Gulf Oil Building (131 Ponce de Leon Avenue)

I. M. Pei finished the design of this office building for the Gulf Oil company in 1949. His firm, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, counts it as the young architect's second completed design, after the Helix building in New York. Built in 1951 where Ponce de Leon Avenue meets Juniper Street, in Midtown, it was the first office building Pei designed and his first building in Atlanta.

The Atlanta Preservation Center had placed it on its 2007 list of endangered buildings, but the City of Atlanta had not designated it a landmark, so no law shielded it from partial or total demolition. In mid-February 2013 the head of the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation grew worried about unusual work on the site: the marble panels below the windows were being taken off. Within a few weeks the whole building had been razed. Davis Architects and the developer Faison Enterprises had it dismantled piece by piece, window after window, marble panel after marble panel, steel column after steel column; the contractor Balfour Beatty then rebuilt its main facade within the 131 Ponce residential complex.

The two-storey building combined steel columns, windows and marble panels set beneath them. It already shows the modernism that would mark the rest of Pei's work: ornament kept to a minimum, and a design of great clarity and simplicity.

The building no longer exists. The 131 Ponce residential complex stands on the site, where Ponce de Leon Avenue meets Juniper Street; the main facade of Pei's building was rebuilt there.