Allegorical window, Union Station. Photograph by John Roever, http://www.flickr.com/people/rock_chalk_jhawk_ku/
Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. The phrase is now ubiquitous, always just outside our waking consciousness. Like a mantra handed down from a gentle, jingle-writing swami to our entire society, these three loaded words are both command and plea. They are repeated, embroidered on bags and plastered on billboards. The words are recited in lilting incantation until they have dissipated into the thick haze of our media sated culture. We breathe them in the way we used to breathe in smog; inadvertently and relentlessly.
We know, we know…
Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.
We actively reduce our collective carbon footprints by taking public transportation or carpooling. We purposefully reuse BPA-free plastic bottles that we fill with tap water before every trip to the market, where we fill our canvas bags with products touting inflated percentages of recycled packaging. We dutifully schlep our recycle bins, overflowing with milk jugs and cardboard paper towel rolls, to the curbside once a week.
We think twice about printing emails and ride our bicycles, even in the rain. We purchase digital music and we grow our own veggies and herbs. We wear vintage and we shop Ebay.
These are all wonderful practices, and cumulatively add up to significantly reduced waste of all kinds, but can all of these little planet-saving intentions scale up to the size of homes, buildings and cities, where progressive change happens not in increments but in giant steps?
In some ways, of course, it all ready has. We’ve already made commitments, whether eco-consciously or fiscally based, that shift momentum to larger arenas. We have already begun to reduce on a large scale.
As a society of builders and buyers, average square footages of home have dropped from almost 2,300 square feet in 2007 to just above 2,100 square feet last year. This may not be precipitous, but is a reduction, to be sure, a signifier that our desire to do more with less is more than simply an ephemeral whim.
Often, when a new building is going up, materials made of recycled content are requested. These requests can range from using composite wood decking picked up from local lumber distributors to reclaimed abandoned barn doors and ship hulls as uniquely aged cladding, flooring or casework to building an entire home of recycled plastic bottles, car windshields and re-purposed denim scraps.
This leaves us with reuse, which is perhaps the broadest of the three charges when thinking at an urban scale. The architectural stock in St. Louis is rich with opportunity for reuse. Many buildings and neighborhoods have already exploited the promise of a second, or third, chance at vitality and a redefined incarnation.
Some of the most audacious examples of adaptive architectural reuse in western culture found in Europe. Neither the Louvre in Paris nor the Winter Garden in St. Petersburg were originally art museums. Both have had their turns as royal residences, and played roles in military operations before they were redefined for their current roles as museums of fine arts.
In London, what was once the Bankside Power Station was redesigned from the inside out by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron, and is now the Tate Modern. Over the course a scant few decades, the building was wholly transformed from a cavernous, neglected power station into a cavernous artistic beacon. It is not only the centerpiece of Britain’s modern art collections, but it is also and world’s most visited museum.
Similarly, the site of a former coal and steel production plant located in Germany was redesigned as a sprawling park. Landscape architect Peter Latz preserved the pre-existing infrastructure and deftly introduced new elements, like climbing walls, walkways and gardens, allowing both of the sites identities to coexist.
We’re no slouches over here in the new world. The Highline in New York City can attest to the promise, both of leisure and of economic stimulus, of reinvigorating an otherwise derelict structure. Stretching from deep in the Village up to Midtown, the Highline reuses an otherwise forgotten raised rail line and transforms it into something like a floating riverfront. Seemingly suspended within the dense canyons of Manhattan, a visitor is treated to a lengthy, unbroken bucolic walk surrounded simultaneously by blooming wild flowers and rusting rivets and railroad ties.
The examples and combinations are seemingly endless. The Dia:Beacon in Beacon, NY, the Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal and the Mill City Museum in Minneapolis, MN all thrive in structures that were once purely industrial. Even Chicago’s Millennium Park sits perched atop a reclaimed railroad yard.
St. Louis, too, is redefining what architectural provenance means and how we can reuse structures and neighborhoods in new ways. The Washington Avenue corridor is littered with buildings that were constructed a century ago to help support a thriving industrial economy. Today those structures house condos, restaurants and art galleries.
Likewise, the Grove on Manchester and Old North St. Louis are both newly revitalized districts, which recently been rediscovered by intrepid designers, brewmasters, chefs and curators.
There is the Moolah Theater, once home to the Shriners, and the Boys and Girls Club—formerly Woolworth’s—located at what was once St. Louis’ busiest intersection.
One of the earliest and most notable examples of adaptive reuse in St. Louis is Union Station. The station once housed 22 railroad services and 42 individual rail lines. It was converted in the mid 1980s to a shopping destination and hotel. While it has perhaps fallen out of favor with locals, a trip to this exhaustive redefinition of place succinctly makes the case architectural reuse.
And yet, there are now many empty storefronts, old factories and industrial sites stand in disuse around our city, and retail chains that have fallen by the way side often leave empty big box structures as the archeological detritus. There is still much work to be done.
Brian Newman earned undergraduate degrees in English Literature and Telecommunications, and his graduate degree in architecture from Washington University in St. Louis. He is currently a practicing architectural designer, a contributor to The Architect’s Newspaper and an adjunct faculty member of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis where he teaches graphic and representational strategies. Brian has worked for both local and national architectual offices in Chicago and St. Louis and has tackled residential projects as a consultant and designer. His work has been included in academic journals and published online.
