They Didn’t Build On That Olympic Spirit

This is not Barcelona. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, sponsors of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games here repeat this refrain when talking about Atlanta’s efforts to organize the Games and make the city look good in the global media spotlight.

Barcelona is a hard act to follow. In preparing for the ’92 Olympics, the Catalonian capital commissioned many of Spain’s and the world’s best architects to design Olympic venues and related facilities. Atlanta did not aim so high.

There are a few happy exceptions, but basically, Atlanta is offering a display of Southern architectural competence. The sports facilities will stand up, they will serve athletes and audiences well, and in many cases they will prove useful long after the Games are done.

Rarely, however, will they inspire emotions or thoughts that go beyond the event itself. Nor will they do much to change the perception the outside world has of Atlanta or, indeed, that Atlanta has of itself.

This is hardly a disgrace, but it is certainly a missed opportunity. The idea of inspirational architectural quality simply was not part of the script for these Olympics. Yet it would have been simple and natural to celebrate athletic excellence with architecture to match.

Then, there is the crucial matter of the long-term legacy of the Games. That is what is truly important to the sponsoring cities--never mind the deserved but oft-inflated burst of hometown pride that comes with the Olympics.

And never mind the television images. Olympic cities all look good on the tube, and they always look a lot alike. Sure, there are mandatory shots of local color, but with fountains fountaining, flags flagging and throngs thronging on clean, tree-lined boulevards, cities as different as Los Angeles, Seoul and Barcelona (to name the last three hosts of the Summer Olympics) take on the homogenizing look of the Games.

Hosting this global spectacle, however, does provide a rare opportunity to focus a city’s energies on its long-term problems and prospects. Here, again, Barcelona set a new standard. It leveraged its Olympic moment to build roads, bridges, parks and other public facilities on an unprecedented scale. “Barcelona used the Olympics to accomplish a 20-year city plan in four years,” as one Atlanta official wistfully put it.

Atlanta did not do this. But for a city with no planning tradition to speak of and with a history of woefully neglecting its public realm, Atlanta didn’t do so badly in the legacy department.

The city added to its already impressive stock of athletic facilities. It built significant new parks in its stressed downtown, and rebuilt old ones. It greatly improved the streetscape along fabled Peachtree Street, Auburn Avenue and other key downtown thoroughfares. In addition to the remarkable Olympic Cauldron and Bridge, it placed more than 75 new works of public art within the city limits. Most hearteningly, it made what one observer called “a good-faith effort” to improve conditions in depressed city neighborhoods.

Whether such positive developments produce all or even any of the hoped-for effects in coming years--improvement in the center city economy, increased amounts of close-in housing, more and better public spaces, neighborhood stabilization and so on--remains to be seen.

But the fact that these things happened at all comes as something of a surprise, in view of the disorganization and bitter squabbling that followed the exhilarating announcement--”It’s Atlanta!”--six years ago.

Like Los Angeles in 1984 (and unlike every other recent Olympic city), Atlanta based its Olympic bid on private financing. This made accomplishing broad public goals inherently difficult. Such troubles were compounded when the organization set up to oversee the Games--the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (ACOG)--took a hard-line, “inside the fences” approach to its responsibilities. Basically, this translated as “We’ll build the venues and somebody else can do the rest.”

ACOG’s plan was to use as many existing facilities as possible--above all, the downtown Omni arena and Georgia World Congress Center. Even so, ACOG budgeted about $550 million for new construction. The organization emphasized technical expertise in its architect-engineer selections, and it employed Atlanta-based firms whenever possible.

The No. 1 need was for an Olympic-caliber stadium for track and field events. ACOG President Billy Payne, a lawyer and University of Georgia football star, envisioned such a stadium downtown. His idea was to build it on parking lots south of the existing Fulton County Stadium, a 30-year-old multipurpose structure.

Other than the inherent waste involved--though still serviceable, the existing stadium will be torn down later this year--this worked out well. The new, $209 million, 85,000-seat stadium will be a fine, if inevitably sweltering, container for this summer’s crowds. Then, after 35,000 seats are removed, it will become a baseball park for the Braves. (As ACOG paid for the whole thing, this makes the baseball team by far the biggest single legatee of the Games.)

Happily, the new stadium is one of the more satisfying architectural works. Designed by a four-firm team in which Atlanta’s Heery International figured prominently, it ingeniously accommodates the different geometric shapes the sports demand--the oval track now dominates, but in the tuck of the stadium’s southwest corner you can see the baseball diamond in nascent form.

Today’s visitor also can imagine what a splendid baseball park this will become when the track’s northern bleachers are removed. A stadium in the neo-traditional, baseball-only mold of Oriole Park at Camden Yards, it will suit the team and the fans just fine, with its corporate suites, broad concourses and thrilling views.

Of course, the design is a bit formulaic. People love these places, and for excellent reason: They are designed with people in mind.

Two extraordinary gestures save the Braves ballpark from being a Camden Yards clone--the powerful march of brick piers and arches that distinguish its exterior walls, and the astonishing cascades of exit stairwells on two sides of the stadium. Right now, these great stairwells play a sort of second fiddle to the extra Olympic seats. But by opening day next spring those seats will have been replaced by an entrance plaza, and the great stairwells will provide the building with a unique identity.

The out-and-out best-in-show award for the architecture of the ’96 Games, however, goes to the stables in out-of-the-way Conyers, Ga., about 30 miles east of Atlanta. Conyers itself is a long-shot story within the saga of Atlanta’s long-shot Olympic bid--a town of 8,000 that convinced ACOG it could handle the equestrian venue and then spent $13 million getting it built. (ACOG spent $24 million.)

The 1,139-acre package, with a grand prix arena, practice fields, steeplechase oval and so on, was laid out on hilly terrain. Much of the architecture is mundane at best, although mention should be made of the jumps on the cross-country obstacle course. Designed by Ralph Haller, constructed of wood and based on aspects of Southern life and history, they are impressive, telegenic and fun. The horses will sail over Indian mounds, Civil War embattlements and even a gigantic rattlesnake.

But the barns, my, there’s a touch of poetry in these utilitarian structures. Designed by the Atlanta firm of Lord Aeck & Sargent with open sides to attract prevailing breezes, along with modular movable stalls made of wood, vented pitched roofs made of metal, and curving steel beams to hold them up, these buildings are everything they should be--simple, economical, comfortable, efficient. Despite being packed together on a dusty, treeless expanse, they’re quite beautiful.

The Aquatic Center on the Georgia Tech campus (by Atlanta’s Stanley Love-Stanley and Smallwood, Reynolds, Stewart, Stewart and Associates) is outstanding in its way. The structural skeleton is the architecture here--this is a high, open pavilion whose exposed steel trusses provide plenty of visual punch. It makes a dramatic silhouette against the broad Southern sky.

And that’s all, folks, for memorable architectural moments of the ’96 Games. The other sports buildings aren’t so much actively awful as just blah. Things you might expect a hard-pressed county government to put up. Cautious, unambitious, workable facilities, including a gymnasium, a tennis complex, outdoor stadiums for field hockey and bicycle racing, covered shooting ranges, a medical testing lab and more. This stuff wouldn’t make it to the trials of an Olympics of architecture.

Fortunately, there also is an architecture outside the Olympic fences. Downtown Atlanta is the primary beneficiary, for two reasons. The first is that, right from the beginning, the Games’ private sponsors decided to concentrate most of the major venues within an “Olympic Ring”--a circle with a 1.5-mile radius centered at the Georgia World Congress Center downtown. The second reason--to oversimplify--is former mayor Maynard Jackson.

Atlanta’s underfunded, politically fragmented city government operated at a big disadvantage in its negotiations with sharply focused ACOG over such issues as infrastructure costs, neighborhood needs and overall fairness. But in the fall of 1992 Jackson put his weight behind the Corporation for Olympic Development in Atlanta (CODA), a nonprofit, public-private organization set up to plan and oversee public improvements downtown and in inner-city communities. And, as it turned out, CODA (with the support of Jackson’s successor, Bill Campbell, and others) performed beyond expectations.

Downtown Atlanta, it should be said, has long been a strangely alienating place. Physically, it is dominated by two opposite elements: the hefty buildings of architect-developer John Portman, with their connecting bridges and sci-fi atriums, and vacant sites operated as parking lots by land speculators. There also are two conflicting street grids and steep hills to contend with. All told, it is safe to say that, with the possible exception of Houston, no American downtown has devoted less attention to pedestrian amenities and traditional public gathering places.

Obviously, with this as a context, almost anything could be seen as an improvement.

Even a noble failure speaks to high ambitions: Working with a consortium of corporations, CODA commissioned what would have been the aesthetic high point of the Games--a wondrous, airy, celebratory Atlanta pavilion on a prominent Peachtree Street site, designed by Scogin Elam and Bray, the city’s most adventurous architecture firm. But it was a complicated deal and, alas, time fell short, and it didn’t get built.

In any event, what did get built is significant. The centerpiece of the new public realm is Woodruff Park, formerly a burrowed, depressing hardscape, transformed by architect Nimrod Long and others into a splendid undulation of grass, with a bandstand, a powerful fountain perfectly placed, and other welcoming features--a true center for downtown.

There are other, smaller parks at key locations, including a “folk art park” vivifying otherwise forgettable chunks of urban real estate where a couple of very ugly bridges cross a 12-lane interstate highway at downtown’s northern edge. All of this isn’t enough exactly to transform downtown Atlanta, but, along with Olympian greed, it already has stimulated a little surge in downtown housing.

In the long run, these improvements may signal a healthy change in Atlanta’s attitudes. The most important totems may be the handsome new “Atlanta lights”--2,000 street light fixtures designed by Long that now demarcate Peachtree Street and other public areas.

Even ACOG got into the spirit of going outside the fences by helping to support the Olympic Village high-rise housing for the athletes, rather adroitly designed by Atlanta’s Niles Bolton Associates to fit the collegiate setting of Georgia Tech. These buildings will become dormitories for Georgia Tech and Georgia State University after the Games. Another of ACOG’s pet projects, jointly financed with the state and private donors, is Centennial Olympic Park, a $50 million public park taking up 21 acres of underused or abandoned downtown real estate.

For all the strenuous huffing and puffing of the last four years by CODA, Habitat for Humanity, various neighborhood groups, a few private corporations and the federal government produced a pitiful total of 290 new housing units in these areas, according to the Atlanta Journal and Constitution.

Yet numbers do not tell the whole story. If you walk along Auburn Avenue, near the birthplace of Martin Luther King Jr., you will see newly paved sidewalks, rows of young willow oak trees and dozens of the light fixtures. You will come across a new public marketplace (under a disfiguring freeway bridge) and a welcoming new park. If you turn onto Howell Street, you will see nine new and eight rehabilitated houses, where a few years ago there were boarded windows and rubble-strewn vacant lots. A street has been remade--no small thing.

It may be that in the neighborhoods, and all through Atlanta, public-spiritedness will decline and public business will return to a depressed norm after the Games. Then again, maybe not. “We have learned a lot in three years,” said CODA President Clara Axam. “We’d be awfully stupid if we don’t capitalize.”