Scaffolding around the Gold Dome and demolition work along Piedmont Avenue mark the visible start of a $392 million project that state lawmakers have described as long overdue: a full overhaul of Georgia's Capitol complex and the construction of a rare new ground-up office building in downtown Atlanta.
The work is funded out of the $36 billion in state revenue lawmakers approved for this fiscal year. Of the total, $83 million is directed specifically at preserving the historical integrity of the 1889 Capitol, including a fresh thin layer of actual gold applied to the dome itself. The budget also covers safety and security upgrades across the Capitol Hill complex.
The larger construction piece sits just north of the Capitol, across Martin Luther King Jr. Drive toward the high-rise core of downtown. An eight-story, 260,000-square-foot legislative office building is planned there, replacing two partially vacant state-owned structures whose demolition recently began — work now visible along Piedmont Avenue. One of the buildings coming down housed the Georgia Office of the Child Advocate for the Protection of Children.
The new building will include a parking garage with 500 spaces and connect to the Gold Dome by skybridge, a detail lawmakers revealed in February. It replaces a dated 1980s office building south of the Capitol that houses most legislative offices and committee rooms today but needs new mechanical and heating systems and lacks sufficient meeting space. Lawmakers have said for years that they are bursting at the seams of the historic Capitol and its adjacent office building.
Project leaders expect the new construction around the Capitol to be finished by the end of 2026. For downtown, that timeline is significant beyond the legislature's own needs: it puts a large state construction site, and then a completed new civic building, on the blocks between the Capitol and the downtown core during the same window the city is racing to finish its World Cup projects.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published September 2024.