The Goat Farm
Atlanta, Georgia

Summary
Atlanta’s Goat Farm Arts Center is a hallowed cultural institution, an architectural reminder of the city’s agrarian manufacturing past reinvented as a creative incubator for visual and performing artists. In reimagining the former textile mill, rather than mimicking the complex’s weathered red brick and metal roofed structures, NBA wanted to honor the city’s history, while acknowledging its future. The design for 254 apartments introduces a new industrial aesthetic, unabashedly contemporary yet embracing the artistic spirit and well-worn charm of the existing 19th-century buildings. Three and four levels of residential units clad in white metal decking rise over the glazed charcoal-brick ground floor of studios and galleries. The intentionally “undesigned” style of the natural-looking landscape accentuates the compound’s courtyards and arcades as vines climb up and around green mesh screens on the buildings’ façade. With the construction of the new Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia on the site, Goat Farm continues to grow as a community and campus with art as its foundation.