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Architects: Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects
- Area: 6000 m²
- Year: 2009
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Photographs:Timothy Hursley
Text description provided by the architects. This 6,000 sqf lobby is located at Alliance Center, a speculative office complex in central Buckhead, just north of downtown Atlanta. The lobby serves Two Alliance, a new office tower already under construction when the design of the lobby was proposed as a means to create a dynamic entrance experience. The plaza space between the One Alliance and Two Alliance towers pours into the generously scaled lobby space by way of a crystalline glass entrance pavilion. The glass pavilion opens onto an elegant light-filled lobby of rich, exotic wood, glistening white terrazzo, an energetic sculpted ceiling and finely crafted detail.
The complex geometries of the ceiling structure and the insertion of the light boxes into the floor invert the traditional ceiling/floor relationship; ceiling as landscape and floor as light. The surface of the floor light boxes is comprised of slip-resistant, laminated translucent glass, which has a 75% light transmittance. There are three shapes of glass panels which are rotated in plan and scattered throughout the lobby in order to evenly light the ceiling above. The up-lights are 150-watt metal halide lamps set twenty inches below the surface of the glass. Two half-inch-thick white metal louver grids (half inch by half inch) are rotated thirty degrees in relation to each other and set beneath the glass. The rotated louvers diffuse the light, reducing the appearance of hot spots on the surface of the glass and preventing direct glare.
Complementary to the up-lights in the floor, the wood wall panels are washed by track-mounted seventy-watt adjustable metal halide lights set in recessed ceiling coves. At the head of the elevator doors, custom stainless steel light fixtures with florescent lamps wash the elevator lobby ceilings.
Glass Fiber Reinforced Gypsum (GFRG) achieves the precise geometric intersections of the ceiling. The custom floor-mounted up-lights create a subtle effect on the ceiling and provide enough light to comfortably illuminate the lobby without causing discordance to those passing through.
The materials include Makore wood veneer wall panels, terrazzo floor with zinc divider strips, painted GFRG and gypsum wall board at the ceiling and glass. There are twenty-nine up-lights and thirty lines of zinc divider strips in the floor with three shapes of lights rotated for variety. Of the seventeen lines in the ceiling, six are curved. The ceiling is comprised of forty planes and two hundred and ten points of intersection.
