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Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s–1970s

2024-08-16T16:13:00-04:00

The story of modern architecture in St. Louis is complex and often contradictory.

Beginning in the 1930s, internationally known architects such as Eric Mendelsohn, Eero Saarinen and Minoru Yamasaki — alongside important regional and national figures like Harris Armstrong, Charles Fleming, Joseph Murphy and Gyo Obata — created iconic structures that embodied new ideas about form and, in many cases, democratic social organization. Yet the period also was marked by racial segregation and by large-scale demolitions throughout the urban core.

This fall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis will present “Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s–1970s.” With nearly 300 architectural drawings, models, photographs, films, digital maps and artworks, “Design Agendas” is the first major exhibition to examine how interlocking civic, cultural and racial histories, as well as conflicting ideological aims, reshaped the city.

“I lived in Pruitt-Ig...

Win a copy of Sandfuture, Justin Beal's revealing biography of World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki

2022-06-23T17:43:00-04:00

Admirers of World Trade Center architect Minoru Yamasaki in search of a hot beach read this summer look no further! We’re giving away a copy of Justin Beal’s engrossing title Sandfuture, recently published by The MIT Press, wherein the prolific career and perplexing obscurity of the late Japanese designer is threaded across 256 pages to an eventual conclusion that asks several essential questions about architectural history, the art market, and changing face of the city in a technically precise novelistic tone.

By avoiding a simple shot-for-shot retelling of the different formative events and pivotal moments comprising the arc of Yamasaki’s still-debated five-decade-long career, Sandfuture builds from the scrapheap of a bygone era into an accurate reflection on contemporary life in post-9/11 New York City, beginning with the author’s own retelling of the infrastructure damage that occurred during Hurricane Sandy.

Image: The Century City Plaza in Los Angeles (courtesy of Walter P. ...

Housing for the Rest of Us, A Non-Manifesto

2016-10-10T11:31:00-04:00

Manifestos serve a purpose. They make quick, abrupt statement, clear the air, and get attention. This manifesto is no different, except it has nothing theoretical to state nor anything specific to propose. It only has one maxim: there are no good ideas. Its only corollary, which necessarily follows, is that there are no good designs.

The essay revisits Pruitt-Igoe to make quick points of obvious relevance today, especially this election cycle. It is both broad and pointed, and takes much of its spirit and bluntness from the manifestos of the past that it reviews briefly, in passing. The quality of our lives today—all of us—depends on the character and quality of our housing.

Of special interest is attention to Steve Carver’s film More Than One Thing, which is a bonus feature on the DVD of Chad Freidrichs’s well-received The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. More Than One Thing has recently been restored as part of a National Film Preservation Grant. It is at the Film and Media Archive at Washington University in St. Louis and will be aired this November at the St. Louis International Film Festival. It should also be available online before long.