Courtesy of Cite Works
Architect Ann Wimsatt has worked around the world. Her projects include this residential building in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Vibrant watercolor sketches from travels around the world paper a white wall in architect Ann Wimsatt’s sleek Central West End studio. They convey energy in static buildings and demonstrate the balance of edifice and environment. Wimsatt’s colorful art coexists with the precision CAD drawings that bring her designs to life.
Founded in 2011, Cite Works Architects comprises Wimsatt’s studio plus that of her husband—architect, landscape designer, and sculptor David Williams, who maintains an industrial space that’s well suited to his work.
“We have different projects and clients,” says Wimsatt. The arrangement isn’t usual for architects, but their partnership never fit in a tidy box.
From the start, the two didn’t shift paradigms; they rocked them. They met in Manhattan in 1980 at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, an avant-garde center where architects explored alternatives in theory and practice.
“It was a heady experience,” she says. “Aldo Rossi critiqued one of my projects; he said, ‘This looks like poetry.’ Dave and I both went to work for I.M. Pei soon after. Pei’s formal language was so perfected, so clear and so constructed. It was an amazing time.”
Wimsatt and Williams draw on 30 years of inspiration from a world they have seen much of and know well.
They married just before departing for Singapore as junior architects on a six-person team at Pei’s Raffles City complex. “That project changed our world. When you’re working with 2,000 Korean workers on a fast track with 500 pages of architectural drawings produced by hand, you get things built.”
They completed the project and rewarded themselves with six months in Italy. “We rested, studied, and sketched before returning to New York. We first saw the world courtesy of I.M. Pei.”
Back in Manhattan in 1986, they founded Wimsatt Williams Studio. In the ’90s they returned to St. Louis, Wimsatt’s hometown, so their boys could attend primary school here.
But memories of their experiences abroad compelled them to move to Christchurch in 2002. “New Zealanders admire modern architecture, plus we wanted our two boys to experience life overseas,” Wimsatt says.
In 2008, when the world economy tanked, Abu Dhabi was still building. The couple moved there under the sponsorship of the ruling sheik’s four brothers. “We drank tea sweetened with camel’s milk in the company of Pashtun Afghans,” says Wimsatt.
Current projects include a condominium development at the Lake of the Ozarks (Williams) and a modern house for a young couple in Old North St. Louis (Wimsatt).
