Atlanta's skyline is full of towers that were pitched, rendered, and then quietly forgotten — the 11-block GLG Park Plaza, Midtown's infamous No2 Opus Place. Less well known, but arguably more audacious, is Union Tower: a proposal that would have made downtown home to the tallest building in the Southeast, rising directly out of the MARTA Five Points station.
The concept came out of Georgia Tech's Portman Prize, an annual studio competition for master of architecture students. In 2017, with South Downtown's redevelopment prospects just starting to heat up, students Pavan Iyer and Jennifer Lee Johnson set their sights on the neighborhood most Atlantans pass through and rarely look at closely. "We went out to the site and talked to random people on the street to ask if they could draw a map of South Downtown," Iyer, who went on to found the Atlanta design firm eightvillage, told Urbanize Atlanta. "Just about everyone's drawings acknowledged that Broad Street is a tale of two sides in every way."
That observation became the whole premise. Broad Street ran continuously through the heart of downtown until MARTA's Five Points station split it into disconnected north and south segments. Union Tower's design — 1,138 feet tall, 115 feet taller than Bank of America Plaza, which has held Atlanta's height record for more than three decades — was built to straddle the station and let North and South Broad reconnect at its base, exactly as they ran before the split.
The design leaned hard into Atlanta's film-industry identity, with production studios and post-production offices woven alongside residential units, and a street-level "Union Cinemas" honoring the demolished Loew's Grand Theatre. Its most memorable flourish, though, was the "Wonka-Vator" — a Ferris-wheel-style glass elevator system that would carry riders up and over the building's exterior for sweeping views of the city, drawing openly on the kitsch of Willy Wonka's glass elevator and Broad Street's own carnival-era history of restaurants, department stores, and midway games.
Iyer spent roughly a year after graduation trying to pitch the concept further, and says he hasn't entirely given up. "I do think the project is still possible, if MARTA could be open to reconnecting the grid," he said — though MARTA's actual Five Points overhaul, which does call for reconnected streets, is squarely focused on the station itself rather than a supertall tower on top of it. Union Tower never got built, and likely never will be. But Iyer says the pitch opened real doors anyway: it led him to Newport US, the German firm that would go on to own dozens of South Downtown buildings, and helped extend Atlanta Streets Alive programming into the neighborhood — a tradition that continues today. "I was as passionate about getting North and South Broad reconnected as I was trying to get a mixed-use vision going for Five Points," he said. "I actually was supposed to get a chance to pitch it to MARTA, but I never got to."
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published January 2024.