|
...Atlanta...Invisible...Accident...Random...Slogans...Testing Ground...Cities within Cities...Flows...Places...Quotes...Background
Background
This background information links to the page from which it came.
ATLANTA -- Atlanta refers to both the City of Atlanta and the Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area. The City of Atlanta has a population of only about 390, 000, roughly the size of Tulsa or Albuquerque. The Atlanta Metropolitan Statistical Area has a population of about 3, 400, 000 including seven counties and dozens of cities and towns. Residents of the metropolitan area as far away as Peachtree City, 30 miles from downtown, say they live in Atlanta, although they may never have been there.
RIDGE -- With an official elevation of 1050 feet above sea level, Atlanta is the second highest city in the United States. Only Denver is higher. The highest point on the ground is 1075 feet and the lowest point 750 feet, the level of the Chattahoochie River, which is six miles from downtown Atlanta. The revolving restaurant of John Portman's WESTIN PEACHTREE PLAZA HOTEL, accessible only by a glass enclosed elevator on the outside of the building, is almost 1800 feet above sea level.
TERMINUS -- Terminus was the name of the area around the Zero Mile Post from 1837 to 1842. Thrasherville, named after Cousin John Thrasher, the contractor in charge of railroad construction, was a nearby temporary settlement housing railroad workers. After moving the Mile Post to its present location in 1842 to better serve railroad operations, the railroad builders named the emerging new settlement Marthasville, in honor of the Georgia governor's daughter. The name changed to Atlanta in 1847. The name Atlanta does not come from the fleet-footed goddess, but greedy, Atalanta, although many think that connection would be appropriate. Atlanta is just the feminine form of Atlantic, taken from the Western and Atlantic Railroad.
ATLANTA -- The renaming of Marthasville to Atlanta in 1847 reflected an early concern for the city's image. Marthasville just didn't fit the image of a future metropolis. After all, a total of 500 people lived in Atlanta shortly after it took its new name, which was ten years before it adopted the slogan "Gate City to the South."
ATRIUM -- Many 19th Century urban buildings -- the arcades of Paris, department stores, and American hotels with their grand lobby spaces -- absorbed public uses and activities into the center of buildings. Insides were as important as outsides. In Atlanta, however, John Portman re-invented the atrium, creating other-worldly spaces inside, diminishing the importance not only of the outside of the building but also the city itself. Portman's Hyatt Regency Hotel was one of the first buildings in Peachtree Center. It is the "classic" modern atrium. It's success spawned the atrium building as a new building type, first for hotel, then office buildings, and then museums and city halls. Rem Koolhaas labels this re-invention, "PORTMAN'S PARADOX:" The MARRIOTT MARQUIS hotel, Portman's most recent in Atlanta, exhibits this atrium - city paradox. Outside, the Marriott is neutral and much of the street frontage is taken up with loading docks, parking entries, and visitor drop-offs. The inside is the opposite: a space beyond the idea of "city." It is the architectural equivalent of the landscape sublime.
MALL CITY -- Lenox Square, built in 1959, was Atlanta's first shopping mall. During the past 35 years, it has grown from a modest center -- two department stores, some shops, and a grocery store -- to a city within a city, known widely as just Lenox. The Mall itself has continuously expanded: three and soon four department stores, a giant food court, an eight-plex cinema, and recently an entire second level of shops. The growth of the Mall also stimulated growth around it: another equally big shopping mall across the street, luxury hotels including the Ritz-Carlton, high rise office towers, big-box retailers in a Power Center, high rise apartment buildings, unusual in Atlanta, a MARTA rapid transit station, and its own toll road, giving direct access to the Atlanta's northern territories. Lenox Square and its surroundings have all the ingredients of a city. However, everything is arranged opposite to traditional ideas of city-making. What appears to be public space is private. Interiors are elaborate architectural compositions; exterior facades are backs, not faces. Walking across Peachtree Street from Lenox Mall to Phipps Plaza, the mall next door, is life-threatening. Walking from apartment to work, shop, eat dinner, or ride MARTA is unlikely. There are few Sidewalks. Inside, however, Lenox is a new kind of Main Street.
PEACHTREE CENTER -- John Portman's first building in downtown Atlanta was the Merchandise Mart which opened in 1961. The success of the Mart led to the development of Peachtree Center, a collection of hotels, office buildings, additional Marts, like the Apparel Mart, Gift Mart and Inforum, and an underground retail and restaurant mall. By 1996, Peachtree Center covered 12 city blocks. The Peachtree Center MARTA rail station connects directly to the retail mall. Most of the buildings are connected together by an elaborate system of pedestrian bridges. One of the bridges connects a distant parking garage and health club, boasting that is the longest pedestrian bridge in the world.
RAVINIA -- When the atrium idea reaches the perimeter, the landscape itself becomes the equivalent of Portman's downtown atriums. Ravinia, an office and hotel development in Perimeter Center, makes a central private garden space into a virtual atrium -- an inside space without a roof. "Ravinia," the name and the garden, is a hybrid of two different landscapes: "ravine" and "arcadia" -- or the ravine in arcadia. The ravine in the dense landscape is the dominant image of Ravinia, in the manner of Portman's hotel atriums where the building itself becomes a neutral background. The atrium, and its virtual counterpart, the private garden, are new building types in the new city.
BRIDGES -- Separating types of traffic -- automobiles, pedestrians, and service vehicles -- has long been a modernist ideal. Skybridges and tunnels are common in large cities. Circulation is layered to reduce conflicts, make space secure, or provide better service. But in Atlanta, bridges are only for the project, connecting the various parts of the City Within the City. Peachtree Center's SKYBRIDGES connect its buildings together above street level. One can move from one's office to another building, parking garages, the food court, or the underground MARTA station without going outside to the downtown streets or sidewalks. In the office park, like Ravinia, interior movement is also separate from the exterior, but the skybridge becomes a garden path, a pedestrian bridge over a lake, or a trellis-covered walkway in the private interior garden, reserved only for the employees or temporary residents of the City Within a City.
PARKING LOT -- The parking lot is now the most experienced urban space in the new city. In the old city, the street is the primary urban space, providing a continuous public realm and weaving the city's parts into a complete and legible whole. The typical pre-World War II American Street, whether Main Street or Elm Street, forms a continuous space made up by the facing buildings or the landscape of trees planted in the space between the curb and the sidewalk. The architect Louis I. Kahn called these streets community rooms, formed by the common agreement of the buildings that lined them. In the new city, the parking lot is a surface, not a space. It is private, not public. It is a fragment, not a part of a whole. The parking lot leads nowhere. But now, one meets in the parking lot, not on the street.
BRIDGES AND PATHS -- Bridges and paths in the new city replace the sidewalks of the old city. The sidewalk absorbs one in the life of the city, as he or she moves from one place to another, one errand to another, one conversation to another. Best described, perhaps, by Jane Jacobs more than 30 years ago, the sidewalk is always part of the street. The sidewalk is a channel of tactile movement through the public space of the city. In the new city, the pedestrian moves by bridge or path, completely isolated from any public space, between the parking place and the office or mall. At their best the bridges become glass and steel cages, converting unsuspecting businessmen into urban voyeurs. And. the paths become routes through elaborate corporate pleasure gardens, inviting the unsuspecting businesswoman, always rushing to the next meeting, to slow down, sit, and conduct her business privately on her cellular phone.
Today the challenge to urbanists is to develop a vocabulary that can speak to the ongoing process of development rather than its spatial contours at any moment. Similarly, we need terms that will emphasize the new patterns of social and economic interaction that our longstanding preoccupation with proximity and place has obscured. In short, as urban geographers have long maintained, we need to address the temporal as well as the spatial dimensions of the modern city. Doing so will require us to move from definition by negation (de-centered city, non-place urban realm, doughnut) to a new set of positive terms.... Whatever words we employ, field or atom or something as yet unnamed, they will help shape our city, for the kind of metaphors we choose will influence the kind of city we see. As the examples of (FRIEDREICH) ENGELS...show(s), learning how to read the city is a necessary part of learning how to change it.
William Sharpe and Leonard Wallach (1987) "From the Great Town to the Non-Place Urban Realm" in Sharpe and Wallach, Eds., Visions of the Modern City. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. P.38-39.
(SENSE OF PLACE) Most of us, I suspect, without giving much thought to the matter, would say that a sense of place, a sense of being at home in a town or a city, grows as we become accostomed to it and learn to know its peculiarities. It is my own belief that a sense of place is something we create ourselves in the course of time. It it the result of habit or custom. But other disagree. They believe that a sense of place comes from a response to features which are already there -- either a beautiful natural setting or well-designed architecture. They believe that a sense of place comes from being in an unusual composition of spaces and forms -- natural or man-made....Ask the average American of the older generation what he or she most clearly remembers and charishes about the home town and its events and the answer will rarely be the public square, the monuments, the patiotic celebrations. What come to mind are such nonpolitical, nonarchitectural places and events as commencement, a revival service in a tent, a traditional football rivalry game, a country fair, and certain family celebrations..... As our cities have grown we have come closer together and acquired a more inclusive sense of community. Even so, I'm inclined to believe that the average American still associates a sense of place not so much with architecture or a monument or a designed space as with some event, some daily or weekly or seasonal occurance which we look forward to or remember and which we share with others, and as a result the event becomes more significant than the place itself.
J.B. Jackson (1994) A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time. New Haven: Yale University Press. P. 159-160.
 Atlanta Essay
Georgia Tech Campus ... Fox ... Portman ... Public Spaces ... Chicken ... Billboards ... Varsity ... Atlanta Essay ... Gorillas ... Stone ... Dreams & Crossroads ... Symphony ... Links ... Neat Stuff
|
