Arts Center Station Competition

Arts Center Station Competition is a transit-oriented development proposal for MARTA’s Arts Center Station in Midtown Atlanta, prepared for The Peebles Corporation, Bolster Real Estate, and MARTA. The site is a vital bus and light-rail hub serving Midtown’s residential and commercial population while sitting beside the city’s cultural corridor near Woodruff Arts Center. Currently largely inaccessible as meaningful public landscape, the proposal creates approximately two acres of publicly accessible open space conceived as a cultural hub and arts district. Program mixes residential, office, hotel, transit-related, retail, and arts-focused uses for on-site users as well as neighbors and visitors.

RELM’s public-realm strategy focuses on corridors that move through the site rather than around it, integrating the transit hub with cultural institutions as a metaphorical front porch and providing a varied array of public spaces sized for Midtown residents, workers, and guests. Success depends on stitching distinct adjacent conditions into one continuous community fabric rather than treating the station block as an island of infrastructure.

A central design challenge is roughly forty feet of grade change between West Peachtree Street NW and Arts Center Way. The landscape and urban design response seeks an elegant section that improves bus circulation along West Peachtree while knitting the campus down to the cultural corridor, turning topographic friction into continuous public access instead of a barrier. Developed in collaboration with HKS as architect, the competition proposal remains a visioning scheme rather than an executed project. It prioritizes activated streets, multi-level open space, and transit integration as the armature for denser Midtown development atop and around station infrastructure, even as MARTA’s broader solicitation process has evolved.