Tonight, I'm going to show you three buildings, the first of which is our studio.
In the winter of 2001, I spent months driving around the worst neighborhoods I could find
in Atlanta.
Vacant lots, railroad lines, burned out buildings.
I was looking for a place that no one else wanted, something anonymous, something forgotten.
The building I found had been abandoned for seven years.
In the 1940s, it was an automotive parts warehouse, but by the time the owner died in the 1990s,
the remaining family had moved away, and the roof had finally collapsed from the weight
of standing water.
It took me three months to track down the descendants of the owner, and when their agent showed
up to meet me, I had to climb over the walls to get in.
The place was filled to the rafters with debris.
Working weekends, demolition took six months, and 38,000 pounds of steel was pulled out
in the process.
So I began with what was left, four walls, a concrete slab, the roof joists, and the
sky.
The program would be simple, a place to work and sleep, but with the three tracks of freight
trains just outside the front door, I learned very quickly how difficult it would be to
sleep as the pattern of the train whistle is always the same, two long, one short, one
very long, and loud.
The renovation took four years.
So as you approach, you are under the original rusted canopy, 16 feet tall.
This is the first room, you might say, all ceiling but no enclosure.
Then as you pass through the solid doors, suddenly you go back outside.
It is a room with all walls but no roof.
A private courtyard, invisible to the street.
It holds a table for 16 friends, a garden, a fireplace, and at the back wall of the courtyard
are eight glass doors which make a window inside to the studio, and this serves as the
single window to both spaces.
The studio space, which is now our office, is the primary space of the project.
To the right is the courtyard, to the left, a series of parallel walls holding three
tiny rooms, a kitchen, a closet, and a bathroom.
These walls are sliced and then filled in with glass so that when you wash dishes or
you take a shower, these gaps frame views back to the courtyard and to the sky beyond.
Finally at the very back is a small living area with a bed, a closet, a few chairs.
From the bed, through the gaps in the walls, you can still keep your eye on the front door
and the trains, and except for the trains, it is very quiet, and with the skylights,
the night is often as bright as the day.
Line number two, I'm going to show you, the Old Fourth Ward neighborhood of Atlanta, once
a thriving working class district in the early 1900s, largely destroyed by the Great Atlanta
Fire of 1917, shown on the left in red, also destroyed somewhat by the construction of
the Freedom Parkway in the 1990s, shown in blue.
The bright image shows a portion of that parkway in the upper left in our site for a single
family house.
The lot is tiny, 40 feet wide by 89 feet deep, but that gave us an opportunity to engage
all parts of the site, pulling the front porch up to the street, cantilevering a bedroom
back out over the backyard, introducing exterior spaces into the bulk of the house at all levels.
This created a house which has as many interior corners as exterior, using windows on these
exterior spaces to pull light and views deep into the plan, and on the right an interior
view shows how a central skylight in the upper left hand corner pulls light all the way down
in the main story, three stories of the house.
But as much as we were concerned with how the house functioned spatially, we were fascinated
with how we might position the structure in the material and historical lineage of Atlanta.
This is a painting by the artist John Addy, which is based on a photograph of General
Sherman's destruction of Atlanta in 1854 at the Cab Avenue, just a few blocks away.
We were intrigued with the idea of creating a very dark house, one that acts as a visual
sponge if you will, soaking up all the colors of the neighboring houses, the dirt, the grime,
the soot of the city.
Thus at night, the windows would be lit in bright contrast to the shadow hidden form
of the house.
So we and the owners commissioned John Addy to develop a technique whereby he would hand
paint each of the exterior panels before they were lifted and installed onto the house,
and then go back and drip layers of paint, unifying them in a black wash from top to
bottom.
On the right is the house just a few days ago, we're a few weeks away from completion.
Finally, building number three, a gallery.
Not far from that image of Sherman's destruction is White Space Gallery in Inman Park.
This picture taken in 1973 shows the original stable and carriage building out back behind
one of the grand Victorian houses on Edgewood.
Massed by the gallery owner to consider the conversion of the structure into a contemporary
gallery, we discovered an incredible interior filled with pencil scrawlings from 1905, and
walls covered with a mysterious, opalescent silver paint.
We realized that the structure, while powerful in its historic and material presence, was
also very fragile.
Our approach was to conduct a kind of distillation of what's already there, intervening in a
way that would emphasize the raw, existing condition without actually touching it.
The first thing we did was to seal the space and enclose it with a set of oversized steel
and glass doors using a custom hinge on the lower left, which would be completely concealed
once they were installed.
Inside, three thin steel frames were mounted in front of the existing brick walls, partially
obscuring the remaining windows and doors and touching neither the floor nor the ceiling.
Power and heating are hidden away behind the walls and distributed through existing gaps
in the ceiling.
The finished frames hold very thin surfaces for the installation of art.
Light from the previous windows spills around the panels, visually floating them, and fabricated
from the same black steel as the wall frames are custom light fixtures suspended from concealed
mounts in the ceiling.
Finally, where this strategy of concealment and a light touch comes together is with a
sixth steel panel.
Weighing 2,500 pounds, it's cantilevered off of a single steel post, which itself is mounted
on one thrust bearing in the upper right-hand corner.
With a light push, it moves across the floor from one side of the gallery to the other.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
