ATLANTA | One Museum Place | HEIGHT | 23 FLOORS

[micropundit]

London architect to design Wieland condo tower
Atlanta Business Chronicle - July 13, 2007by Lisa R. SchoolcraftStaff writer
Joann Vitelli
The 23-story, $325 million luxury condominium tower will be a modernist design by London architect David Chipperfield.

The condo tower, at 1301 Peachtree St., across from the High Museum of Art, will have 96 units that begin at $2 million, said Wieland, CEO of John Wieland Homes & Neighborhoods Inc., Atlanta's seventh-largest home builder. Construction is scheduled to begin Sept. 5 and the project is expected to be completed in fall 2009.

"Our main thought is that this is going to be the signature residence for Atlanta," Wieland said.

"There are a lot of high-end condominiums, but nobody has employed a world-class architect. Most of the towers are just towers."

Chipperfield says this is his first U.S. condominium project, although he has done similar high-rise residential projects in Berlin and London, he said. Chipperfield has also done design work for museums, including Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, and Saint Louis Art Museum in St. Louis.

For Chipperfield, One Museum Place is special.

"It's the proximity to the High Museum campus," he said from his London office. "It's the fourth side of the High Museum piazza. It has to be considered in that context."

Wieland believes his first condo project "has a lot of architectural links to the past through the grid system and formality of the building."

A modernist building in Midtown "is a big deal because the Atlanta housing market has been pretty traditional," said Terry Herr, principal of Pieper O'Brien Herr Architects Ltd. But being near the High Museum, itself with modern architecture, would not seem out of place.

"Atlanta has been changing since the 1996 Olympics with more diverse populations," Herr said.

"When demographics change, modern architecture can be embraced by metropolitan Atlanta."

One Museum Place will distinguish itself not just in architecture, but as a pure luxury condo, Wieland said. The building does not contain a hotel.

Keep down your dukes
"Unlike the St. Regis, The Mansion, the [proposed] Mandarin Oriental or The Four Seasons, you don't have to duke it out with the hotel guests [for amenities]," he said. "When you go down to the lounge for a drink, it will just be the residents, not the guy who checked in four hours ago."

Working gallery
One Museum Place won't be short on amenities.

Residents will have private access to their residences via six pass-card-keyed elevators. No common hallways link condos. Other amenities include a pet wash area, three guest apartments for rent to residents for visitors, a private dining room and a media/lecture room.
There will be some interaction with the public at the tower. A small amount of ground-level retail space likely will include a restaurant and day spa.

The second floor will have nearly 14,000 square feet of gallery space, a working exhibition hall that will connect One Museum Place and the High Museum, Chipperfield said.

The High Museum will have an option to buy the gallery space 10 years after the opening of One Museum Place for $1, but for the first 10 years of operation, the Wieland Family Foundation will subsidize the gallery.

Programming will be overseen by Jeffrey Grove, the Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the High. Wieland expects the gallery to showcase the works of emerging contemporary artists.