The Atlanta City Studio is coming back, and it is landing in South Downtown. The roving urban design studio opens its fourth location on Monday in The Sylvan Building on Mitchell Street, its first new home since 2022 and a notable vote of confidence in the revitalization of historic Hotel Row.
The studio operates inside the City of Atlanta's Department of City Planning, managed by the department's Office of Design, and its whole method depends on being physically present in a neighborhood. It relocates every few years so that residents in different parts of the city can walk in, offer opinions, and, as studio leaders put it, play an integral role in the design of the city. Leaders say the Hotel Row location, next door to Spiller Park Coffee, confirms their commitment to South Downtown's growth while giving the city departments overseeing that growth a base inside it.
Since launching in 2016 at Ponce City Market, the studio has worked on Westside Park, the pedestrian-friendly revamp of Broad Street downtown, the Cascade Storefront Redesign Program, the Beecher Street design concept, and the Cascade bus canopy design and construction. Its prior homes were Ponce City Market from 2016 to 2017, Cascade Heights from 2017 to 2019, and a building on South Broad Street from 2019 to 2022.
The Sylvan Building is filling up around it. A tech-focused startup and coworking hub is set to open in the same building in early 2025 — the 31,000-square-foot Atlanta Tech Village-Sylvan, positioned as downtown's answer to the Buckhead startup hub of the same name.
That is one piece of a much larger effort. Work is accelerating on Project Elle, an L-shaped collection of more than 25 buildings running from Ted Turner Drive and Mitchell Street around to Broad Street and up to Five Points. Plans call for more than 100 adaptive-reuse apartments and 150,000 square feet of commercial space. Atlanta Ventures said in July that its goal was to have the majority of those buildings under construction by the end of 2024.
Putting the city's design shop in the middle of that is a deliberate choice. South Downtown is the part of the city where the most buildings are changing hands and use at once, and the studio's value has always been that residents can find it without an appointment.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published September 2024.
