At the start of the twenty-first century, Atlanta is the fastest growing metropolitan area in the United States, with a population exceeding five million. Its skyline is punctuated with elegant new skyscrapers designed by leading urban architects, and the city is home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other, except New York. It has been an amazing rise in a century and a half. On September 1, 1864, Confederate General John Bell Hood surrendered the city of Atlanta, after four months of brutal siege, to a Union army led by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who burned the entire city to the ground before marching south through Georgia. Relatively small at the start of the war—its population was only 9,554 in the census of 1860—Atlanta struggled to rebuild during decades of reconstruction to become an industrial behemoth today. The saga is immortalized by the phoenix on its city seal, which bears the motto “Resurgens,” Latin for “rising again.”
 

Architecture is less important as a fine art than as a civic art.¹ As a fine art, a building gives fame to its designer and pleasure to those who appreciate it. As a civic art, it honors the art of architecture, while serving and representing the purposes of individuals bound together into a political community that assists all of its members in seeking to perfect their nature. A fine arts culture seeks ever-changing exhibitions of buildings; a civic culture builds cities. The one spurns tradition; the other embeds architecture within a tradition. In the one, architects reject the past and build only for the present; in the other, they reach into the past to serve the present and future. The one is modernism; the other is the “other modern.”²