Lamar Building penthouse

G. Lloyd Preacher, from Augusta and Atlanta, and W. L. Stoddard, from New York, drew the Lamar Building. A great fire swept Augusta in 1916 and damaged the frame, and the tower was finished in 1918.

Gene Holley, who won a seat in the Georgia State Senate in 1964, was one of three Augusta businessmen who bought the building in 1973. During the 1970s he grew close to I. M. Pei and asked him for a penthouse crowning the tower. His dealings in the oil industry paid for an increasingly lavish life, and the glass penthouse was its high point. It was finished in 1975; in May 1978, after foreclosure, the insurance company that held the building's mortgage bought it.

In 1979 the building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. After standing vacant for several years, it was bought in June 2021 by Georgia developer Pace Burt, to be converted into apartments.

The penthouse is a wedge-shaped glass pavilion that locals call "the toaster". Those who made it inside in Holley's day found, among other things, hand-picked, hand-carved Italian marble.

The modern pavilion and the main building, which has some Baroque elements, set two very different styles side by side, and people have debated the result since it was completed. About ten years later, Pei would design the glass pyramid at the Louvre.

The pavilion can be seen from afar in downtown Augusta, on top of the Lamar Building on Broad Street.