Atlanta architects rock the Times
March 3rd, 2008 by Felicia Feaster in News
(Photo courtesy bldgs)
What a great surprise to open the New York Times magazine Sunday and find Pilar Viladas’ profile of David Yocum’s and Brian Bell’s West End architectural firm, bldgs.
There are so many amazing people and places in the city, you wonder if the culture vultures of the world will ever find them all. I’m not holding my breath.
In the kind of three degrees of separation that defines the enmeshed lives of Atlantans, Yocum and Bell worked previously with Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam, the architects whose Buckhead Library has been much in the news lately. For those of you following the Buckhead Library situation, check out my initial article.
(For now, fortune has favored the library. The Atlanta Fulton Public Library system voted not to allow developer Ben Carter’s offer of $24 million to buy and level the award-winning library to tempt them. But the building’s ultimate fate will lie with the Fulton County Board of Commissioners. But I digress …)
Yocum’s and Bell’s firm is an amazing high-design space tucked into a desolate stretch of the city. It reminded me of those thick metal doors and grimy hallways in New York City that open up to reveal incredible, secret loft spaces. But there is a Southern edge to bldgs, too: The embrace of rust and time and industrial spaces has something in common with the work of local artists like E.K. Huckaby or filmmaker Milt Thomas, who have also treasured the shabby, the old, that patina of the past in their work.
I can attest to the building’s magic, having attended a particularly lovely and poetic wedding in the space this fall. The time-marked elegance of the space meshed with the rooted, artistic alt couple exchanging their vows. The space was graced with the ghost of the authentic, and seemed a great harbinger of a blessed marriage.
I almost broke my leg negotiating the uneven sidewalks outside the studio several glasses of wine afterward. But the building wove a spell. My son watched a line of ants in the courtyard march in a military column into the office space, embracing the architectural mantra of erasing the line between inside and outside. We went crazy over the bathroom floor composed of beach pebbles. Great architecture, like great art, is supposed to re-envision the world, make you think about space and life in new ways. It did.
Leave a Reply