Jennifer Bonner Turns Atlanta Warehouse into Loop Art Centre

A century-old Atlanta warehouse has reopened as Loop, an art and performance centre whose facade glows, in its architect's words, "like Dan Flavin on steroids." Architect Jennifer Bonner designed the renovation for local arts organisation Goat Farm, which operates the event, exhibition and studio space on a three-year activation.

Georgia Tech purchased the seven-acre site in 2018 from Randall Brothers, a building supplies company that had occupied it since 1885. The plot will hold the university's new Creative Quarter, with academic buildings, student housing and a hotel to come. Most structures on the site were demolished. The historic warehouse was retained.

The commission began by chance. Bonner, based in Portland, Oregon, formerly taught at Georgia Tech and had exhibited with Goat Farm when she ran into Goat Farm managing director Mark Dinatale on the site. "Mark and I saw each other there and I said 'we have to work together on this,'" Bonner said.

How does the building work for artists?

Goat Farm runs nearly 200 artists' rental studios across five Atlanta locations. "The revenue from studio rentals actually goes to support the arts programming. We can use it to subsidise harder-to-fund art forms and more experimental forms of art," Dinatale said.

The warehouse was in good condition. The design team repaired the roof and installed new HVAC, plumbing, windows and doors, and cleared a lingering layer of sawdust from the building's industrial past. Bonner placed 17 artists' studios within the column grid along the structure's two sides, keeping the central volume free for flexible use: exhibitions, installations and performances.

Because the tenure is temporary, the intervention stayed light. A literal loop — a translucent curtain of metallic flame-retardant polyester fabric — divides or opens the space as needed. "Basically the curtain became a way to spatially close things off or divide them," Bonner said.

Forty custom-fabricated planter carts supply ornament and spatial organisation on a budget. "They can be recombined in terms of shapes and they can be all clustered together," Bonner added.

What does the lighting do?

Working with lighting designer Pablo Gnecco of New York-based Studio Studio, Bonner ran LED strips vertically on interior columns and stretched a horizontal glowing band across the front facade. The palette shifts from pink to purple to green, either fixed or pulsating.

Dinatale framed the ambition plainly: Loop aims to be "an experimental space" that grants artists access to space and technology. Programming so far includes exhibitions, events, performances by Hyojin Kwon and Frank Vigroux, dance companies, AI art, video game art and Georgia Tech's Laptop orchestra.

Creative and design director Allie Bashuk noted that Loop suits evening performances because no residences surround it. "We try to elevate all these projects by giving them proper lighting and visual cues," Bashuk said.

Why does the project carry extra weight for the profession?

Bonner exhibited roof designs at Goat Farm in 2014 in a show titled Domestic Hats. Loop, she noted, marks an overdue milestone: it is the "first building on the Georgia Tech campus designed by a female architect." As the Creative Quarter rises around it, the warehouse sets the tone for what the district's art programming can become.