The skies over intown Atlanta are filled with empty space where big dreams were hatched but never grew up. Think of the titanic, 11-block GLG Park Plaza project—or more recently, Midtown’s infamous No2 Opus Place.
A lesser-known but equally impressive whopper of a proposal in the annals of Atlanta history was called Union Tower, which would have lorded over downtown as the tallest building in the Southeast.
But unlike the aforementioned examples, the architect believes the concept is still viable downtown, pending some monumental puzzle pieces falling into place.
The Union Tower concept called/calls for a 1,138-foot-tall skyscraper standing over and breaking up the above-ground massing of MARTA’s Five Points station, allowing North and South Broad streets to reconnect at the tower’s base, as they once were before the station divided them. It would top out 115 feet taller than Bank of America Plaza, which has held the title of Atlanta’s tallest high-rise for more than three decades.
In terms of location, the logic went that the birthplace of Atlanta naturally deserved to lay claim to its tallest building.
Union Tower was originally the brainchild of two Georgia Tech students studying for their master of architecture degrees, Pavan Iyer and Jennifer Lee Johnson, as part of the school’s Portman Prize annual competition between studio classes. In 2017, the program’s focus was on South Downtown as prospects of redevelopment started heating up.
“As part of the project, we went out to the site and talked to random people on the street to ask if they could draw a map of South Downtown,” says Iyer, who would go on to found eightvillage, an Atlanta-based architecture, urban design, and ecology consultancy firm. “Just about everyone’s drawings acknowledged that Broad Street is a tale of two sides in every way.”
The tower concept’s placement next to a reconnected Broad Street, over today’s Five Points station.
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