Architecture: Designing on the Atlanta Beltline

We all have to live together in this world. We interact, form tribes, fall in love. We are social animals. Technology may connect our digital selves, but it isolates our physical selves. Social spaces create the stage where we can be our selves in public. The built environment represents our attitudes and needs for social interaction in spaces, and architects have a responsibility to see social spaces as integral to our health and quality of our lives.

A beautiful city does more than efficiently house individuals and plan for their movement and circulation. It needs public space. Free space. Democratic and communal space. Parks and squares to wander and daydream. Spaces to sit under a tree on a bench with a coffee and someone you may be falling in love with. Spaces where you’ll feel the light on your face and have a front row seat to the drama of the city. Spaces that say “This is why I live here.” They can be modest or grand, but they are necessary.

680 Hamilton

Unlike LOHA in a previous post, I’m not working with a network of institutions that are tackling the problems of homelessness or supportive housing. Though I would readily embrace it, as Atlanta has its own issues in handling growth, neighborhood gentrification and social equity. I am working on one project that fronts the Beltline here in Atlanta, which is fast becoming a great equalizer as it continues to complete its loop , connecting neighborhoods in a new way with social space.

The site is in southeast Atlanta on what once was an industrial site along the railroad line that has since become part of the Beltline trail. What once would have been the rear of a site becomes a new front, an additional front, and my project of apartment flats and commercial space has to acknowledge this new pedestrian trail.

680 Hamilton site plan, with the city street to the bottom of the image, and the Beltline at the top. Both become active, public entries to the project. Everyone benefits from inclusion. Rendered Image by HGOR

I envisioned buildings that were carved up, notched, sliced to let the light in, sculpted from space into forms.

Aerial Study: Beltline in the foreground, with a central piazza incorporating elements of existing structures into commercial ‘follies.’

Aerial Study: An internal street that feels like part of the city, connecting to the Beltline. Hide the parking. Scale the buildings appropriately.

Pedestrian View Study: Architecture makes room for social space and becomes the stage for everyone’s lives.

Design inevitably has a hierarchy: a big idea permeates all the little ones. The melody line threads through the entire song, and if the emotion is strong enough, you feel it without needing to know what it’s ‘about.’ What stands out? What fits in? The big idea here is the figure-ground, the open vs. closed, the act of making room for public space in recognizable forms: piazzas, streets, pedestrian lanes, lawns, arbors, and pass-throughs. The architecture of the apartment buildings supports and frames a community stage. The buildings themselves: just context and home.

“That’s my window there, with the balcony.”

“We can meet for a drink downstairs and figure something out.”

“A bunch of us meet here for a run at 6:30.”

An architect needs to understand that sometimes the best part of a project happens in places where you didn’t place the building. Space carved out to let the light in.

Learning from LOHA

Lorcan O’Herlihy and his design firm LOHA are leading the charge for architecture that matters with their work. His latest book is called “Architecture is a Social Act,” and it chronicles his team’s efforts to think of architecture as a force of creating spaces that are livable, that encourage community, and are socially equitable. I recently attended a lecture for Kennesaw State University’s architecture department and he presented several of his projects where he discussed design actions that doubled as guerilla tactics for creating social spaces and actual change for the communities.

Formosa 1140

This project for affordable housing in Los Angeles inverts an introverted building type (a courtyard) into a more extroverted one: an exterior walkway connects through-block units, giving them cross ventilation and a greater perception of interior space. Contracting the building’s form and pushing it to one side, and sinking a parking podium under the site, provided room and a creative strategy for a new community park space. The building itself is a study in layering and color and light and shadow: a painter designed these elevations, and even in a small 11 unit building they are rapturous and complex.

Screenshot from the LOHA lecture showing the Formosa elevation.

The park exists only because the architect made space for it and deemed it necessary and vital.

Inventive site section becomes the social act, creating social space where it would not otherwise exist.

MLK 1101

Designers cannot forget to carve the room to allow us to come together. What happens when a city cannot grow any further, and it discovers that sidewalks and boulevards are not enough? There are over 60,000 homeless in Los Angeles. LOHA designed this project for supportive housing for veterans and families with the simple tenet that open space and natural light are needed for a healthy mind. Architecture houses that healing mind, and creates outdoor living rooms, inviting community amenity spaces, and an uplifting spirit of design where residents cannot help but feel valued and anchor their dignity.

The building plan fragments, bends and encourages residents to gather on the roof of the parking podium.

The street elevation, with its peek at a green roof, stairs up to the piazza, and a healthy attention to a bright facade.

These LOHA projects are successes beyond being some of the best architectural design in affordable housing today; the designs began with purposeful action, the ‘social act’ of their mantra. Community matters, dignity matters, and these become design rudders for decisions that follow. The result is a place that connects, is alive, and has real significance to its neighborhood.