By Design

Suffering some cross-traffic at a red light while driving along any given street in Atlanta, you might be compelled to glance over at whichever new construction site you’re stopped beside and think to yourself, ... huh? That sentiment perfectly conveys the curiosity surrounding the reasons why so many things in Atlanta look like that, that being your basic neo-traditional revivalist representation of something meant to be quaint, known as developers’ option A, or the alternate, developer’s option B, a slick, glass-walled monolith.

The sibling rivalry between Slick and Quaint is really beside the point. One or the other is typically preferred when the proposed building is supported by pricey real estate. That high initial investment tends to make developers looking for a certain rate of return a little nervous. And it’s difficult to take a leap of faith when you’re weak in the knees.

So until Atlanta gets a few more gutsy developers, like the ones responsible for Studioplex, King Plow or the up-and-coming Roundhouse, a soon-to-be office complex at the old Southern railroad site near the Georgia World Congress Center, we’re forced to take some sneaky shortcuts, back roads and even dirt roads to find where Atlanta’s hiding its architectural creativity.

Anyone can find creatively designed structures in Atlanta if they pay attention to the backdrop against which they play out their lives. If you’re in Inman Park or Buckhead, Decatur or West End, or in any number of the areas in between, you can probably look around and find those few cases where someone has put a lot of thought and energy into the architecture that they’re adding to the city — that perfectly placed building that you always want a view of when you go on a picnic, or the one that suddenly catches your eye when you turn a corner and makes you smile. If you take a second longer to notice these structures, you’ll realize that thoughtfulness is what distinguishes them, not budget or style.

In looking around town, the following projects jump to the forefront as examples of creative architectural ventures. With completion dates ranging from the late ’80s to some so new the paint’s not dry yet, these buildings vary in almost every way but one: intelligence.

Tale of two homes Consider these two houses in Home Park, near Georgia Tech.

Both of these sites show off a latent potential underlying all of Atlanta: the residual lot. Hotfoot growth spurts and abundant land have contributed over the years to lopped off plots of turf strewn about the city, ripe for improvement by those with a bent toward the eccentric.

The first of these two homes was a self-commissioned investment project built on Hemphill Avenue in 1994 by the local architecture firm MC2. By accentuating every idiosyncratic aspect of “the problem lot,” this team was able to find a highly inventive but cost effective solution for the site. Not only was the lot’s acutely triangular shape adopted into the design, but so was the lot’s underlying grade, allowing for an interplay between the movement of water off the property and the occupant’s access to the house. The same notion of judicious fusion follows through to the interior of the house, where unexpected materials, such as concrete filled glass partitions, are collaged and actively detailed.

Moving over a block or two, this next spot of reclaimed land hides shyly behind bamboo groves on, yes, an actual dirt road in Home Park between McMillan and Hemphill. The legal viability of the plot was birthed through dogged coaxing of right of ways and utility access by the project’s architect Nicholas Storck, but the end result has nothing to do with a hint of the homemade. The elegance of the small home, completed in 1995, comes from accepting the given narrowness of the lot and using it to inspire a delicate approach into the building.

Elevated parking provides a street-side counterpoint to the home itself, with a narrow walkway stretching between, which continues under the volume of the house to the entry. Designed for a single occupant or couple, the design employs the precise delimiting of space, both in view and movement, interior and exterior.

Both of these projects exemplify the type of young adult housing the city is so in need of right now.

New use for an old building Kin to Atlanta’s residual lot is the abundant and fascinating abandoned building. Depending on the original structure of the building, its decayed state might offer up a bare bones framing system or, instead, the solidity of something built of concrete, granite or brick, which shows layers of history. These quirky structures around town are an exciting reminder of the many possibilities latent within the city. Open to the wind and rain, they could become anything.

One such reclamation project is the former automotive electrical supply shop located on the corner of Highland and Elizabeth, which is being transformed into a mixed-use commercial center, including office space and a pizzeria. The success of this project lies clearly in the overriding declaration that this is not a strip mall. Credit for the insightful development and design of the building’s renovation goes to Jones/Pierce Architects.

By maintaining a limited palette of materials, the architects were able to highlight the old building while still making a new one. In application, these materials, mainly aluminum panels and paint, help identify differing quadrants of use and entry within the building, relieving it of an over dependence on signage or labels.

Elevate the reclamation theme to the local urban planning level and you’ve got the swank new Studioplex, designed by architects Brock/Green Architects & Planners to anchor the far end of Auburn Avenue. Reusing the old cotton compress warehouse, possibly the oldest concrete structure in Atlanta, was right on target for the primary goal of creating an arts district, compete with gallery, studio and residential space.

Some insightful dissection of the warehouse around its concrete structure was used to create an interior open-air and light-filled passage, giving access to both galleries and residences. The architects made a conscious effort not to over-design the passage area, preferring instead to allow the open super-structure of the warehouse to interact with the individual expression of each tenant.

Aesthetic addition Witty repartee with an existing building doesn’t necessarily demand adaptive-reuse. The next time you’re racing down West Peachtree Street, slow down a bit between Fourteenth and Fifteenth streets, and take a look at the entrance pavilion of the Boys and Girls Club. The architecture of this compact addition manages to be fun without being cliché.

In fact, the brilliance of this project is accomplished by an advantageous use of circumstance by the now-disbanded architecture firm of Osgood and Associates. The stayed and monolithic brick facade of the existing building is left as an independent backdrop for the smaller addition, built in 1994. Beyond the mere addition of something fun, this tailored juxtaposition between new and old causes the existing building to become an exterior gallery space against which to exhibit the newer pavilion.

Key to this contrast were the architects’ ability to choose a distinct range of materials and design according to current standards, rather than give in to the safety of copying the existing “context” or style of the initial building. The pavilion becomes a true transition between the interior and exterior of the complex. Its transparent glass walls moderate a visitor’s experience, allowing for a more complete interaction with sunlight, while providing sheltered views of the rain, wind and street activity outside. A final turn toward the inside then leaves the rest of these reminders behind.

Compare and contrast Local architects’ facility for that “path less chosen” glamour-ness is the D. Abbot Turner Center on Emory University’s campus. Hidden on a residential circle is the chapel and complex designed by local architects Scogin, Elam and Bray in 1989. Although an entirely new structure, the building establishes a contrast within itself of a traditional volume against a more dynamic one. While it may be true that some sort of spatial experience is always defined by architecture, we so often accept this experience to be defined in only a few, limited, ways: generally, the box, or the atrium. And sometimes even the atrium is, in fact, just a larger box.

But the Turner Center marks the transition of scale from the known to the unknown by first constructing a basis of typical rooms and then launching off of that platform with space expanded in view, light and the visitors’ sense of motion through space.

The nice thing about all of this back road brilliance is that it neatly coincides with the continual development of Atlanta into a latticework of urban living. We can only hope that the rising interest in our urban densification will serve to fuel the demand for an intelligently designed and built environment.??