A new book, "City by Design: Atlanta" will highlight Sizemore Group's architecture with a green tint. Book excerpt:

Designed to focus on graduate and executive education, the 92,000-square-foot facility is attached to the original business school. Sizemore Group, Prime Architect, worked with the architect of the original building, Kallman McKinnell & Wood, as Associate Architect in this development. While the expansion emulates the majestic facade of the original building, it also features many advanced principles of sustainable design. In the finest green building tradition, Sizemore Group’s integrated team approach included Holder Construction, Emory Project Management, and the Goizueta Business School.

 

From the beginning of the project, Emory University indicated that it wanted to pursue an advanced level of LEED certification, a goal Sizemore Group embraced wholeheartedly. The building is served by major bus routes and an internal campus shuttle. The five-story building features bicycle storage, changing areas, and showers to encourage bicycle use. Electric vehicle recharging is provided onsite. Glass-enclosed stairs open up visually to the campus to draw occupants into them rather than to the elevators.

 

By minimizing the need for a large parking area, Sizemore Group was able to incorporate a permanent green space xeriscaped with native species into the design. Its irrigation system includes a drip irrigation system supplied by storm water collected in an underground cistern. The courtyard is an important community outdoor space, as the business school and the university’s music school share it with the greater campus for gatherings, informal get-togethers, and performances linked to the campus’ pedestrian pathway system.

 

More than 15 percent of the business school’s expansion was constructed with recycled content, and more than 40 percent was constructed with locally manufactured materials. Eighty-six percent of the waste from the building’s construction was diverted from landfills.

The Atlanta Regional Commission, at its annual “State of the Region” breakfast, recognized six trend-setting new developments with the ninth annual Developments of Excellence Awards, which are presented in conjunction with the Livable Centers Coalition.

Duluth Town Green was awarded with the 2007 Livable Centers Initiative Achievement Award . As a recipient of one of the first Livable Center Initiative studies, city officials set out to envision the Duluth of tomorrow.  The result was a master plan by Sizemore Group that supports a live, work and play environment, paired with a transportation network that serves a mix of land uses. The mixed-use developments, centered on a town green in the middle of the Duluth central business district, have brought new retail, restaurants and offices into an area within walking distance of new and existing residences and neighborhoods.  Furthering the appeal of downtown are new sidewalks, street lighting and landscaping. 

More information on Atlanta Regional Commission's website.

The parish hall was designed by Sizemore Group to accommodate overflow from Mass services and will also be used for wedding receptions, banquets and other church-related functions. The varying ceiling height provides exceptional acoustical quality. The custom-designed windows and doors allow natural daylight to filter through the space providing a continuous link to the outside.

Spelman College will break ground for its new residence hall on Friday, October 20, 2006 at 12:00 noon at the corner of West View Drive and Lee Street.  The building will be designed with a high priority on health, reduced environmental impact and increased conservation and is on track to attain Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design TM certification through the U.S. Green Building Council.

The residence hall will be comprised of more than 201,455 square feet and will house 303 beds, thereby raising current capacity by over 300 students.  The student suites will feature spacious two-, three- and four-bedroom apartments, complete with kitchenettes and living rooms.  Each floor will also include study halls, a recreational lounge, and vending and storage areas. 

Sizemore Group will provide design and LEED consulting along with bridging documents.  Student occupancy is projected for July 2008.

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Clark Atlanta University staff will dedicate the newly-renovated Thayer Hall on Friday, October 20, 2006.  The comprehensive renovation is the home of the Whitney M. Young, Jr. School of Social Work. It provides space for offices, classrooms, laboratories and other support for instruction and research.  

The School of Social Work was founded in 1920 and incorporated under the laws of the State of Georgia in 1925. Membership in the American Association of Schools of Social Work was granted in 1928. When the accrediting body was succeeded by the Council on Social Work Education in 1952, the School became a chartered member, and has maintained its accreditation since then. The School celebrated its 80th year in October 2000 and was renamed the Whitney M. Young, Jr. School of Social Work in August 2000. 

Sizemore Group worked in collaboration with W. R. Ray, a team of consultants and the staff at Clark Atlanta University to complete the project.  The design solution highlights key elements of the original design hidden through previous renovations.   The main feature is the treatment of the top floor where the original ceiling and structure have been exposed.  In addition, all instructional space integrates the use technology as a delivery system.  The project was executed using a multiple-package approach to bid and construction.  The Sizemore Group team provided project planning, architecture, and program management services as well as fixtures, furniture and equipment for the facility.

Odyssey Family Counseling Center, Inc. will celebrate the groundbreaking of their Women and Children’s Center in College Park, Georgia on Friday, October, 2006 at 12:00 noon.  The newest facility will be located on the corner of John Wesley Avenue and College Street and will serve more than 2,000 women, children and adolescents a year.  This event is the culmination of a twenty-one month long $3.3 million Capital Fundraising Project of which $3.1 million has been raised. 

For over 30 years, Odyssey’s mission has been to provide high-quality professional counseling services to citizens in the metro Atlanta area regardless of income.  Odyssey is recognized for its expertise in the areas of substance abuse, trauma, child abuse, domestic violence and family therapy.  Currently with six clinical sites, the counseling centers offer their clients a hopeful future and a world full of promise. 

Sizemore Group’s mission is to create a welcoming environment that is sensitive to the emotional needs of the clientele and one that fits into an Historic District.  Also at the forefront is to protect a great number of existing trees that serve as bounding edges to an intimate courtyard.  Sizemore Group is providing master planning, architecture, interior design, and program management services for the project which is expected to be completed by July 2007.

The Atlanta Regional Commission is currently producing "The Shape of Things to Come", an exciting new 30-minute quarterly public affairs show which showcases new developments in communities that promote quality growth principles by successfully mixing live, work and play options. The current and third episode, "Livable, Healthy Communities", includes interviews with experts in development, housing, community improvement and livable communities.

Mike Sizemore, founder of  Sizemore Group, appears in this newest installment along with developers and community leaders.  Mr. Sizemore is a long-time proponent of sustainable green communities that help improve the quality of life.  “Livable communities are public spaces that are great to be in, places that are walkable, ones in which your child can run down the block and practice soccer on their own, where seniors can live there near their grandkids," Sizemore says during the show. "They have a mix of uses and building types that fit together well within a town center or activity center to create energy and a great place to be".

The show is hosted by Susan Hoffman of GPTV’s "Georgia Week in Review." Past episodes explored how the region might best accommodate the 2.3 million more residents expected by 2030 and the challenges faced by the region’s growing older adult population.   The newest installment can be viewed on government access cable channels across metro Atlanta and is available for streaming  or by visiting the Atlanta Regional Commission website.

June 1, 2006 – “The Sizemore Group – Taking Space and Giving It Spirit”;

For over 30 years, The Sizemore Group has been providing a diverse client base with award-winning architecture, architectural planning and design expertise.  Committed to “architecture with a higher purpose,” the renowned Atlanta-based firm is currently one of Georgia’s most active proponents of sustainability and quality of life issues.  The typical Sizemore client is looking for a fresh approach to projects and welcomes the opportunity to work in tandem with architects and designers to ensure the best and most creative implementation of their plans.  The firm strives to incorporate the views of a wide range of voices, believing that every idea and concern should be seriously considered during design and community planning.  Today, Sizemore Group has made its mission to create environments that bring about the best in all of us and to instill a strong sense of community, shared values and memorable experience.

For more on how Sizemore Group continues to fulfill its mission, please read the complete story.

The term “quality of life” can mean different things to different people.  City officials, citizen groups, and community leaders can vary in their opinions that may run contrary to one another.  However, “health” and “happiness” are two fundamental elements that most often define quality of life.

Architecture plays an important role to this end by incorporating sound planning and implementation in a community.  Using a double tree canopy on a city’s main street, utilizing town greens and pocket parks, and adding compact mixed-use village centers provide settings for individual and community memories.  Air and water quality, pedestrian safety and a balance between jobs and housing in a city all contribute to the community’s well-being or being healthy.

Please read the full story as it appears on the Georgia Municipal Association website.

Two of Sizemore Group’s projects recently won Build Georgia Awards  for Best in Construction as featured in the May 12-18, 2006 Special Section of the Atlanta Business Chronicle.  Holder Construction Group LLC, General Contractor for Goizueta Business School Center for Research and Doctoral Education at Emory University, won First Place in the Construction Management At Risk – New Over $100 Million category.  Cork-Howard Construction Company, General Contractor for the revitalization of The Center for Family Resources in Cobb County, won the competition in the Design-Bid–Build Renovation $20-$50 Million category. 

Emory University retained Sizemore Group to build an addition to Goizueta Business School Center for Research and Doctoral Education, focusing on sustainable design and construction. Having knowledge of business schools and worked with Emory University on a previous project, the Sizemore Group team was able to quickly validate the needs of the Program and provide an architectural solution that complimented the existing structure. Key to the success of this building is how its Site Plan addresses the sector and the solution uses the building to create the edges that define the main courtyard. Two key passageways serve as connection points to the rest of the campus.

Faculty offices, classrooms, offices and space for PhD program, a café and a large meeting room complete with catering kitchen make up the 85,000 square foot building.  

Sizemore Group was the Architect of Record, Kallman McKinnell and Wood Architects was the Associate Architect and Holder Construction Group LLC was General Contractor for the project.  Services provided include Architecture, Master Planning, Program Verification, Interior Design Space Planning (FF&E), and Peer Institution Review.

The Center for Family Resources, a non-profit organization that serves families in need, was once a Sears building in Marietta near the Marietta Square.  The redesign of the 62,000 square foot facility included a new façade, two-story entrance rotunda, a day-care center and playground, administrative offices, and intake facility.  The Center also contains a large Banquet Hall consisting of a Main Ballroom and additional classrooms. 

While The Center for Family Resources owns the 62,000 square foot facility and occupies part of the building, the remainder is sublet to other non-profits creating a synergistic community that will serve as a gateway on Roswell Street and a corridor for the larger development of the City of Marietta.  This facility employs LEED-designed principles including redevelopment of an abandoned retail shopping center, day-lighting strategies, and reduced site disturbance.

Services provided include Programming, Master Planning, Architecture, Project Management, Furniture Fixtures and Equipment and Interior Design.

Sizemore Group recently completed Delta Air Lines newest work of art, the Crown Room Club^© on Concourse C at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport.  The club showcases regional Southern design elements, works from local artists and state-of-the-art amenities that have become Delta’s hallmark.  Members can relax and unwind in “a convenient, comfortable and uniquely-Southern retreat.”

Sizemore Group’s design offers high-touch solutions for a high-tech world. To help Delta meet its purpose of attracting and retaining customers, Sizemore Group created a place of retreat for members at the world’s busiest airport. A sense of stability and solidity are immediately established by a slate wainscot and floor. Air travelers can get their “feet back on the ground” here.

An expansive wood arched ceiling then unifies the many niches into a single, coherent composition. The arched ceiling harkens back to Delta’s original hangars.  The latest in technology is used by Delta to provide services that are immediately accessible to guests with plug-in ports distributed throughout the seating areas.  The quality of detailing is not only visually the highest, but it will withstand intense use. Well over one thousand guests a day arrived within the first week of opening.

Services provided include Architecture, Programming, Space Planning, Interior Design, Furniture, Fixtures & Equipment, and Construction Administration.

Sizemore Group’s Third Annual Quality of Life Conference was recently held on Friday, March 17, 2006 at The Center for Family Resources in Marietta, Georgia.  The conference addressed “Architecture’s Impact on Quality of Life: Changing Places, Changing Lives.”  

Presenters included civic, educational, religious and private sector leaders in the architectural decision-making process.  The group focused on how the role of institutions and developers is changing and how architecture, planning and design need to change to better support the goals and missions of these organizations.

Please choose a link below for complete summaries.

Breakout Session I:  K-12, Higher Education and Religious Organizations

The Changing Role of Institutions in Developing the Community

Breakout Session II:  Mixed-Use Redevelopment

The Changing Role of Public/Private Redevelopment in the Community

Photos

March 31, 2006 - Atlanta's Shakespeare Tavern on Peachtree Street gets a new $300,000 Elizabethan-era facade by Sizemore Group.

 

Bard makeover - New American Shakespeare Tavern hopes Elizabethan facade will outshine neon of x-rated neighbor

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Main Edition

Tom Sabulis/Staff

It's been one of the odder couplings on Peachtree Street: a garish triple-X video store next to a folksy Shakespearean theater, two businesses with more differences, if fewer hostilities, than the Capulets and Montagues. For the performers and staff at the New American Shakespeare Tavern, it's been an uneasy coexistence for years on the block between Pine Street and Renaissance Parkway, where the theater's stained-wood door meets the lavender and cherry-red neon lights of the "adult fantasy" emporium Inserection.

The bard might refer to the latter as a "cistern of lust,” but the Shakespeareans have been operating in the shadow of the purple peep-show palace since the late 1990s. Now that's changed.

In an attempt to establish a marquee sidewalk presence, the tavern officially unveiled Thursday a $300,000-plus makeover featuring a curved Elizabethan-era facade complete with lead-glass windows, powerful new lighting and --- paging Romeo --- a balcony above Peachtree Street where

performers can relax and occasionally perform to the street below.

"We're shouting down our next-door neighbor,” says Jeff Watkins, artistic director of the resident Atlanta Shakespeare Company, which has been performing onstage at 499 Peachtree St. since 1989. "We haven't been the dominant architectural feature of our block. I want to be the big window on the street."

A noble aspiration indeed, considering the only windows next door --- in private viewing booths --- have nude dancers inside them.

Watkins expects the new design, by the Sizemore Group, to convey on the outside what patrons find inside: convivial Shakespeare productions set within a cozy pub-style playhouse, where theatergoers can mimic Falstaff ordering off a menu of pub grub and imported ales.

This marks the tavern's second overhaul in seven years. The interior underwent a $2 million renovation in 1999, but the big donor for that project insisted that the company spend the money exclusively inside the building.

As a result, the outside was left flat, faceless and less inviting than Macbeth's castle.

Subsequently, despite its Peachtree Street frontage, the Shakespeare Tavern often has been overlooked by potential patrons. On a typical night, pedestrians hustled past the adult video store and tried to avoid loiterers from the nearby homeless shelter on Pine Street.

"If you're walking fast, you pass it [the entrance] very quickly, before you know it, " says Shelly Kacergis, a theater regular who works for Bank of America in the nearby Bank of America Plaza. "I don't think people are really aware of what's there."

The new facade allows the company to assert more ownership of its block --- an important development for a small but sturdy nonprofit organization that sells 42,000 tickets a year, many to schoolchildren. The period architecture will magnify the company's commitment to "original practice" productions, which include authentic Shakespearean costumes and music.

"We want to flood the place with light outside, " Watkins says, "so people don't get to stand in the shadows, because there won't be any."

He would also like the city to install a crosswalk in front for theater patrons parking at the Emory Crawford Long Hospital garage across Peachtree Street. So far, he's been unsuccessful.

It remains to be seen how much the face-lift will help business.

Over the years, Watkins contends, the proximity of the video store has stifled tavern turnout.

"I know of some people who say, 'I would come down there more often, but my wife doesn't like walking by that dirty bookstore, ' " he says. "I've heard that more than once."

To be fair, Watkins adds that the video store's managers are, in fact, better neighbors than the nightclub owners who operated the property in previous incarnations at 505 Peachtree St.

"These guys are not hard to get along with, " he says. "They keep a security guard out there. But I'd rather they be somewhere else."

The manager of Inserection blames the loitering on visitors to the homeless shelter.

"We have a really hard time controlling people from the shelter, " Scott Davis says. "There's petty theft, begging, hassling. They are people we don't let in our store."

The Inserection site is owned by Cousins Properties, which inherited the lease when it purchased the property from entrepreneur Raymond O. Boyd in October 2004. (Last year, the owner of the video-store chain, Michael Morrison, was sentenced to four years in federal prison for tax evasion.)

A Cousins spokesman would not comment on the length of the video store's lease or any plans the developer might have for the property in the gentrifying neighborhood south of North Avenue.

Although he could not name a date, store manager Davis says Inserection's lease does not expire for years. "We're going to be here for a while." (Watkins believes the lease runs out in 2010.)

Other metro Atlanta theaters face their own peculiar neighborhood challenges: Freight trains clang by during productions at Marietta's Theatre in the Square, and downtown Atlanta still feels disconcertingly deserted on some nights that Theatrical Outfit is performing at the Balzer

Theatre at Herren's. But the tavern's situation is unique: a microcosm of how theaters in New York's Times Square must have felt in the pre-Disney era --- dominated by X-rated neighbors.

Theater patrons interviewed for this story seem to take the situation in stride.

"I've worked downtown since 1979 and that stuff is just part of the scene, part of the flavor, " says Bruce Jackson, a local attorney. "I don't recall ever being bothered by anyone in front of the purple building."

Another patron, Judi Rabel, a community volunteer, says she's never felt like anyone "would do [her] harm, " but "it seems like the whole block is a little uncomfortable."

It won't stop her from going to the tavern, though. "I love having a little bit of England on Peachtree, " Rabel says.

A sanguine Watkins keeps it in historical perspective, adding that Shakespeare had a bigger challenge in his day.

The bard's original haunt, the Globe Theatre, was located near "the Stews, " the infamous brothels-and-gambling district on the south side of London Bridge.

"You had to pass the whorehouses to go to the theater, " Watkins says.

The tavern's renovation may have had one other unintended impact: The video store plans to renovate once the theater finishes its overhaul.

The signs advertising "lap dances" and "nudes" are coming down and the building will be painted "more tastefully, " says manager Davis, who says he has attended a couple of shows at the Shakespeare Tavern.

"We're going for a more sophisticated, romantic look outside that doesn't throw sex in people's face, " Davis says.

©2006 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  Reprinted with permission from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  Further reproduction, retransmission or distribution of these materials without the prior written consent of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and any copyright holder identified in the

material’s copyright notice, is prohibited.
 

In the early 1800’s, the City of Duluth, Georgia was a crossroads for plantation owners and a place where farmers could sell their crops.  It began along the famed Peachtree Road that originated in Atlanta and followed the Chattahoochee River as an offshoot to an Indian trail.  Eventually, with the advent of convenience stores and malls, Duluth lost its charm and became just another part of the growing metropolis of Atlanta. Today it boasts a new, hip identity that’s defined by its bustling commerce and a Festival Center on the Town Green, complete with a pavilion and water fountain for outdoor entertainment.  Sizemore Group (formerly Sizemore Floyd Architects, LLC) was instrumental in the transformation through the development of their Master Plan and Design from 1999-2001.

Points North magazine features the city in their September 2005 issue.  Please read the complete story.