During a recent remodel of the U-Haul Company of St. Louis showroom on South Kingshighway, the company’s maintenance technicians revealed a 1946 Modernist masterpiece, the last intact large-scale lunar landscape by artist Isamu Noguchi. The piece, commissioned by architect Harris Armstrong for the American Stove Company–Magic Chef office building, had been hidden for decades above a dropped ceiling.
Steve Langford, president of the company, says the decision to retain the sculpture was an easy one.
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“Architecture students over the years have wandered into our building to get a glimpse. We would push up a ceiling tile and see a tiny bit.”
The adaptive reuse of the ceiling would have likely delighted Noguchi, who decried the rigid dichotomy of art and utility, artist and other. The story also brings to light how a community benefits when the core values of a business include repurposing of existing buildings.
“We’ve expanded in St. Louis with two buildings–the old Globe Drug Store warehouse on South Tucker, which is nearly complete, and we acquired the National Candy building on Gravois in South St. Louis,” says Langford.
Yet the story of the Armstrong building also highlights tensions that can exist between preservation and economic development.
In 1950, three years after the building was erected, the city’s population reached its zenith of nearly 900,000 residents. Demand for home appliances after the end of World War II drove up sales at the American Stove Company, and Noguchi’s lunar-illuminated ceiling floated above their state-of-the-art lobby.
However, with the advent of suburban sprawl, the city’s population began to decline and St. Louis faced major economic challenges. The American Stove Company, which had by then changed its name to Magic Chef, was bought out in a series of mergers. In 1957, the company vacated the building.
Twenty years later, U-Haul acquired the International Style building from the Teamsters Union and added the dropped ceiling.
Today, St. Louisans from all walks of life conduct business in the showroom beneath the Biomorphic lunar landscape. Although the sculpture reads differently in the more tightly enclosed space, its power to enchant remains.
