Atlanta Is a Design City

Atlanta is a city that got rebuilt around the car before most people understood what that would cost. The freeways came through in the fifties and sixties, displacing neighborhoods and encoding a particular idea about how people should move through space. The consequences have been accumulating ever since.

This isn’t just a transportation history. It’s a design history. And the city has spent the last two decades trying to retrofit the outcomes.

The BeltLine as a Design Argument

The Atlanta BeltLine is, at its core, an accessibility project. A former rail corridor repurposed into a 22-mile loop of trail, transit, and green space threading through neighborhoods that were previously disconnected from each other and from the rest of the city.

It works as a design argument because it’s specific. It didn’t try to solve Atlanta’s transportation problem everywhere at once. It identified a single latent asset — a loop of unused rail infrastructure — and built incrementally from there. Thirty-three miles are planned. Less than half are complete. But the sections that are done changed the neighborhoods around them.

The lesson isn’t that linear parks solve cities. It’s that a well-constrained intervention, built with a clear user in mind — pedestrians, cyclists, neighborhood residents who couldn’t previously walk to each other — produces something real and replicable.

Ponce City Market and the Adaptive Reuse Model

The Sears, Roebuck and Company building that became Ponce City Market is one of the better examples of adaptive reuse in the country. A 2.1 million square foot brick complex that was variously a government facility, a Home Depot, and an abandoned eyesore before its renovation.

What makes it work as a design story isn’t the retail or the food hall. It’s the decision to preserve the structure and adapt to its constraints rather than build around them. The building’s original bones — wide floor plates, heavy timber, generous ceiling heights — made it more useful for its current purpose than anything built new for the same footprint probably would be.

Constraints, again, as design opportunity.

What the Airport Tells You

Hartsfield-Jackson is the busiest airport in the world by passenger count. It’s also, by most measures, one of the more functional ones. The terminal layout, the automated train connecting concourses, the signage system — they work at a scale that most airports don’t.

They work because someone, at some point, took the throughput problem seriously. The design goal wasn’t a beautiful airport. It was a legible, navigable one. An airport that a person who’s never been there before can move through without getting lost.

That’s accessible design applied to a non-obvious context. The user isn’t a wheelchair user or a person with a visual impairment — though the design has to work for them too. The user is every person who lands in Atlanta for the first time at 11pm and needs to get to a rental car. The design has to work for that person, at that time, under those conditions.

Why This Matters for What We Build

We’re based in Atlanta in part because the city is a good reminder that design decisions have consequences that outlast the designers. The freeways that defined twentieth-century Atlanta weren’t built by people who wanted to harm the city. They were built by people solving an immediate problem without fully modeling the long-term effects.

Software isn’t infrastructure in the same sense. But the products we build shape how people work, communicate, and move through their own processes. Designing with accessibility and universal use as a starting constraint, not an afterthought, is how you avoid building the freeway.

The BeltLine exists because people decided the city could be different and built toward that incrementally. That’s the only way it works.