The Goat Farm

Year: 2025 Design & Honor Awards | Category: Built Project over 5,000 SF

The Goat Farm site has, over time, woven a rich tapestry of chaos and order. A partnership between a multifamily developer and a renowned arts organization, the task of bringing in apartments and artist studios would necessarily deposit a high concentration of order to the campus. Unabashedly contemporary, the design solutions were aimed at balancing that order through shape and form, while not attempting to camouflage change. The Goat Farm Apartments help reimagine and ignite a historic arts campus with 19th century industrial buildings to embrace the future and thrive as a mixed-use artistic hub.

Design Challenge

The design team’s guiding principle throughout the development process was direct and vital to its success: How can the context of an arts campus inhabiting 19th century agricultural/industrial buildings expand and embrace the contemporary future through architectural design? How can design integrate the site, where 209 apartments and 48 studio spaces are to be included, into the campus, while maintaining the community’s artistic and ebulliently anarchic spirit and personality? The design solutions were simple and elegant, though they led to complexities that only enriched the overall result.

Rather than mimicking the complex’s weathered red brick and metal roofed structures, the team wanted to honor the city’s history, while acknowledging its future. The design introduces a new industrial aesthetic, contemporary yet embracing the artistic spirit and well-worn charm of the existing 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 second stories of the buildings are extended over the first, reducing summer sun exposure on the artist studio windows and doors.

A parking garage was necessary but provided an aesthetic challenge. Thoughtfully hidden in a convenient, centralized location, a four-level precast deck serves the entire campus, including the future Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA). The roof of the parking deck provides dual-purpose, containing the club and fitness spaces which directly link to exterior zones that maximize and democratize city views. Amenities are accessible to both artists and residents, encouraging a multifaceted blend of the community.

Firm
Niles Bolton Associates

Project Location
Atlanta, Georgia

Completion Date
5/31/2024

Architects and Designers
Brian Ward, AIA
David Duncan, RA

Structural Engineer
Lou Pontigo & Associates

Landscape
Perkins&Will

General Contractor
TriBridge Residential

Additional Team
Kimley-Horn
Charlotte Mechanical Engineering
Square Feet Studio

Photographer
Dustin Chambers Photography