Atlanta Skyline

Most American cities put their towers in one place. Atlanta has two downtowns and builds in both. The Downtown cluster around Peachtree Center and the Midtown cluster a mile and a half north are separated by a stretch of lower building and the Connector cutting through the middle, which is why photographs of Atlanta rarely agree with each other — the city looks different depending on which half you are facing.

That split is the hardest thing to get right in a model. Compress the two clusters together and you have a generic American skyline. Space them accurately and the silhouette reads as Atlanta immediately, because the gap is as recognisable as the towers.

Bank of America Plaza tops out at 1,023 feet and has been the tallest building in the Southeast since it went up in 1992. The spire is the detail everyone remembers — an open latticework pyramid finished in gold leaf, lit at night, visible from most of the metro.

It is also the element that fails most often in a printed model, because a tapering open spire is thin, unsupported and prone to breaking. We print it as part of the tower rather than as a separate attachment, and trim the lattice to the point where it survives shipping while still reading as the shape you know from I-75.

John Portman shaped more of Atlanta's skyline than any other architect, and the Westin Peachtree Plaza is his signature here: a 723-foot glass cylinder that looks like nothing else in the cluster. In a model, a cylinder among rectangles is the second-strongest identifier after the gold spire, so it gets its proportions checked against the neighbouring towers rather than being approximated.

The result is a piece where three things do the recognition work — the two-cluster spacing, the gold-tipped pyramid, and the lone cylinder. Get those right and the rest of the skyline falls into place around them.

Midtown leads with Bank of America Plaza's gold latticework spire, the tallest in the Southeast. One Atlantic Center's pink granite and copper pyramid roof sits beside it, and Promenade Tower carries its distinctive stepped glass crown.

Downtown, a mile and a half south, is a separate group: the Westin Peachtree Plaza's glass cylinder, Truist Plaza's rounded top, and 191 Peachtree's twin crowned towers. The gap between the two clusters is modelled at its true width — compress it and the piece stops being Atlanta.