Flattery, you may have noticed, has been scarce recently.
We’ve received our fair share of attention over the past months, but very little of it has been complimentary. Lately we find our city ranked near the top of the kinds of national lists that, more often than not, make us want to slink down low. We’re tops in crime. We tip the charts, and the scales, in weight. We’re in rarified air as one of the most polluted cities in the country and we’ve slept our way to the top of the list of cities with the highest STD rates.
These are some undeniably nasty stats and could add up to quite the indecorous reputation. Compound this existential crisis (is that really us?!) with the brutal winter of blizzards, tornadoes and the Pujols situation that we’ve all slogged through and you may find yourself, and the city around you, feeling a little tattered.
And then something wholly unexpected comes along that reminds us why, even in the shadow of these unseemly distinctions, it’s still appropriate to feel good about St. Louis. Just when we thought we were at our worst, a secret admirer hands over a valentine that reminds us just how good we can be.
American City: St. Louis Architecture, Three Centuries of Classic Design, published last month by The Image Group, is a 132-page love letter to a town that desperately needed some epistolary affection.
Writer Robert Sharoff and photographer William Zbaren spent the summer of 2007 living in St. Louis as intrepid documentarians, urban archeologists and ersatz artists in residence. They explored our city the way a cardiologist examines arteries and ventricles. Methodically, emphatically, and always with an keen eye trained toward the city as a place with its own esoteric urban mythologies as well as a real sense of sustained dynamic momentum, Sharoff and Zbaren have assembled a portrait of the city as a beautiful, 250-year-old work-in-progress.
Sharoff’s introduction succinctly outlines the history of St. Louis as told through the work of our impressive homegrown pedigree of planners, architects and builders. Architectural epochs, which seamlessly blur together on our neighborhood streets, are disentangled from each other in order to examine them in detailed relief. We learn, for instance, that early St. Louis resembled Quebec, that the construction of the Old Courthouse and our City hall took a combined 39 years and that Eads Bridge was $6.5 million over budget.
Sharoff further informs us that the Wainwright building was “designed in a matter of minutes,” that Frank Lloyd Wright was less than impressed with the caliber of buildings being constructed here in the early 1900s and that our modern era has been defined and dominated by “a trio of Japanese designers,” Minoru Yamasaki (Lambert Field, Pruitt-Igoe), Fumihiko Maki (Steinberg Hall, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum and Walker Hall), and Gyo Obata (the American Zinc Building, MacDonnell Planetarium, Metropolitan Square, the Thomas Eagleton Courthouse, Centene Plaza).
The text is undeniably erudite, at times even witty, but it is the collection of photos that give this book a feeling of true intimacy. The images of the 50 buildings featured in this collection are vibrant, saturated, and seductive, with warm reds of brick (of course), golden ornamentation and gleaming white limestone all jumping off the page. Zbaren smartly frames his subjects and usually pairs a wide view with a smaller, more detailed shot.
Frequently, it seems as though Zbaren is attempting to represent the buildings as objects in a field, which is to say isolated and predominantly devoid of surrounding context, as he does with the Patrick Henry School, Grant Clinic and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, to name only a few. While this compositional strategy does little to indicate the complex urban landscape of our city, and should be taken with something of a grain of salt by those of us who appreciate contradictory aesthetics rubbing shoulders and a good idiosyncratic adjacency, it does allow the architecture of the individual structures to stretch out a bit, even to strike something of a studied pose.
Likewise, many pages proffer architectural details that are cropped to the point of pure abstraction, as is the case with the St. Louis City Hall rotunda, the Wainwright Building’s elevation and the ceiling of the Main Terminal at Lambert Field.
What the collection does best is encourages us to re-examine the physical genetic make-up of our city. The pages of this book reveal exceedingly beautiful buildings that we have reduced to merely the innocuous set pieces of our daily proceedings. We rarely acknowledge the intricacies of the terra cotta ornamentation on the Chemical Building, or the rigorous austerity of 1010 Market and Milles Fountain long ago blended into the background of Market Street.
Thumbing though this book quickly re-assures us that we are surrounded by a legacy of deftly designed places and that the mundane can be extraordinary if we take the initiative to observe with a considered eye.
And so, at long last, we ought to feel flattered. Sharoff and Zbaren have given us American City: St. Louis Architecture as a gift; it is a mirror that reflects back to us our city’s gilded architectural inheritance, its continually evolving identity and the exceptional places that define what it means to be home.
So try to put those ugly lists out of mind; you’re looking pretty good, St. Louis.
Brian Newman 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.
