Six Outstanding Libraries Honored by the AIA and American Library Association
South Mountain Community Library. (Bill Timmerman / Mark Boisclair)
As cities across the country struggle to bring new life to aging athenaeums and cash-strapped local libraries, the AIA has honored six outstanding examples of library design in this year’s AIA/ALA Library Building Awards. In the past we have seen a Walmart transformed into a library, a controversial starchitect renovation in New York, and an interactive, LED light-show—now take a look at these honored projects. From democratic design in the nation’s capital to a stunning Beaux-Arts restoration in St. Louis and high-tech solutions in North Carolina, this year’s winning projects present a range of answers to the challenges facing our fading repositories.
Anheuser-Busch Taps Plans For St. Louis Biergarten
A new outdoor “biergarten” at the Anheuser-Busch brewery in St. Louis will be a first for any of the beer conglomerate’s 12 U.S. breweries. (Courtesy Anheuser-Busch)
An 18-foot, bright red “B” plucked from St. Louis’ Anheuser-Busch brewery will find a permanent home in the beer conglomerate’s first U.S. “biergarten.” The “B” is a relic of the neon Budweiser sign replaced by LEDs in February.
Located adjacent to the brewery’s tour center at 12th and Lynch streets, the beer garden joins what is already one of the region’s largest tourist attractions, drawing 350,000 visitors annually. Five of the dozen U.S. breweries are owned by A-B, which itself is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Belgium-based A-B InBev, but the St. Louis location is so far the only one with a beer garden on tap.
Massive Monsanto Expansion in St. Louis Suburbs has Urbanists Asking, “Why not downtown?”
Cannon Design’s life sciences research center for agribusiness giant Monsanto in Chesterfield, Missouri. (Courtesy Cannon Design)
Agribusiness titan Monsanto has pledged hundreds of millions of dollars in upgrades to its research facility outside St. Louis, and design details are starting to pop up. Cannon Design will plan, design and engineer a new 400,000 square foot center for life sciences research.
Coming Soon To Vacant Lots in St. Louis: Chess, Farming, Sunflower Rehab
A restaurant made from shipping containers was among the winners. (Courtesy Sustainable Land Lab)
The winners of St. Louis’ first-ever “Sustainable Land Lab” competition, put on by Washington University and city officials, attempted to make the most of a regrettably abundant resource: vacant lots.
Local architects took top honors in a competition that garnered some four dozen submissions. Each winner gets a two-year lease on a North St. Louis vacant lot and $5,000 in seed money to realize their ideas. Five winning projects will share four lots (two finalist teams combined their proposals into one new plan) across the city.
St. Louis Eyes Shipping Container Architecture
(Courtesy Delsa Development)
A new development in St. Louis has proposed using shipping containers to create a mixed-use building. The project, known as The Grove, is located at 4312 Manchester Avenue. It features a three-story structure of stacked steel boxes with retail on the first level and offices and residential above. The development, which already garnered the support of the Forest Park Southeast Development Committee, is set on the site of a former four-family brick home and is presently awaiting approval from the 17th Ward Alderman.
Before & After> Michael Van Valkenburgh Overhauling St. Louis Arch Grounds
The Eero Saarinen-designed Gateway Arch in St. Louis is preparing to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its opening, taking place in 2015, and the original Dan Kiley landscape around the monumental catenary arch is getting an overhaul by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA). The full story about the newly updated plans for the ambitious project appeared in the Midwest edition of AN News. MVVA shared these views of the current landscape and what’s proposed, showing just how dramatic the transformation will be. Take a look.
Washington University in St. Louis will soon begin work on two major projects totaling $130 million, according to NextSTL. St. Louis’ Hastings+Chivetta will design the $120 field house expansion, an extensive addition to Washington University’s historic field house, built out from the 1903 Francis gymnasium. Clayton, MO-based Ottolino Winters Huebner will design a $10 million cyclotron, a particle accelerator used for medical imaging and for the synthesis of radioisotopes for pharmaceutical production. The university’s Dr. Michel Ter-Pogossian is considered the father of positron emission tomography (PET scans), a nuclear medical imaging technique that produces 3-D images of internal body processes. (Rendering: Hastings+Chivetta)
Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch in St. Louis Broke Ground 50 Years Ago Today
St. Louis’ Gateway Arch under construction. (Courtesy Missouri State Archives)
Fifty years ago, the St. Louis waterfront was one gigantic parking lot after 40 blocks of the city’s gritty industrial quarter were cleared in the late 1930s to create a site for a new Jefferson National Expansion Memorial. It took another two decades to get anything built, but on February 12, 1963, the missing slice of St. Louis began to change as ground was broken for Eero Saarinen’s famous Gateway Arch that still defines St. Louis in one dramatic gesture.
Colloquium to Revisit the Building of Tadao Ando’s Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis
The Pulitzer Foundation by Tadao Ando. (Courtesy Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts)
Tadao Ando’s architecture strives for perfection, with glass-smooth concrete walls nearly as reflective as mirrors, ideal proportion and geometry creating a sacred sense of space, and design details that reveal no part of a building is too small for consideration. In fact, as one story goes, Ando requested that a foot-thick concrete wall at his Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts in St. Louis be rebuilt multiple times since it didn’t meet his strict standards.
The Pulitzer, one of only a handful of buildings the Japanese architect has completed in the United States and the first in the US intended for public use, opened in 2001, demurely set behind a concrete wall in the city’s Grand Center neighborhood. This Friday and Saturday (February 8 and 9), the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and Washington University in St. Louis are hosting the free Building Pulitzer colloquium looking back at the four-year construction period of Ando’s Pulitzer Foundation.
St. Louis’ Last Gasometer is No More
The last gasometer in St. Louis bites the dust. (Courtesy Michael R. Allen / Preservation Research Office)
A collection of strange industrial relics in St. Louis has gone the way of many before it, as the city’s last gasometer has fallen.
Gasometers are storage devices for natural and coal gas, built during the 20th century but abandoned after 2000 when underground storage became the preferred method. The Laclede Gas Company Pumping Station at 3615 Chevrolet, built around 1920, was the area’s last. Michael R. Allen wrote an epitaph for the bygone piece of infrastructure, providing a remembrance that asks, are industrial relics worth preserving?
Basically silos for gas, the structures leave behind industrial skeletons that are sometimes stunning, always intriguing — a Flickr group devoted to their documentation has more than 1,000 entries. They are more common in Europe than in the U.S., but Laclede’s St. Louis structures were the most notable on this side of the Atlantic. In Vienna they are celebrated, with four architectural teams currently converting four gasometers for new uses.
National Blues Museum Targets 2014 Opening in St. Louis
The National Blues Museum. (Courtesy NationalBluesMuseum.org)
Cleveland has the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Kansas City has the American Jazz Museum, Nashville has Music City, and now St. Louis looks likely to become home to the National Blues Museum in 2014. Cue up “St. Louis Blues.”
On View> Sreshta Rit Premnath’s “Folding Rulers” Explore Visual Representation
(Courtesy Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis)
Sreshta Rit Premnath: Folding Rulers
Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis
3750 Washington Blvd
Through December 30, 2012
Sreshta Rit Premnath’s exhibit, Folding Rulers, at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis questions processes of representation, attempting to identify why certain objects, images, events, and discourses are chosen to represent larger ideas, cultural periods, or histories. Using various mediums, Premnath investigates why and how icons, places, and people— specifically the concept of power—are so symbolic. By analyzing and reducing these symbols and their meanings, his new work offers new readings of people, places, and times.
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