Atlanta Skyways

Atlanta Skyways:

By: Chris Pacanowski

                Seeing a new city is always one of the greatest things in the world, and just last week I had the opportunity to go visit Atlanta, Georgia. The city itself is a little smaller than I was use to since I have lived near Chicago my whole life. The city of Atlanta had a lot of interesting things that I hadn’t seen in a city. One of the interesting things that I had seen was the fact that the public transportation throughout the city was poor in comparison to many other cities that I have visited in the past. The city was divided into four quadrants, NE, SE, SW, NW, by two train lines going directly through and crossing in the middle of the city. The problem with that is the fact that the people in the four quadrants that weren’t within walking distance to the train lines would not have a chance to be able to take that type of public transportation. These are all issues that an architect has to think about when doing city planning.

One of the architecture firms that we had visited, Perkins and Will, had actually been working on a project that would assist on getting more people that lived in the outskirts of the city, to the main city center.  This project was a very interesting project because the idea was to utilize an abandon train line that was around the whole city called the “beltline” and connect to the existing two train lines that cross the city. This project has a great opportunity to utilize a train system to transport more people that didn’t have any method to get to the downtown area. The reason why I had thought that this project was such an amazing project was the fact that the head architect had come up with this idea to utilize this train “beltline” in college and had done his thesis project on this idea. That showed me that even as a graduate student my thesis project could actually become a reality.  

                Another interesting thing that I had seen when I was at Atlanta was the fact that a lot of the buildings in the downtown area were interconnected with large skyways. These skyways varied in lengths and level that they were on. When looking at the skyways it almost created a feeling of connectivity between every building that it connected together, almost like it was designed by the same architect. When thinking of the reason for why they had connected the buildings together the first thing that had come to mind was that they were utilized to walk from building to building on a rainy day so the employees wouldn’t get wet. I believe that was a valid reason for them but after walking through a bunch of them I started to notice that they were a lot harder to navigate through because of the fact that the skyways were on different levels and you almost had to know exactly where they were to go from building to building. Another thing that I had noticed with the skyways was the fact that they were all almost leading to one point, a central mall type area with a large food court. This lead me to believe that the skyways could have been designed to be utilized to go from their building and go directly to lunch without going outside on a rainy day.

                Overall my experience in Atlanta was good and I highly recommend people to always experience as many cities as you can and to just get lost in them.