2006 PALLADIO AWARDS
Public Spaces: Parks, Plazas, Gardens, Streetscapes
WINNER:
The National Monuments Foundation
Triumphal March
PROJECT: Millennium Gate, Atlanta, GA
CLIENT: National Monuments Foundation; Rodney
Mims Cook, Jr., Atlanta, GA, president
ARCHITECT: Robert Adam Architects, Winchester and
London, U.K.
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECT: Tunnell & Tunnell, Atlanta, GA
INTERIOR DESIGNER: Henrietta Spencer-Churchill,
London, U.K.
ARCHITECT OF RECORD: Collins Cooper Carusi,
Atlanta, GA
CONTRACTOR: Hardin Construction, Atlanta, GA
SCULPTOR: Alexander Stoddart, Paisley, Scotland
ENGINEERS: Jordan, Jones & Goulding, Atlanta;
MACTEC, Alpharetta, GA
FOUNDRY: Morris Singer, Hampshire, U.K.
Ground at a downtown Atlanta, GA, brownfield is slated to
be broken this summer for the nation’s largest Classical
monument since Jefferson’s domed colonnade opened on the
Washington Mall in 1943. At the Atlanta ensemble, called
the Millennium Gate, two bronze Greek goddesses already
rest on pylons. Between them will soon rise a limestone
arch and four allegorical bronze figures with
iconography summarizing the past 2,000 years of human
aspiration and peaceable achievement.
Bringing forth this rare Classical landmark has required
years of negotiation and collaboration among architects,
engineers, landscape architects, developers, donors,
city officials and the Scottish sculptor Alexander
Stoddart. Orchestrating the players is Classical
designer and philanthropist Rodney Mims Cook, Jr.
As the founder and president of an Atlanta nonprofit called
the National Monuments Foundation (NMF), Cook has been
shepherding the project for seven years. Originally
conceived for a barren traffic island in Washington, DC,
the gate’s plan has been gracefully adapted to its
Atlanta berth, largely because of Cook’s watchful eye
and impassioned commitment. “He has tremendous reserves
of compassion and kindness, and he never gets
discouraged, he keeps going great guns,” Stoddart says.
“Rodney is in fact officially a miracle.”
Cook has deep Atlanta roots. Among his Confederate and
Union-sympathizing ancestors are two Atlanta mayors,
both design patrons. In the 1850s, Mayor John Mims
commissioned Atlanta’s first citywide map, and in the
early 1900s, Mayor Livingston Mims funded major park
expansions including an Olmsted Brothers’ scheme. Cook’s
bloodlines and in-laws also include clients of Atlanta’s
renowned Classical architect Philip Trammell Shutze. As
a teenager in the 1970s, Cook led preservation picketers
who saved the city’s Fox Theatre, a 1920s Moorish
fantasy then slated for demolition. Cook was a founding
trustee of the Prince of Wales’s Foundation for
Architecture, which helped organize a competition for a
monument commemorating Atlanta’s hosting of the 1996
Olympics. On an Atlanta traffic circle stands the
competition winner: bronze atlases and limestone
columns, designed by Russian-born architect Anton Glikin.
Locals determinedly cross busy lanes to reach the
sculpture. “People leave bouquets, flags, and candles
there whenever there’s a world tragedy to mourn,” Cook
says. “The monument speaks to their souls.” Atlanta can
use more such meditative gathering places, he adds,
partly because so few were built there in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries: “Citizens here were still
recovering from the Civil War and rebuilding their
homes, while the rest of the country was benefiting so
greatly from the Beaux-Arts City Beautiful movement.”
Atlanta’s Millennium Gate arose out of a now-stalled
endeavor to ennoble Washington, DC’s Commodore Barney
Circle, a snarl of traffic islands and highway ramps. In
2000, Cook organized an international monument
competition, open to architecture students and recent
architecture school graduates and sponsored by the
University of Notre Dame. The jurors were Léon Krier,
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Robert A.M. Stern, Carroll
William Westfall, and Michael Dennis. Daniel G. Parolek
(of Opticos Design, Berkeley, CA) won first place among
ten winners. The other nine were Lisa Schmitt Bergman,
Marianne Cusato (who recently designed a prototype
cottage for Hurricane Katrina recovery zones), Olympics
monument designer Anton Glikin, Shelley Hoenle, Luis
Pedro Vásquez Lobos, Abdul Muzikir, Silvia Neri, Milan
Petkovic and Joseph Matthew Smith. They participated in
a charrette (except for Vásquez Lobos, a Guatemalan who
was tragically killed in a car accident), and their
collaboration led to a four-sided arch that politicians
praised, muddled over and then shelved.
Cook promised the city that his group would raise the
entire $50-million construction budget, but still
couldn’t convince bureaucrats to move forward. He found
far more receptive audiences in Atlanta’s private
sector, notably Jacoby Development. The company has
cleaned up 138 downtown acres, the former home of
Atlantic Steel, to make way for $2 billion worth of
offices, residences, stores and hotels. A walkway
elevated across a 21-lane interstate connects the
property, called Atlantic Station, to the rest of the
city. A few industrial relics have been preserved
onsite, including a sooty smokestack. Cook persuaded
Jacoby to reserve an acre for a Classical monument that
would set a sophisticated tone for the development,
while eye-catchingly terminating an avenue vista and
providing an irresistible gathering spot.
The parkland, along a 150-ft.-wide thoroughfare, cost
Jacoby some $1.25 million to give away. The NMF is
raising its own $18 million to build the Gate. (On the
foundation board serve such luminaries as Colin Amery,
Richard H. Driehaus, Susan Eisenhower, Anne Randolph
Hearst, Priscilla Roosevelt, Thomas Gordon Smith, and
Tom Wolfe.) Cook brought in Hugh Petter, a director at
Robert Adam Architects, to adapt the Barney Circle
design into a 70-ft.-tall arch flanked by 24-ft.-tall
pylons. Petter was one of three scholars at the Prince
of Wales’s Institute who’d helped Cook organize the
Olympics-monument competition, along with Dr. Richard
John and Victor Deupi (now the Arthur Ross Director of
Education at the Institute of Classical Architecture &
Classical America).
The arch’s many precedents, Petter explains, include
London’s Wellington, New York’s Washington, Paris’s
Carrousel near the Louvre, Munich’s Siegestor and Rome’s
Titus. Petter, along with local architect Sandy Cooper
of Collins Cooper Carusi, chose Indiana limestone for
the cladding. “At Bybee Stone,” Cooper recalls, “we
looked at buff and variegated samples, and the
variegated stood out because of the striations and the
sense of depth.” The pylons and arch will have concrete
substructures, yet not look veneered. “We’ll use huge
blocks,” Petter says, “so it will appear massive,
enduring and timeless.”
Stoddart’s sculptures will mark the past two millennia of
time’s passage. On the pylons already stand figures of
the Greek goddesses of Peace, Eirene (pronounced eye-REEN-ee),
and Justice, Dike (DEE-kay). Each weighs 1.5 tons and
was cast in 360 moulds. Eirene sits behind Ploutos, the
god of wealth and bountiful harvests, and at Dike’s feet
stands Harpocrates, the shushing god of restraint of
judgment. Dike wears an Egyptian headdress and holds a
sistrum, a sacred rattle used by priestesses devoted to
Isis, the first goddess said to represent justice.
The Morris Singer foundry in Hampshire, England, shipped
the eight-ft.-tall ladies to Savannah last fall. From
there, Melanie Faser, the project coordinator for the
NMF, arranged for a Percheron-drawn caisson to carry
them to Atlanta. Brass bands and bagpipers led the way.
Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue (a Republican) and
Congressmen Jim Marshall (a Democrat) and Jack Kingston
(a Republican) were among the notables driving the
caisson.
Stoddart is now sketching the first of four female figures
for the arch base. Each will represent 500 years: the
Hellenistic period, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and
modern times. They will stand 14½ ft. tall, just shy of
the roof beam in Stoddart’s studio in Paisley, Scotland.
The Hellenistic woman will carry a broken column,
“signifying the moment when Classical culture came to a
rich and virtuosic maturity,” the sculptor explains.
Around her will also be arrayed a model of Alexandria’s
Pharos (referring to the empire’s extensive trade, and
serving as a sign of hope) and two scrolls symbolizing
the era’s destroyed libraries and lost knowledge.
Stoddart has not yet finalized the other three designs,
but he expects to evoke everything from the first
charitable hospitals and first declarations of universal
enfranchisement to the ambitions of space exploration.
The backdrop of Atlanta high rises somehow suits Stoddart’s
bronzes. “We found the statues’ scale is even more
impressive than we expected,” Petter says. “They really
hold their own in the context. And the arch will be as
tall as the smokestack.” Stoddart adds that Eirene and
Dike “look glorious in that Atlanta sun, especially in
the morning. Sculpture wants a strong, high-up, raking
light.”
A park will be planted at the ladies’ feet, designed by
landscape architect Spencer Tunnell, of the Atlanta firm
Tunnell & Tunnell. An elliptical lawn will be framed by
what Tunnell calls “a pierced retaining wall with
pilasters and blind arches forming an architectural
container, and completely festooned in climbing roses.
We’re also planting crabapple and cherry trees, to
create the same lushness and abundance you see in
gardens in Rome, which has a similar climate to
Atlanta’s.” The groves will eventually serve as waiting
areas for visitors entering the arch.
Galleries inside will cover Atlanta history, and conference
rooms and the roof terrace will be rentable for events.
Cook has commissioned a series of period rooms as well,
either copied from landmarks or fashioned from
architectural salvage. Gate-goers will be able to stroll
through a forest of Corinthian columns that held up an
1810s stairwell in Savannah, a 1920s Italian Baroque
living room designed by Shutze for the family of Mrs.
James D. Robinson, Jr. (Cook’s grandmother-in-law), and
a 1930s paneled office used by Atlantic Steel
industrialist Thomas K. Glenn.
The arch is scheduled to open in the fall of 2007 with the
names of all contributors etched into its flanks,
including the Barney Circle competition finalists. Cook
is already planning his next Atlanta project. He won’t
reveal the site, just the program: “a monumental column
on the scale of Nelson’s or Trajan’s, to commemorate
Georgia’s founder, James Oglethorpe.” Cook is also
researching potential parade routes for Stoddart’s arch
figures, which will arrive annually over the next few
years. Eirene and Dike, Cook says, “look absolutely
majestic, even better than we’d imagined. They’re
exactly what’s been sorely needed in Atlanta, and they
look perfectly appropriate. Even in this
Modernist-inclined city, people are telling us they’re
thrilled to have something this magnificent built,
finally.” – Eve M. Kahn
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