Atlanta’s overall architectural quality is among the worst of any major U.S. city, and you will never find a harsher critic than I of its subpar built environment.
May it never be said, though, that I do not praise the few works in the city that are actually worthy of admiration. Here’s one: the 1991 expansion of the Georgian Terrace Hotel, designed by Smallwood Reynolds Stewart Stewart & Associates of Atlanta.
The 20-story tower was attached to the original 1911 structure — the first of dozens of luxury hotels in the eastern United States designed by W.L. Stoddart of New York, who had deep ties to Atlanta and designed several other buildings in the city, notably the Winecoff Hotel, site of the deadliest hotel fire in United States history.
Efficient and prolific, Stoddart became a millionaire from his many projects, although his legacy is all but forgotten today. I would argue that’s because he spent the bulk of his career sacrificing his creative talent — and there is ample evidence that he had actual talent — by lazily repeating the same designs, which became increasingly flavorless and banal.
Compare Stoddart’s Poinsett Hotel in Greenville, South Carolina; the Francis Marion Hotel in Charleston, South Carolina; or the Hotel Savannah in Savannah, Georgia — the 3 buildings are nearly identical in appearance and plan.
Thomas Wolfe was scathingly accurate in his assessment of Stoddart’s Battery Park Hotel in Asheville, North Carolina: “It was being stamped out of the same mold, as if by some gigantic biscuit-cutter of hotels that had produced a thousand others like it all over the country.”
Like so many hotels of the era, Atlanta’s Georgian Terrace had been long abandoned when it was renovated into luxury apartments in 1991. Smallwood’s soaring glass and steel atrium, seen here, ingeniously incorporated Stoddart’s hotel building with the modern addition.
Considered radical at the time, the design met with local opposition (isn’t that always the case?), but in the years since, the expanded Georgian Terrace — once again a hotel — has become an integral part of Midtown Atlanta, and is something rare for the city: a beautiful and unique space that preserves history.