In Atlanta, a 30-year-old experimental backyard finds a brand new, and extra contextual, dwelling.

By Timothy A. Schuler 

Timber Atlanta’s new headquarters has the requisite workplace and program area, together with an implementation yard and tree nursery, however with greater than 55 tree species and the set up of an experimental panorama art work, the endeavor was, in some ways, “extra of a panorama structure challenge than an structure challenge,” says Matt Cherry, ASLA. He’s the director of panorama structure and concrete design on the multidisciplinary agency Lord Aeck Sargent, which designed the brand new constructing.

The challenge, designed with Andropogon, will reforest a big proportion of a three-acre brownfield website left by a business bakery in Atlanta’s Adair Park neighborhood. The property is situated 80 toes from an entrance to the BeltLine, and the panorama contains 235 new timber organized in ecologically distinct “forest rooms,” in addition to a brand new reference to the BeltLine, an intentional transfer to attract guests into the unfenced website. “[Trees Atlanta] principally noticed this as a public area,” Cherry says.

Juxtaposed with the constructing’s modern structure are weathered relics and different hints of the positioning’s industrial historical past, partially because of the finances. “We ended up sort of mining the challenge [for material] to make it occur,” says José Almiñana, FASLA, a principal at Andropogon. Essentially the most notable aspect to obtain a second life is a granite outcrop backyard designed by Darrel Morrison, FASLA, a residing sculpture first put in on the Atlanta Historical past Heart in 1995 (see “Pure Counterpoint,” LAM, October 1995).

Morrison, a longtime educator and an early proponent of designing with naturally occurring plant communities, designed the 30-foot-diameter granite outcrop to summary the distinctive ecology of a quotidian but underappreciated geological formation. The cracks between its lichen-covered granite slabs burst with Stone Mountain yellow daisies. A whorl-shaped melancholy at its heart catches water to create a attribute ephemeral pool.

The outcrop backyard was put in in the midst of the historical past heart’s circle drive, however when it expanded in 1998, the piece was dismantled and its elements stockpiled on the heart. When Cherry first noticed it, “it was a pile of their yard with a tarp on high,” he says.

The thought to repurpose Morrison’s sculpture got here from Greg Levine, the manager director of Timber Atlanta, who studied panorama structure on the College of Georgia throughout Morrison’s time as dean of the Faculty of Surroundings and Design. It got here late within the design course of, however working off Morrison’s unique drawing and historic photographs, the design crew was capable of incorporate the piece into their plan for a Georgia Piedmont meadow area, turning the outcrop right into a centerpiece and regrading the grassland space to direct runoff into its spiral basin.

Reflecting on the outcrop’s new website, Morrison says that, within the sculpture’s relationship to a functioning meadow ecosystem, the piece could also be “extra in context within the new website than it was within the heart of Atlanta.” Its incorporation, Almiñana argues, is yet one more instance of the ways in which an ethic of reuse, even when a necessity, improves a challenge. “In some ways,” he says, “not having all these sources and getting artful results in a greater design.”