Brookhaven removes colored glass from City Centre dome after uproar

Mayor John Park summarized the overall consensus thus: “The primary colors didn’t mesh with the rest of the design of the building. It distracted from that kind of muted design principle we put forth.”

After discussions, Park and City Council members announced last week they would remove the glass.

The dome sits atop Brookhaven’s 58,000-square-foot City Centre on Peachtree Road, at its intersection with North Druid Hills Road and beside the Brookhaven/Oglethorpe MARTA station. Construction is finishing up, and officials say the new facility will open Aug. 9.

Credit: Reed Williams/AJC

Credit: Reed Williams/AJC

At a cost of $81 million, the City Centre will house offices for the city’s administrative staff, its mayor and City Council members, as well as for the Brookhaven Chamber of Commerce and Explore Brookhaven, the city’s tourism bureau.

It also will house the City Council chambers.

But 60% of the building will serve as public space, giving rise to the City Centre’s nickname: “The People’s House.” The open-air dome can be rented out for events like weddings. One already is booked for this fall.

“We want it to be decorative,” Park said in an interview. “We want it to be iconic.”

He added: “When you’re driving up from Buckhead on Peachtree turning that corner, you wanted something that people notice.”

But how did the dome end up with glass panes whose colors were much brighter than expected?

“We’re trying to get to the bottom of it,” Park said.

It’s unclear if the manufacturer accidentally made glass panes that were more brightly colored than the samples city officials had received.

City spokesperson Burke Brennan offered another possible theory for the mix up: Maybe the fluorescent lights in the current City Hall made the samples appear duller than they are in sunlight.

City officials said the cost of the steel portion of the dome was $965,000. The cost of the colored glass, which would have covered about 30% of the dome, was $890,000.

The mayor, for his part, said the city wants to return the glass for a refund.

“We believe it’s not right, and therefore we shouldn’t have to pay for it,” he said.

Another option is for the city’s arts commission to have an artist “make something out of it,” Park said.

Credit: Reed Williams/AJC

Credit: Reed Williams/AJC

Lauren Kiefer, a former arts commissioner for the city who ran unsuccessfully for Brookhaven mayor in 2023, said having a dome atop the City Centre is “overkill.”

“We have a Gold Dome at the (state) Capitol,” she said. “When I think ‘dome,’ I think the Capitol, the U.S. Capitol, I think Russian cathedrals. I don’t think Brookhaven City Hall.”

Marjorie Hall is founder of the advocacy group DeKalb Strong, which opposes the creation of new cities in the county. She said the “palatial” City Centre of Brookhaven is symbolic of small cities forming and “carving out all these new little fiefdoms” that only add a new layer of government and new expenses without improving DeKalb County.

In the past couple of years, Brookhaven has added a new $25.7 million public safety building and a $10 million office building for the city’s permitting, engineering and other development services employees.

City officials say they have solicited community input on the design of the City Centre in several stages.

“It isn’t like it showed up in the middle of the night,” City Manager Christian Sigman said. “That dome has been around for every design process.”

At one point, Sigman said he remembers seeing a dome with a spire and another dome “like a bishop’s house.”

The four-story City Centre, which will have a green space on top along with the dome, is being paid for by Brookhaven’s Special Services District, a tax district made up of the city’s commercial properties.

The building sits on property the city is leasing from MARTA beside the Brookhaven/Oglethorpe station. The city agreed to pay 6% of the property’s assessed value over the 50-year lease term that began in October 2022.

The city will take ownership of the property in October 2072.

The annual rent for the first year was $174,120, which was 6% of the property’s assessed value of $2.9 million. The annual rent goes up as the property appreciates.

John Ernst, who preceded Park as Brookhaven’s two-term mayor, said it’s a “fabulous building overall” and the colored glass was only going to be a tiny part of it.

“Every construction project I have heard of — private, public, my own house, other people’s houses — there’s always something at the end that didn’t go right or didn’t seem to be right,” he said. “That’s just a part of the construction process.”