Opinion - Atlanta needs a design director

People are flocking back to Atlanta and construction cranes are returning. Developers are scrambling to break ground on various parking lots and vacant land in Midtown. Along the Atlanta Beltline, developers are eager to build next to the Eastside Trail and the project’s future phases. There have been successes when it comes to design and architecture, including Ponce City Market, but the long list of ho-hum design in our fair city is getting longer. It’s hard to imagine these designs — take your pick of the glass-and-steel vertical subdivisions dotting the skyline or in the development pipeline — standing the test of time.

Atlanta could have world-class architecture and design. But we have a ways to go. In addition to preserving what beautiful buildings still stand from Atlanta’s past, we need to make concerted efforts to ensure what gets built in the future is our own, interesting, and authentic.

One way to do so would be to hire a design director who, from the safety of a City Hall office that’s not prone to pressure from political forces (that’ll be tough), could speak truth to power and advise developers how their concepts could be improved.

This kind of position already exists in some form in other cities and could operate under several models. The mayor could give his or her full-throated blessing and support to the design director. Or the director could report directly to the mayor. Or they could be totally independent.

The design director would work alongside the Atlanta Urban Design Commission, which regulates historic and landmark districts, among other functions, and the city’s current planners. He or she would also cooperate with the neighborhood design review advisory groups that already exist in Midtown, Buckhead, and Downtown.

This person should be steeped in architecture, urban planning know-how, and excited to educate and inform the public on good design. They would be paid a competitive salary to attract academics and professionals. He or she won’t be nervous about offending potential future clients or fellow architects. The design director should be unafraid to be blunt not just with city officials — especially when it comes to public buildings — but the public as well.

Imagine a public official asking aloud why Atlanta needs three “SkyHouses” — a high-rise design that developer Novare Group has rolled out in other Sun Belt cities. Or taking developers to task for proposing unsightly big boxes along the Beltline. Or even chiding city officials for not revising woefully outdated ordinances.

Sure, with such proposals come questions about additional cost in terms of time and money, in addition to the necessary debate over how much power the director would have. But it’s a discussion worth having.

If city officials, developers, and residents are too uneasy about giving one person that influence, then spread it among three or five people. Create design guidelines and a review board but give it power. Alpharetta, Roswell, and Chamblee have similar groups. Or create a studio where thinkers, developers, and the public can partner.

Developers will tell you that good design costs money. The city’s business community could follow the example of Columbus, Ind. Starting in the 1950s, one of the city’s largest companies’ philanthropic foundations started to pay architects’ fees for some public buildings. The program attracted top talent. Atlanta’s corporate titans could do one better and pay local architects a proper fee so they could produce thoughtful designs for the city’s public buildings and spaces.

To make this happen, Atlanta will need to start having thoughtful and considered discussions about design and architecture. Not just a collective eye roll. When a multimillion-dollar eyesore is proposed along the city’s most iconic street, we need to respond to it. When Donald Trump recently slapped his name on the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, a town that cherishes its architecture, the city gasped. Mayor Rahm Emanuel took a public stand. When longtime Atlanta businessman Bill Corey installed an LED screen on his defunct smokestack along the Downtown Connector, we groaned. But we didn’t form collective sentences to express our disgust to people in power.

The Architecture and Design Center, an advocacy and public education project of the American Institute of Architect’s Atlanta chapter, is building and trying to nurture this conversation. But it can’t do it alone. A single person — or group of people — who can call out bad design, work with developers, and champion for the built environment could help. The skyline and the streets where we walk and bike and work every day need to have a ombudsman.

Lots of things go into making a great city. It involves culture — the art, the music — and the landscape. It also involves the buildings that surround the people and the plazas where they gather. They are crucial to a city’s identity. It’s part of the reason you want to visit Paris and New York.

Atlanta will never be New York. Or Chicago. But Atlanta can be Atlanta. There is only so much land to develop. And what does get built will be among us for at least a generation. Developers must understand that what they construct will be their legacy. City Hall needs to understand its public buildings and spaces are representative of who we are. We need to take pride in what our city is and can become. Embracing architecture and design can make it happen.