There’s little architecture of merit in Atlanta — the city’s leaders have long despised passion and imagination, their minds too addled by the pursuit of power, suppression, and the illusion of status to spark creative inclination.
Instead, Atlanta consistently copies the architectural designs of better cities, usually a decade or more after the fact, inevitably making cheap, watered-down imitations drawn by second-rate firms.
Thus, it’s a genuine surprise when the city actually produces a building that warrants a second look, but here’s one: the new Center for Innovation & the Arts at Spelman College.
Spelman is a historically Black college for women, and the project was fittingly designed by Studio Gang of Chicago — founded by Jeanne Gang — with Goode Van Slyke Architecture — a Black-owned firm of Atlanta — as associate architect.
Like all feeble and flimsy constructs of man, architecture is gasping its last self-important breaths, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for designers to disguise that their job is, at its essence, to make decorative boxes for people to cower and shit in.
Those who can pull off the ruse with ingenuity and style deserve recognition, however, and the designers of this project have done a fine job. Look beneath the building’s exoskeleton and you’ll find a fairly standard, 4-story, 84,000-square-foot box.
What gives the building panache are the metal sunshades and screens on its upper floors, which the Studio Gang site describes as “tuned to the angles of the sun”. OK, sure.
With two recessed porches on the north and south sides, and an open space atop the southwest corner, the building gives the faint illusion that it’s floating in the sky. It’s particularly stunning at dusk, when the falling light deepens the orange and brown palette.
The design recalls work by Philip Freelon, notably the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., and the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Studio Gang has made more interesting and, well, innovative buildings elsewhere, but for Atlanta, this is about as wild and daring an architectural design as you’ll find.