At Atlanta Technical College, there was a building sitting on campus that no longer served its original purpose. The Georgia Public Broadcasting studios, once built to house the specialized infrastructure of broadcast television production, had run their course. The campus needed space. The question was what to do with what they had.
Build new, or reimagine what was already there?
The decision to convert Georgia Public Broadcasting into a state-of-the-art library, testing center, and student resource hub is the kind of call that doesn’t make headlines when it’s made. It makes headlines later, when students are using the space and the institution wonders why it took so long.
A Building with the Wrong DNA
Broadcast studios are designed for a fundamentally different set of requirements than academic learning environments. Power infrastructure is concentrated and specialized. Lighting is controlled and directional, built for cameras rather than people. Acoustic treatment is extreme — studios are engineered to eliminate sound transmission, not manage it across a variety of activities. Natural light, the single most valuable asset in a library environment, is typically absent by design.
Converting the building meant working through those differences systematically. The floor plates had to support open computer labs, quiet study zones, group collaboration areas, and a high-capacity testing center, all with very different acoustic, lighting, and data infrastructure needs. The two-story window wall that now fills the second level with natural light wasn’t a design flourish. It was a direct response to what the original building couldn’t offer.
That principle shaped the approach throughout the Library. Zoning the space — separating the testing center from the open computer labs, the quiet stacks from the collaborative areas — required decisions that had to be made early and held through the design process. Moving walls after the fact is expensive. Getting the adjacencies right from the start is the work.
Why Repurpose Rather Than Build?
The financial case for adaptive reuse in higher education is well-established. Construction costs for repurposing projects can run 12 to 50 percent less than equivalent new builds, depending on the condition of the existing structure and the complexity of the conversion. At Atlanta Technical College, the $4.8 million renovation produced a 36,000 square foot facility – a number that would look very different on a new construction budget.
|
But cost alone rarely drives these decisions. There’s a campus planning dimension that matters just as much. A building that sits underutilized creates drag on maintenance budgets, on campus cohesion, on the way a campus feels to the people who use it every day. Converting Georgia Public Broadcasting added more than 30,000 square feet of functional space to Atlanta Technical College’s academic footprint without requiring new land, new permitting timelines, or the extended disruption that comes with ground-up projects.
The Princeton Review has found that 59 percent of students surveyed said an institution’s commitment to sustainable building practices would factor into their decision to attend. Adaptive reuse doesn’t just make financial sense, it signals something to prospective students about how an institution makes decisions.
What the Space Includes Today
The finished library at Atlanta Technical College functions across multiple modes simultaneously. On the first level: the Paralegal, Periodicals, and Reference collections; Multi-Media Services; Circulation; Technical Services; Computer Help Stations; an electronic classroom; a presentation room; a multi-purpose room for student and community programming; and a testing center in the rear of the building, accessible through a separate entrance, equipped to serve 75 or more students at one time.
Over 200 individual and collaborative computer workstations support student and faculty research throughout.
The second level houses the General and Allied Health Collections. Private group study rooms, individual study carrels, lounge seating, and reading tables are distributed to accommodate different kinds of work at different levels of focus. The two-story window wall provides the natural light the original building couldn’t.
Students and visitors enter through a new exterior canopy and move through the space guided by curved floor patterns and overhead ceiling features that orient the two-story interior without signage doing all the work. It reads as a contemporary academic library — not as a renovated broadcast facility.
The Broader Question
The Atlanta Technical College project is a useful example of how adaptive reuse decisions play out when they’re made well. Institutions facing similar situations tend to frame the question too narrowly at first: can we fit our program into this building? The better question is whether this building, properly reimagined, can support what the campus needs for the next twenty years.
The design challenges in a conversion like this are real. Infrastructure differences between a broadcast environment and an academic one don’t resolve themselves. The work is in the assessment — understanding what the building can support, what it needs to be made to support, and where the investment pays off. That assessment, done early, shapes every decision that follows.
What the Atlanta Technical College library demonstrates is that the right answer isn’t always the new building. Sometimes the right answer is already on campus, waiting for a different question.
Working through a similar decision on your campus?
We’ve worked on adaptive reuse and renovation projects across higher education, public libraries, and civic spaces for over 50 years. If you’re assessing what’s realistic for a building on your campus, we’re glad to have that conversation.