LEED Silver Midtown Atlanta high-rise, home to King and Spalding, with 18th level roof garden, streetscape, street level garden on structure, and 40’ interior bamboo installation.

“One of the most unique projects I’ve worked on”

As this assignment unfolded, it grew to two separate clients with distinct contracts and an unusual, overlapping scope of work.  Hines, a long-time client, had teamed up with the Woodruff Arts Center/Atlanta Symphony Orchestra (ASO) to develop a site originally master planned by Ceasar Pelli.
It included commercial, high-rise development coupled with a new symphony hall to be designed by Santiago Calatrava.  The commercial development was first in line.  After settling on a pro forma and program, securing financial partners and a major tenant (attorneys King and Spalding), the design of an office tower began.

As Principal-In-Charge, Project Manager and Lead Designer for Roy Ashley & Associates, I worked with two distinct teams before this work was over.  The Hines design team included Design Architect Jon Pickard (Pickard Chilton, New Haven) and Architect of Record Kendall-Heaton (Houston).  The ASO side of the table included Calatrava, a separate group of professionals from Kendall-Heaton and the iconic landscape architecture firm of Sasaki (Cambridge, MA).  Each team worked within the framework of the original master plan.  This included one of its key elements known as “the allee”, a pedestrian spine defined by rows of trees to create a green promenade from Peachtree Street to the Symphony’s front door.

Specific services for Hines included comprehensive landscape and hardscape design for all exterior spaces, with much of it on-structure, streetscape coordination with Midtown Alliance and the City of Atlanta, all LEED-related documentation and design and specimen bamboo planting for the lobby’s interior.  For ASO, we were the local landscape architects in support of Sasaki’s efforts.  That included meeting with Planning and Arborist Departments at City Hall, reporting on sustainability considerations for this site development, reviewing or recommending plant selections and finally implementing a participatory process for stakeholders that would select “Green Vase” Zelkova as the master plan’s formal allee.

Each project team dealt with complex issues including phasing and the physical interface of two separate projects over time, sustainability and an urban context with numerous opportunities for open space and landscape on-structure.    While the design solutions were intimately connected, each had its own set of rules and aspirations.  The conclusion remains incomplete as the ASO struggles with fund raising and now considers an alternative site. As so often happens (in projects and in life), we do the best we can to anticipate a future scenario, based on the facts available, and put proper strategies in place.  But with too much focus on assuming an outcome, do we always consider everything we should?