In Atlanta, a 30-year-old experimental garden finds a new, and more contextual, home.

By Timothy A. Schuler 

Trees Atlanta’s new headquarters has the requisite office and program space, including an implementation yard and tree nursery, but with more than 55 tree species and the installation of an experimental landscape artwork, the endeavor was, in many ways, “more of a landscape architecture project than an architecture project,” says Matt Cherry, ASLA. He is the director of landscape architecture and urban design at the multidisciplinary firm Lord Aeck Sargent, which designed the new building.

The project, designed with Andropogon, will reforest a significant percentage of a three-acre brownfield site left by a commercial bakery in Atlanta’s Adair Park neighborhood. The property is located 80 feet from an entrance to the BeltLine, and the landscape includes 235 new trees arranged in ecologically distinct “forest rooms,” as well as a new connection with the BeltLine, an intentional move to draw visitors into the unfenced site. “[Trees Atlanta] basically saw this as a public space,” Cherry says.

Juxtaposed with the building’s contemporary architecture are weathered relics and other hints of the site’s industrial history, partially due to the budget. “We ended up kind of mining the project [for material] to make it happen,” says José Almiñana, FASLA, a principal at Andropogon. The most notable element to receive a second life is a granite outcrop garden designed by Darrel Morrison, FASLA, a living sculpture first installed at the Atlanta History Center in 1995 (see “Natural Counterpoint,” LAM, October 1995).

Morrison, a longtime educator and an early proponent of designing with naturally occurring plant communities, designed the 30-foot-diameter granite outcrop to abstract the unique ecology of a quotidian yet underappreciated geological formation. The cracks between its lichen-covered granite slabs burst with Stone Mountain yellow daisies. A whorl-shaped depression at its center catches water to create a characteristic ephemeral pool.

The outcrop garden was installed in the middle of the history center’s circle drive, but when it expanded in 1998, the piece was dismantled and its parts stockpiled at the center. When Cherry first saw it, “it was a pile in their yard with a tarp on top,” he says.

The idea to repurpose Morrison’s sculpture came from Greg Levine, the executive director of Trees Atlanta, who studied landscape architecture at the University of Georgia during Morrison’s time as dean of the College of Environment and Design. It came late in the design process, but working off Morrison’s original drawing and historic photos, the design team was able to incorporate the piece into their plan for a Georgia Piedmont meadow space, turning the outcrop into a centerpiece and regrading the grassland area to direct runoff into its spiral basin.

Reflecting on the outcrop’s new site, Morrison says that, in the sculpture’s relationship to a functioning meadow ecosystem, the piece may be “more in context in the new site than it was in the center of Atlanta.” Its incorporation, Almiñana argues, is yet another example of the ways that an ethic of reuse, even if a necessity, improves a project. “In many ways,” he says, “not having all these resources and getting crafty leads to a better design.”