The American Midwest is making a new name for itself. While cities like New York and Los Angeles are known as global design capitals, dynamic modern architecture has begun emerging across the country’s fly-over states. Advocating world-class architecture, sustainability, and craft, Kansas City has become a leader in great American design.
St. Louis-based architecture and design practice Patterhn Ives has broken ground on a new outdoor performing arts pavilion for Missouri State University. Located in Springfield, the project reimagines the plaza adjacent to Craig Hall and transforms the outdoor area into the Judith Enyeart Reynolds Arts Park. Named the John Goodman Amphitheatre, the design will serve as the new, permanent home for the university's acclaimed Tent Theatre.
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Architecture is rooted in tectonics and craft. Few offices know this better than Hufft, an architecture, interior design and fabrication studio with offices in Kansas City and Bentonville. Founded on the belief that input from builders and fabricators adds value and creates better experiences, the studio's multi-disciplinary team now includes over 50 people. In an interview with ArchDaily, Principal Matthew Hufft discusses the firms values and what it means to build today.
Stoss Landscape Urbanism is leading a 13-firm team creating the new Chouteau Greenway Framework Plan for St. Louis. The framework plan consists of a series of geographic, equity, economic, architectural, programming, art and design guidelines that will serve as the master plan for projects. As winners of the competition, the team is exploring how to incorporate connection, inclusion, and joy along the Greenway.
Kansas City has become the first major city in the United States to approve free public transit. Last week, the City Council voted unanimously to make the city’s bus system fare-free alongside the existing streetcar system that was launch in 2016. The Zero Fare Transit proposal aims to be a universal and system-wide fare-free scheme.
Few buildings in history can claim as infamous a legacy as that of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project of St. Louis, Missouri. Built during the height of Modernism this nominally innovative collection of residential towers was meant to stand as a triumph of rational architectural design over the ills of poverty and urban blight; instead, two decades of turmoil preceded the final, unceremonious destruction of the entire complex in 1973. The fall of Pruitt-Igoe ultimately came to signify not only the failure of one public housing project, but arguably the death knell of the entire Modernist era of design.
Studio Gang has revealed their design for One Hundred, a mixed-use tower to be located on Forest Park in St. Louis, Missouri. Studio Gang’s first project in the city, the tower will rise over 350 feet and include retail, amenities, parking and residential apartments featuring views of the park and the Gateway Arch.
Today marks the ninth anniversary of the opening of the Steven Holl Architect’s Bloch Building for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. To commemorate the occasion, Iwan Baan has visited the project to show how it has settled into place on the museum’s campus, become an architectural icon for Kansas City, and continues to shine as one of Steven Holl's most recognized projects.
The Pulitzer Arts Foundation and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis are inviting architects, designers and artists to propose a temporary structure in St. Louis, Missouri, for the second cycle of “PXSTL”. The competition aims to transform an under-used lot in the heart of St. Louis’ Arts and Culture district, catalyzing creative intervention and artistic programs. Nominations will be solicited from deans of architecture, art, and design programs; editors of art, architecture, and design publications; distinguished practitioners; and directors and curators of arts institutions. Read more about this competition after the break.
Make It Right, the organization formed by Brad Pitt that builds affordable and sustainable houses for people in need, has released a series of new single-family home designs by local architects to expand their efforts in Kansas City, Missouri. The new homes will become part of Make it Right's established work in Manheim Park, complementing the affordable housing and community complex opened by the organization in 2013.
View the designs, after the break.
As a student of architecture, the formative years of study are a period of wild experimentation, bizarre use of materials, and most importantly, a time to make mistakes. Work from this period in the life of an architect rarely floats to the surface - unless you're Zaha Hadid or Frank Gehry, that is. A treasure trove of early architectural drawings from the world's leading architects has recently been unearthed from the private collection of former Architectural Association Chairman Alvin Boyarsky. The collection is slated to be shown at the Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, as a part of the exhibition Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association from September 12th to January 4th, 2015.
Take a look at the complete set of architects and drawings for the exhibition after the break.
RTKL, a global architecture and design practice, announced its HALO project will be featured as part of the TransformKC Exhibition (October 4th - 25th in Kansas City, Missouri), which seeks to illustrate what the future could look like for Kansas City transit and innovative rail projects. The HALO concept is a modular, five-foot panelized, glass-enclosed, sustainable walkway for bus passengers that will utilize new technology to capture kinetic energy expended from foot traffic - approximately 7 watts per tile per footstrike. More info here.
Taking place this coming Tuesday, April 2nd at 6:30pm, Daniel Libeskind, one of the most celebrated architects working today, will be delivering the 'Future of Cities' lecture as part of the Assembly Series at Washington University in St. Louis. His presentation, sponsored by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the Architecture Student Council, is free and open to the public and will take place in Graham Chapel. Well known for his Jewish Museum in Berlin, the museum’s radical, strikingly asymmetrical design, is a true icon for the city and the country of Germany. He has received numerous awards including the 2001 Hiroshima Art Prize - an award given to an artist whose work promotes international understanding and peace, never before given to an architect. Fore more information, please visit here.
Taking place February 8-9, the Building Pulitzer Colloquium, which is free and open to the public, will bring together key participants in the design and construction of this iconic building. The colloquium will provide unique insight into the extraordinary collaboration and dedication required to realize this project. Hosted by the The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and Washington University in St. Louis, the event focuses on how this building, designed by an internationally recognized architect, was completed. Topics will include the working structure between Tadao Ando’s office and the St. Louis-based team, the realization of Ando’s design intent through the translation of American methods of construction, and the creation of a work environment that fostered construction excellence. More information on the event after the break.
Material Landscapes is an exhibition that recently opened at the Sheldon Art Gallery in St. Louis, Missouri. The show is curated by Liane Hancock, Assistant Professor at Louisiana Tech University. It features materiality in contemporary landscape architecture through projects by a group of national and international landscape architects.
The Missouri Botanical Garden presents a photographic exhibition documenting many of St. Louis’s most architecturally impressive structures. View “American City: St. Louis Architecture” on display Friday, June 10 through Sunday, Aug. 21 from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily in the Garden’s Ridgway Visitor Center. The exhibit is included with Garden admission.
“American City: St. Louis Architecture” features over 70 large-scale color images by award-winner architectural photographer William Zbaren, including the iconic Linnean House conservatory and Museum Building at the Missouri Botanical Garden.
The images are from the new architectural monograph, “American City: St. Louis Architecture: Three Centuries of Classic Design,” by Zbaren and architectural writer Robert Sharoff. The book – the first new monograph on the city since the 1920s – depicts 50 of the city’s most architecturally significant structures and is available at the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Garden Gate Shop.
For more information on the exhibition please click here. And check “Seven Amazing Structures You Kidn’t Know Were In St. Louis” images after the break.
In the Spring 2010 academic semester, Wiel Arets and Robert McCarter co-taught “A Wonderful World,” an advanced architectural design studio at Washington University in St. Louis. The students were asked to consider the following:
To understand the world we are living in at this moment, we have to redefine the “Map of the World,” a mental construct which at least since 1492 has undergone many reinterpretations. We could read the world anno 2020 as a collective living space for all of us, in which all the continents are in reach within 288 minutes, and the maximum travel distance at each continent will be 72 minutes, the time in which every city on each continent will be able to be reached. During the studio research, the world will be our territory, the continents are our daily living space, and the metropolitan three-dimensional city our home, surrounded by an untouched green/blue environment. The basic question we should put forward is: How will the city develop within our extremely exciting, complex, but “shrinking” world?
Washington University in St. Louis shared with us work from the studio. Follow the break for a description and drawings.
Students Featured: Andrew Buck, Shaun Dodson, Stephen Kim, Meredith Klein, Wai Yu Man, James Morgan, Aaron Plewke Images: Courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis
We also suggest you look at how students responded to the same questions proposed by Wiel Arets at the Berlage Institute Postgraduate Research Laboratory “A Wonderful World” class.
In the summer, we introduced the proposals for The City + The Arch + The River competition that challenged designers to revive the urban fabric surrounding St. Louis’ iconic arch. The proposals offered differing views on ways to activate a park system and attract the public. We’re excited to share the news that the proposal by landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh and his multidisciplinary team has been selected to move forward!
Check out a cool video of MVVA’s proposal and more about the project after the break.
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