No detail too small to count

When the Clayton County Headquarters Library opened in 1988, Time magazine featured it to proclaim a “compelling new modernism.”

Twenty years later, the building is still fresh and striking, and Atlantans Merrill Elam and Mack Scogin, its inventive architects, have earned an international reputation. Last year the British Architects named them International Fellows, an honor shared with only a handful of leading American architects.

You can bet that they are the only Fellows whose office, a nondescript former car dealership downtown, boasts a patch of corn and sunflowers growing tall in the parking lot. Elam and Scogin —-who will lecture at Georgia Tech on Wednesday as part of a centennial series of distinguished alums —- and their architecture are planted firmly in Southern soil.

It’s a choice at the heart of their distinctive practice but also, as they see it, a necessity. “Architecture is at once universal and very specific,” Scogin, says. “If you can’t be in touch with your place, you’ll never get any other place.”

Elam spent her youth in rural Tennessee. Scogin grew up taking the trolley from Avondale to Atlanta. Her father ran the tailor shop in a nearby military base. His father ran the workshop for the decorators at Rich’s Department Store and decorated their modest home to the hilt. She notes the contrast between the freedom of the country and the order of the base. He remembers his otherwise modest home as “an intense visual environment.”

Their work doesn’t reflect their upbringings in any obvious way. Nor will you find stock Southernisms, like verandahs or Tara columns. Southernness, as they see it, is more a way of thinking and observing. Elam, 65, and Scogin, 64, take particular delight in down-home culture: in idiosyncrasy, in the creativity that comes of necessity or intuition. Just as important, they believe they have as much to learn from the Corner Cafe in Cartersville as a Baroque cathedral. Simmering together in the creative soup, they lead to something new and original.

The Clayton County library reflects the mix of high and low. The crisp geometry goes vernacular through the corrugated aluminum siding painted like an old marbleized notebook cover and the neon sign flashing “Library” at the entrance.

“No detail is too small,” Carol Stewart, director of Clayton County’s library services. “It makes their buildings special.”

Using ordinary materials in new ways is a signature practice, like the roof shingles that sheathe of the Buckhead Library.

“It’s like Ray Charles,” says Doug Allen, associate dean of Tech’s College of Architecture. “When he records ‘You Are My Sunshine,’ it’s not the same song.”

IF YOU GO

Merrill Elam and Mack Scogin will give a free lecture Wednesday at 6 p.m. in Georgia Tech’s Architecture Auditorium, East Architecture Building. 245 Fourth St., Atlanta.

PRIZE PROJECTS DUO

Merrill Elam and Mack Scogin have won more than 15 national awards in the past 20 years for projects from dormitories and private homes to libraries and academic buildings. The architects have done interior renovation for Clark Atlanta University Art Galleries and for the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia on Bennett Street. The lobby renovation of One Midtown Plaza in Atlanta opens in November.

Much of their Atlanta work is gone or, as with the Buckhead Library, threatened. Here are a few accessible examples:

Herman Miller Cherokee Operations, Canton, Ga.

Lee B. Philmon Branch Library, Riverdale

Carol Cobb Turner Branch Library, Morrow

Buckhead branch library, Atlanta

Projects elsewhere:

Willow Street Residence Hall, Tulane University

Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center, Wellesley College

Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture, Ohio State University