Project Description
Modera Prominence in Buckhead, GA is a new mixed-use development that performs a rare feat of urbanism in a difficult context; it is an ensemble of buildings constructed over time that makes a place. Buckhead is a dense edge city of Atlanta characterized by large roads, sizable blocks, and buildings that sit casually on their sites. It is an area that contains adequate density for mixed use walkable, transit oriented, placemaking, but that doesn’t deliver the promise of the density.
Developed in 1998, Prominence Tower is a 19-story trophy office building situated on the important corner of Lenox and Piedmont Roads. It exemplifies a typical suburban office site plan parti: a high-rise occupying the middle of its site with a parking garage behind and a landscaped foreground to each street of the corner location.
In 2012, the office building and surrounding land were acquired by Mill Creek Residential, who then engaged SK+I to provide the planning and architecture services to refine and realize a broader mixed use idea for the area.
Phase I, consisting of 320 units and 20,000 square feet of retail, is a composite building comprised of a partially enclosed courtyard building on the corner and a cranked bar building that stretches north along Lenox. Together the buildings engage and define the two intersecting streets: the courtyard building with ground-floor retail and the bar building with stoops and dooryards. Phase II, comprising 395 units, is also a composite building consisting of a podium courtyard building and a high-rise tower. The lower building engages the internal streets and the tower completes the plaza being formed by the existing office tower and Phase I.
Together with its Phase II companion, Modera Prominence creates a wholly new, adjacent urban context for the existing office tower, enhancing tenant livability and quality of life. The new ensemble shapes a walkable precinct showcased by a pedestrian-oriented, through-block sequence of spaces. The sequence involves a corner piazzetta, a grand stair, a festival retail courtyard, and a hardscape plaza that provides a central focus for the ensemble.
The partially enclosed courtyard building principally shapes the sequence. The building punctuates the important intersection of Lenox and Piedmont with a notch in the massing and a striking branding wall that shapes a small plaza space on the corner. A grand stair links the corner plaza with a festival retail courtyard above. The courtyard will serve the daytime and evening population with retail, chef-inspired restaurants, outdoor dining, coworking spaces, and a central kiosk that will give the outdoor space an architectural focus.
The corner of the building is raised on piloti, revealing the courtyard from the vantage point of the street. The rear of the courtyard is opened at the corner and features a hardscape plaza. Embraced by the two wings of the courtyard building, the existing office tower, and the new Phase II residential tower, the plaza is the center of the composition and the element that brings the three buildings together into a singular spatial composition.
Modera Prominence in Atlanta is an articulate piece of urbanism; it frames a pedestrian sequence through several spaces as it accommodates a significantly sloped site. It shapes a public plaza space that unites three buildings in an open space composition and creates a festival retail courtyard that serves as an areawide—if not regional—draw. It provides a walkable context for a tall building and gives it a power that it never had, as it improves the lives of the people who live and work there.