When Bernard McCoy was stationed in Italy with the US air force in the 1990s, the culture of design and creative collaboration he witnessed there made an impression. When he arrived back home in Atlanta, he saw the potential for his native city, just like Milan or London, to develop events for sharing, discussing and exploring developments within the world of architecture.
McCoy launched MA! Architecture Tours in 2007, featuring both commercial and residential buildings. The very first tour was a visit to a contemporary home. “It was an open house where people could experience what a modern property was like,” he says. “It drew in more than 100 people.” The tours were a precursor to the Atlanta Design Festival, founded by McCoy and Elayne DeLeo in 2009.
The week-long festival, which starts this weekend, has evolved to include creatives from different industries. Alongside tours and exhibitions, the programme features panel discussions and — with this year’s theme being “Why Not Now?” — aims to showcase Atlanta’s progressive design in technology, architecture, products, craft and urban planning.
Residential tours continue to highlight the evolving architectural styles in the city. “Juxtaposition” is a restored c1915 house originally designed by Atlanta architect Neel Reid and located in the historic Druid Hills neighbourhood, which was laid out at the turn of the century by Frederick Law Olmsted. For the restoration project, Atlanta-based architect Sheila Lee Davies created modern additions including a distinctive glass and zinc pavilion, demonstrating how the city’s traditional housing stock can be updated and complemented using contemporary architecture.
Visitors can also tour Lee Davies’s recently completed Cantilever House, which is built on a wedge-shaped site and features a cantilevered first floor that exploits views of the surrounding park. “Atlanta’s changing demographics produce greater demand for modern architecture,” Lee Davies says, and her bold design creates a 20ft open and centralised area for family and entertaining. “The house features strong indoor-outdoor connections and a flexible layout that fits well” on its challenging lot, she says.
Also worth viewing is McLendon Avenue Home by Robert M Cain, who incorporated a bridge into his design in order to overcome the challenges of having a creek on the site. “Scattered around the city core are undeveloped sites considered ‘unbuildable’, most often because of jurisdictionally imposed restraints such as zoning, zoning setbacks and riparian stream buffers,” says Cain. The house shows, he hopes, how restrictive building regulations can be overcome.
For visitors seeking interiors and furniture design, Minnesota brand Room & Board will be showing items focused on sustainable and repurposed materials. Its Prospect coffee table, for example, is made from reclaimed wood and treated using the Japanese technique of shou-sugi-ban, whereby the wood is flame-charred and blackened.
Atlanta showroom Illuminations will be displaying the Plusminus lighting system by Stefan Diez for Vibia, which features a textile strap that encourages lighting designers to create bespoke configurations. Brand collective MillerKnoll is highlighting timeless design, displaying Eero Saarinen’s Womb Chair and Side Table along with other classics.
The festival is focused on incorporating as many creative elements that are relevant to the city’s development as possible. In 2018 McCoy came across Design Economy — a study published every three years by the UK’s Design Council that provides data on the state of design and design skills, and their value to the national economy. He commissioned British consultancy Ortus Economic Research to do the same for Atlanta, in the hope that the findings would help to secure more support from the city council for the festival.
The study revealed the design sector is a significant economic driver for Atlanta with creatives within the engineering, healthcare and fashion industries also playing their part to generate $39.5bn in GDP in 2021. This is 8.3 per cent of Atlanta’s GDP and is a greater proportion of employment and wealth creation than the US average (7.2 per cent) and New York (6.1 per cent).
The results are encouraging for co-founder Elayne DeLeo, who believes the festival highlights the significance of creative businesses and individuals in Atlanta who are leveraging the power of design to solve challenging problems, such as Cain’s McLendon House. “The festival will show how design can become the cornerstone of change” across a range of industries and disciplines, she says.
The festival’s Creative Futures Conference is taking place in the Old Fourth Ward, a historic neighbourhood that was once a settlement for previously enslaved African-Americans, and was home to Martin Luther King Junior. Now, it’s home to a 12-acre mixed-use redevelopment, due to be completed in 2024 with hotels, residential buildings, shops and offices. This area also hosts the Eastside Trail of the city’s regenerative BeltLine — a network of public parks, trails, transit system and housing built on the old rail system and open for visitors to explore.
One of the speakers at the conference is Jan Knikker, a partner at Dutch architecture firm MVRDV, who will be giving a talk on best practice in urban planning and trends in improving cities and towns for their inhabitants, while maintaining a healthy, sustainable lifestyle and economy. “We see that Atlanta is a city in transformation and that this archetype of the car-based American multi-centred city is refreshing itself,” Knikker says.
The diverse demographic of attendees at the festival reflects the increasing genuine interest from the local population, says McCoy. “There are people who attend in their eighties that love Modernism and the festival allows them to be around like-minded people from different generations,” he says. “The fellowship that initiated the festival is very much still there.”
Atlanta Design Festival; October 14-22; atlantadesignfestival.net
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