human-centric environment. Architecture shapes how people live and perform. Everything architects do is for people.”

Portman has faced choruses of critics over the years, many of whom say his insular structures “turn their backs” on the true vibrancy and community of city life. But as his legacy continues to take shape, both the architecture world and civic organizations are beginning to revisit his work. The High Museum of Art exhibited a Portman retrospective in 2009; in 2011, he was the subject of the documentary, A Life of Building; and at an Atlanta award ceremony in 2013, he was honored by the former Atlanta Mayor and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, who, as reported by The Atlanta Business Chronicle, called Portman an artist and “a man who believed he could make something out of nothing.”