Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects

By Raymund Ryan - 8 January 2010

Home to Coca-Cola and to John Portman, that instigator of atrium hotels in the 1960s, Atlanta is one of the fastest growing conurbations in contemporary America. Unofficial capital of The New South, proud location of Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport—"the world’s busiest passenger airport", Atlanta is also home to the architecture team of Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam.
Since leaving their positions as, respectively, Director of Design and Senior Associate at Heery and Heery, the Atlanta-based mega-firm, in 1984, Scogin and Elam have realised many innovative designs in the Atlanta area; in particular, neighbourhood libraries where one quickly detects a Modernist legacy, the architects’ exploration of structural systems, and their visual wit. While maintaining the practice in Atlanta, Scogin also served as Chairman of the Department of Architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design from 1990 to 1995. Now he and Elam have completed several academic projects across the United States, bringing their firm, Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, to national status.
Last summer, on the West Coast, the Jean Gray Hargrove Music Library opened at the University of California Berkeley. October saw the inauguration of the Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture at one of the Midwest’s most prestigious institutions, Ohio State University (OSU). Most recently, Scogin and Elam are inserting the Wang Campus Center into the picturesque landscape of Wellesley College. There in New England, not far from Harvard, the Atlantans are immediate neighbours of Rafael Moneo, with his Davis Museum and Cultural Center (1993), and a fellow Southerner, Paul Rudolph, whose Jewett Arts Center, an early work dating from 1958, is surprisingly delicate and tailored.
Knowlton Hall is a dynamic presence on the Ohio campus. The university is laid out across its flat Midwestern terrain as a rational plaid with Beaux Arts accents. In the late 1980s, Peter Eisenman made a...