Echo Street West is located along a spur trail of the Atlanta Beltline path, a reclaimed urban infrastructure development. A close study of Atlanta-specific southern porches is deployed in the forms of raised restaurant decks and social seating steps at anchor retail areas.

The structures are organized within and around outdoor spaces at a variety of contexts, ranging from the street-facing and public plazas to more visually protected outdoor amenities geared toward leasing tenants. The central courtyard over the parking deck in the commercial office parcel, while dedicated to casual working and socializing uses for tenants, is accessible to the general public. Built and planted elements work together to frame different scales of assembly and guide the experience around and even through the buildings.

The main office building picks up cues from the evolving pre-urban gestures of past streets, railways, and structures, and proceeds to extrapolate those into a typology that has traditionally been used to mitigate topographical challenges. 

The open floor plan allows for multiple ways of populating the office space, giving flexibility to the tenants to grow or adapt the space according to their specific needs. 

The natural landscape on the project site and surroundings has been disturbed and re-forested, constantly reinventing itself and rebuilding on top of its previous conditions—a process which in ecological terms is called succession. The urban fabric has morphed from residential to industrial uses before being largely abandoned, allowing for the opportunity to identify and capitalize upon the local character. 

Design for the different disciplines has been focused on the recognition of artifact as an asset and artifice as an object introduced into the local setting to slowly integrate and ultimately become an artifact, as well. A sense of place on those terms is predicated on the attitude to revive the local conditions of the place, using as much of the natural and built resources and artifacts to be re-placed, rather than replaced.