To get a sense of the transformation of the American city from a glittering downtown surrounded by sprawl into a collection of neighborhoods and points of interest increasingly focused on renovation, reuse, and reimagination—go to Atlanta.
Big cities along the coasts, such as New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, have for decades been turning, or returning, to their warehouse districts and transportation structures to reuse them for shopping, offices, and apartments. The Chelsea Market, Brooklyn Navy Yard, and Los Angeles Warehouse Districts are where the action is.
Now the middle of the country, led by cities such as Denver (the LoDdo District) and even Des Moines, Iowa (the Market District), is getting into the act. But to see Atlanta, the crystal city at the heart of the American Southeast’s rebirth as a manufacturing and services motor of our economy, turn away from the thrusting towers of downtown and Peachtree Street and towards old meatpacking plants and a Sears warehouse is especially remarkable.
On a recent trip to Atlanta, I reflexively booked myself into one of the hotels downtown by John Portman, FAIA. That is where the action has always been, aside from at the busiest airport in the world or the upscale Peachtree area. As soon as I put my bags down, however, my local hosts whisked me away to the Westside Provisions District. First opened in 2016, it is now a collection of former food warehouses, augmented by truly ugly upscale apartment blocks, that meanders around plazas, courtyards, and parking garages, some of which move through the buildings themselves.
Around the district, there were traffic jams. Inside, people were strolling around, eating, drinking, and (in the case of us nerdy architect types) admiring the exposed concrete structure through which locally based renovation architects Smith Dalia had threaded stairs, elevators, and balconies.
What made the whole place especially lively was that weaving of new and old, inside and out, the public street and private commercial district. The complex has even jumped over a major railroad line in defiance of old rules about what shoppers or diners will do to get from one part of their experience to another. The architects were especially skillful at highlighting the acts of renovation, leaving ragged edges of brick, turning facades into pictures of different materials as they selectively stripped stucco and paint to reveal underlying concrete and brick textures, and forthrightly adding new objects hovering over and through the new structures.
The next day I visited what is by far the largest of such renovations, the Ponce City Market. Once Sears’ largest warehouse on the East Coast, the 2 million-square-foot grid of concrete and brick sat empty for decades, most recently with a little city hall offshoot hunkering in its vast spaces. Now its complete ground floor has filled up with more of the same sort of upscale restaurants and stores that fill out the Westside Provisions area, while the seemingly endless expanse of floors above are also becoming populated by lofts where people either live or work, or both. The scale is massive, as were the crowds when I visited, and the architecture provides an open framework that sets the scene for all that activity without enclosing it with the kind of mind-numbing smooth surfaces, even lighting, and scented air that have helped to make shopping malls so dead, or dying. The design, by the New York firm S9 Architecture, emphasizes the heroic qualities of the original building and makes the most of the many levels, openings, and perspectives needed to make the big block accessible and usable. New steel frames stand in the old concrete frames, the brick has been cleaned until it shines, and remnants of old equipment and structure are treated as found art. This is heroic renovation.
The Ponce City Market is helped by the fact that it is on the BeltLine, Atlanta’s supposed answer to New York’s High Line. Like the popular elevated park it seeks to copy, the BeltLine is a former railroad line. Here it goes on for miles, meandering through and along the back of neighborhoods with bike and hiking trails. Unlike the High Line, the BeltLine has little of the kind of design elements or density that make it a place where you actually want to linger. No matter: it brings people out into public space; it feeds the market; and it has spawned new construction so large and ugly to make the Westside Provisions additions look delicate and good in comparison.
The big story lurking behind all this is, of course, gentrification. Both new markets are in or next to what were once were areas where people of lower incomes could actually afford to live. Now that is changing with the same rapidity that poorer people are getting crowded out of such hip and happening places around the country. Because this hipification is taking place in the car-oriented metropolises off the seaboards, the problem is exasperated by the hulks of parking garages and access roads surrounding much of these castle-like developments like bulwarks and moats.
The danger—or the reality, if you will—of such large-scale renovationsis that they are becoming the 21-century equivalent of Atlanta’s downtown and Peachtree: fortresses for the privileged in which the architecture signs and secures the upperclass’s enjoyment of their lives. If once reflective glass, soaring atria, and geometric abstractions reaching to the sky denoted and protected where the rich lived, played, shopped, and worked, now it is the open skeletons of concrete warehouses and the ruin porn of distressed brick and fragments of disused industrial equipment turned into monuments.At least, and it is a very big caveat, these new districts are more open and more sustainable. Although they are heavily policed, they are not actual fortresses, and their designs create much more fluid relations between the people living in their lofts looking across at the shops or the people hanging around, while the mixed-use character gives them a more complete sense of life. Because they also consist, at least at their core, of reused buildings, they are considerably better than the closed-off and massive constructions of a previous era in terms of shepherding natural resources.
The Westside Provisions District and the Ponce City Market, in other words, present us with a strategy by which we could bring back to life and give beauty to the remains of oth our industrial and our consumer eras. What I would love to see is a way to take the techniques architects and developers have learned in such projects applied to the making of the kind of facilities we need so much more than another West Elm or martini bar. That would be affordable housing above all else, and all the community services and employment opportunities that go with what should be at the core of our revitalized urban areas.
The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
