Constraints on the Site that Impacted the Building Design

The site is near the Atlanta Airport. It's part of a project for a development called Gateway Center, and this is one of the phases. There's been some phases that have happened before this for a big convention center, hotels, some office buildings already, and because of its proximity to the Atlanta Airport, it's a really important site for the city, and it's an important site for redevelopment. The site that we were given is the site that is just over an acre, and the program, our client wanted us to program a office building that was about 50,000 square feet plus structured parking, and with the site being so small, it was somewhat difficult to get all of that onto the site.

We are near the airport so there were some height restrictions. There's a big easement that runs through the property that also limited the site area. There's really only one front door to the project, so we had to be creative about how we were going to approach where the building was going to sit on the site.

This is the civil site plan, and this is showing this hatched area is an easement that there's already a storm sewer in there, and we couldn't move it. It's already servicing the hotel, and the office buildings, and other projects that are part of the development, so we had to work around that, and because of the way it cuts into the site, the property line is here, but we really couldn't build anything very close to the property line because of the easement, so that really forced us to making that become the front door to the project, and it really wanted to be anyway because of the tram system, and then because of the relationship over to the hotel.

And one of the considerations was to park the cars, the required parking, offsite on the existing parking garage that you see here, so that was going to have to be expanded by another level or two which was going to be really expensive, and that was the direction that the client was thinking we were going to go in, but after we had some time to do some side analysis, we realized there was about a 20-foot slope on the site, and all of that slope was put there, when they did all of the other construction, by the soil that they had excavated from those other sites.

So it was all fill, and we realized that we could take that fill out 'cause we weren't going to be able to build on it anyway, and by taking that out, we now had about a 20-foot podium that we could build. We could park underneath that, and then put the office building on top.

It all worked out. We were still able to maintain 120 feet in the width so we could two trades of parking, and then I think we're about 270 feet in length, so we had a nice office-building footprint of about 110 by 260, I believe, across the long face which ends up being about 25,000 square feet of rentable space per floor, and it met all of the needs for the client.

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