With World Cup on horizon, where ailing landmark's revival stands

With Atlanta’s first 2026 FIFA World Cup match just 76 days away, significant changes downtown extend beyond Centennial Yards, the former CNN Center, and historic Broad Street. 

Active downtown developers Gorman & Company report that pre-World Cup phase one work has nearly finished at the long-vacant but iconic Atlanta Construction Building. 

The multi-phase project—formerly known as Folio House, but that name has been dropped—has been renamed 143 Alabama St. for its downtown address, officials tell Urbanize Atlanta. The initial phase officially broke ground in June. 

As part of the Constitution Building’s adaptive-reuse revival, the building’s façade has been washed, and metal panels that had covered windows for a decade have been removed and replaced with stained wood. 

“Vinyl wraps are going up in the window openings facing Forsyth [Street], and a mural project will line the bottom windows on Alabama Street, closer to the World Cup,” a project rep wrote via email. 

Plans call for activating the area behind the building—to be called “The Pitch”—during multiple World Cup games beginning in mid-June, according to Gorman reps. (A 2025 diagram included with Invest Atlanta paperwork shows a watch party screen, food trucks, DJ booth, kids play area, pavilion, and more positioned around the old building.)  

Project officials have said the goal prior to the World Cup is to stabilize and restore the building’s exterior while daylighting the ground-floor commercial space. 

Following World Cup festivities, the second part of phase one will kick off construction prior to the end of 2026, Gorman officials said in an update. 

That now calls for converting upstairs spaces to 46 affordable housing units—reserved for renters earning between 30 and 80 percent of the Area Median Income—and the ground floor into commercial spaces totaling about 11,600 square feet. 

The building's housing and commercial overhaul is projected to open in 2028, according to Gorman reps. 

Meanwhile, phase two of the project has been awarded tax credits from the Georgia Department of Community Affairs as its design phase continues. Land disturbance and building permits were recently applied for with the city, per Gorman officials.

Phase-two construction is now expected to finish sometime in 2029. It calls for ground-up construction of 149 affordable multifamily units atop a parking structure next to the landmark Constitution Building, as designed by architects Gensler. 

Invest Atlanta, the city’s economic development arm, approved tax-exempt bond financing totaling more than $22 million in September to help get the second phase of the 143 Alabama St. project off the ground. 

Ultimately, the project is envisioned as becoming an anchor for formerly tired downtown blocks and a conduit between Centennial Yards, Five Points, and Underground Atlanta. Invest Atlanta selected Gorman—a Wisconsin-based developer specializing in affordable housing—to take on the Constitution Building restoration job and new construction next door in autumn 2024. 

A rare example of Art Moderne-style architecture in the city, the original five-story, 95,000-square-foot structure was built in 1947 for the Atlanta Constitution newspaper, a predecessor to today’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution. That operation departed the building after just a few years. 

Georgia Power moved in around 1953 but was gone in the early 1970s, leaving the property vacant ever since. In more recent years, the metal shields were placed over windows to prevent encampments. At one point, trees sprouted from the roof. 

The new mid-rise apartment building next door would rise from a current parking lot along Ted Turner Drive, between Five Points and the under-construction Centennial Yards megaproject. 

Another Gorman development with an adaptive-reuse component, Sweet Auburn Grande, is fully under construction on the flipside of downtown, while the company’s proposed remake of historic church property elsewhere downtown is gearing up to break ground soon. 

Find a closer look at plans for the downtown property’s revitalization—both pre-World Cup and after—in the gallery above. 

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