Few people have shaped where downtown Atlanta gathers as much as Thomas W. Ventulett III, and fewer still have been so little known for it. The architect, who co-founded the firm now called TVS, died Aug. 24 of natural causes. He was 90.
Ventulett grew up in Albany in a military household and came to Atlanta to study at Georgia Tech. Early in his career, at the firm Toombs, Amisano & Wells, he worked on the original master plan for the Woodruff Arts Center in Midtown. In 1968 he joined Bill Thompson and Ray Stainback to found Thompson, Ventulett, Stainback & Associates.
A downtown built for crowds
The firm's early commissions set the template for the district that now hosts conventions, concerts and championship games. TVS designed the Georgia World Congress Center and the Omni Complex, the mixed-use arena, hotel and office development that anchored the western edge of downtown in the 1970s. Its office and atrium later became CNN Center, which reopened this year as The CTR after a top-to-bottom overhaul.
His daughter, Suzanne Holder, remembered doing math homework beside her father while he sketched, with sheets of tracing paper showing the Omni spread across his desk. The arena itself is long gone, but the pattern it started, of big public rooms clustered close together, still defines the area.
The same was true of the Georgia Dome, another TVS landmark, which was demolished in 2017. Its footprint became The Home Depot Backyard, the green space in the shadow of Mercedes-Benz Stadium. A few blocks north, the firm's College Football Hall of Fame still draws visitors to Centennial Olympic Park Drive more than a decade after it broke ground.
Beyond downtown, his name is attached to Atlantic Station, the King and Queen towers in Sandy Springs, the former Campanile building and Northlake Mall. By his own tally, his work added up to at least 75 million square feet around the world.
Detail, humility and teaching
His son Thomas P. Ventulett said attention to detail was everything to his father, and that every element of a design had to have a purpose. The children joked that he wore a tie to bed. Former Carter CEO Billy Mitchell recalled that when Colony Square's owners were weighing a redevelopment, Ventulett skipped a formal pitch, asked the room what they liked and what needed fixing, and drew the answers on a large sheet of paper as they talked.
Family and colleagues repeatedly described him as humble. His son once teased him that he was the most unknown person to have built so much in town, and Ventulett said he preferred it that way. TVS said his care for Atlanta shaped places where the city has gathered ever since.
His influence continues at Georgia Tech, where endowments he supported created the Thomas W. Ventulett III Distinguished Chair in Architectural Design. He is survived by three children and six grandchildren; his wife of 61 years, Beth, died in 2019. A public funeral is planned for 1 p.m. Oct. 3 at Holy Innocents' Episcopal Church in Sandy Springs, a campus he helped design.
Original reporting by Zachary Hansen for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
