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Overview: Rethinking Downtown Atlanta
The Georgia World Congress Center (GWCC), Georgia’s most-prized convention center and a major landholder spanning 220 acres in downtown Atlanta, posed HKS with a transformative challenge: determining the highest and best use for its underutilized properties. This task was not solely about aesthetics but also about creating scenarios to maximize capacity and positive impact.
What started as a focused project evolved into an extensive 900-acre neighborhood study that created a composite assembly of adjacent plans. It involved balancing the interests of many stakeholders, such as neighbors, landowners, developers, and the city. HKS knew they needed innovative design strategies to deliver such a wide-reaching project. With that in mind, HKS selected Giraffe, a geospatial modeling tool specifically designed for urban planning.
Image: Within the microsite, HKS embedded Giraffe as an interactive experience.
The Challenge: Navigating Complexity with New Tools
In prior projects, HKS encountered obstacles in addressing ever-changing requirements and contexts. Sheba Titus, Partner and Global Practice Director | Cities & Communities at HKS, reflected on a familiar experience: “It took us nearly five months to create that [...] static document. When [GWCC] approached us, I thought, "Downtown Atlanta is evolving so quickly. If it takes five months to put this together, things will have already changed by the time it’s finished." We wouldn’t want to publish a document celebrating the city's development energy, only for it to feel outdated immediately.”
To address these challenges, HKS needed tools that could:
- Handle Complexity: Seamlessly integrate into a rapidly changing urban environment.
- Support Real-Time Updates: Provide a living, adaptable document that evolves alongside data and stakeholder input.
- Simplify Processes: Transition from static reports to interactive, user-friendly models.
Teaming up with Reeti Gupta, Sr. Special Projects Lead | Futures, HKS began a journey to identify a solution that could serve the needs of urban scale projects. ‘We had demo’s from autodesk & GeoBIM… it was all too complex’.
Conventional tools frequently fell short on large-scale, intricate projects. Sheba explained,”They worked well for demonstrations but struggled to handle real projects.”
The Solution: Harnessing Giraffe’s Versatility
HKS emphasized simplicity, focusing on land use, program distribution, and connections to essential infrastructure like transportation networks. The goal was to integrate information seamlessly with the drawings, creating a "one-stop shop" that eliminated the need for static PDFs or traditional design documents by enabling creation and presentation within the same platform.
Image: The interactive experience has several slides to tell the full story
Giraffe’s capabilities aligned perfectly with GWCC’s requirements, empowering HKS to craft, refine, and showcase evolving scenarios within one place. Key features included:
- Geospatial Accuracy: Ensuring designs correspond with the broader urban framework.
- Iterative Modeling: Enabling rapid adjustments to land use and program distribution.
- Efficient Processes: Minimizing manual calculations and interoperability challenges.
“Giraffe was the perfect fit—it was lightweight, dynamic, and geospatially oriented,” remarked Reeti Gupta.
The Impact: Efficiency and Innovation
Using Giraffe, HKS significantly enhanced its ability to make and communicate decisions. The team quickly evaluated capacity, land use, and infrastructure integration to deliver actionable findings. Recognizing that determining the highest and best use required exploring multiple scenarios, they analyzed various options and their impacts through diverse metrics—a level of analysis that would have been nearly impossible to achieve in such a short timeframe using traditional methods.
Key outcomes included:
- Faster Timelines: Projects that once required four months could now take as little as three weeks.
- Real-Time Analytics: Giraffe’s built-in metrics allowed the team to measure areas, building heights, and capacities instantaneously.
- Interactive Deliverables: The client received a dynamic, web-hosted model instead of static documents.
Furthermore, the interactive deliverables reshaped how stakeholders engaged with the plans.
Sheba mentioned, “When I watched the client present it to their leadership, they specifically highlighted how this would usually be a timestamped PDF. ‘The beauty of what HKS has done,’ they said, ‘is that it’s dynamic—you fly across, get additional information, and anybody can pick it up and present.’”
A Blueprint for Future Projects
Using Giraffe for GWCC reshaped HKS’s approach to urban planning, shifting it from a routine design task to a process of innovation. Giraffe became more than a design software: it was a thinking tool.
“The biggest win was not just in the doing but in how Giraffe allowed us to think differently,” explained Sheba.
Sheba noted “we were doing in five minutes what would normally take two weeks.”
Since then, this methodology has been applied to other projects, including the Buford Highway Corridor Vision, Santa Cruz redevelopment & the Auckland Stadium Development. HKS transformed its project delivery approach with Giraffe, revolutionizing collaboration and creating unique stakeholder value.
Conclusion: Redefining Urban Planning
With Giraffe, HKS replaced static deliverables and one-off tasks with dynamic processes, setting a precedent for the future of urban design. Beyond enhancing efficiency, Giraffe reshaped how HKS thinks, collaborates, and innovates. “This isn’t just about making something look good—it’s about creating a fundamental shift in how we approach and think about urban design,” said Sheba.
The future of urban planning must break down silos and embrace flexibility. Reeti emphasized this shift: “We’ll have to move past thinking I can do massing only in Rhino, document only in Revit, or export only from Grasshopper. Those walls will be broken, and it’s about using whatever you need when you need it.”
As HKS continues incorporating Giraffe into its projects, the firm is reaping the benefits of combining creativity with practicality. HKS’s success with Giraffe on the GWCC project and others set a new standard for urban planning as a collaborative and iterative process within HKS’s practice.
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