The Goat Farm Apartments Wins at AIA Atlanta’s 2024 Residential & Hospitality Design Awards
NBA is proud to announce The Goat Farm Apartments was recognized with an Honor Award at AIA Atlanta’s 2024 Residential & Hospitality Design Awards in the Multifamily/Mixed-Use—Over 50 Units category. This accolade celebrates the firm's innovative design, which thoughtfully features a modern, minimalist exterior aesthetic contrasting the adjacent 19th century agricultural/industrial buildings.
Principal and Director of Design Brian Ward attended the event to accept the award, acknowledging the team's collaborative effort in bringing this project to life. The Goat Farm Apartments exemplify how multifamily developments can celebrate creativity and blend functionality, community engagement, and architectural excellence.
Congratulations to Tribridge Residential and the entire project team for the successful design and development of the project. To view the full list of winners, visit AIA Atlanta's Residential & Hospitality Design Awards.
To dive deeper into The Goat Farm Apartments and explore the concepts behind this award-winning project, read the full case study below.
The history of the Goat Farm site has, over time, woven a rich tapestry of chaos and order. A partnership between a multifamily developer, Tribridge Residential, and an arts organization renowned for being a leader in providing studio spaces and cultural events in Atlanta for decades, the task of bringing in 209 apartments and 48 artist studios would necessarily deposit a high concentration of order to the campus. The design solutions were aimed at balancing that order through shape and form, while not attempting to camouflage change, and by creating guides for the chaos that nature will inevitably bring over time.
The site plan welcomes the public by keeping the new art studios accessible to the entire community and by creating ‘discoverable’ outdoor spaces. 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 of three connected buildings 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.
All amenities are accessible to both artists and residents, encouraging the heterogeneous mix of the community. With site constraints such as the existing buildings to the south and the school to the north, the team creatively organized an efficient program with ground level leasing facing the campus center. The thoughtful and unique offering of amenities are accentuated with rotating art installations which provide surprise and delight to the pedestrian experience everywhere from the parking deck to the courtyards and pet spa.
The roof of the parking deck contains the club and fitness spaces which directly link to exterior zones that maximize city views. Exterior amenities include the pool deck and well shaded outdoor spaces such as cooking stations, yoga lawn, and gaming areas for residents to connect with each other and nature. Steel and glass bridges connect each building to the central deck, maintaining safe and secure circulation for the residents.
With the ongoing adaptive reuse of the existing buildings, the future construction of MOCA, and the opportunities for public events within the courtyards, lawns, porches, and the rooftop terrace, The Goat Farm is set up to be a cultural leader in Atlanta for decades yet to come.
Delivered on budget and two months ahead of schedule, the project’s lease-up has been extremely successful, at twice the expected rate. Exceeding all expectations from the client and artist community, 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.
Goat Farm Project Team: Tribridge Residential (Owner & Contractor), Niles Bolton Associates (Architect), Charlotte Mechanical Engineering (MEP Engineer), Lou Pontigo & Associates (Structural Engineer), Kimley-Horn & Associates (Civil Engineer), Perkins + Will (Landscape Architect), Square Feet Studio (Interior Design)