The commissions of Mauran, Russell, Garden, and later Crowell fought for classical style as the world became more modern

They designed Stix, Baer and Fuller, the massive Butler Brothers warehouse in western downtown, and the Second Baptist Church, among others.

by

The Beaux-Arts Style in St. Louis would not last forever, and the firm of Mauran, Russell and Garden would help usher that aging style into the decades after World War I. Later switching out Garden with Crowell, the four architects would reshape how the built environment would adapt to the increasingly unstable world the 20th century was becoming, as World War II was looming in the 1930s. Simultaneously, the first stirrings of modernism in architecture were appearing in European schools at the same time political upheavals occurred around the continent. When the dust settled, the architectural styles of the past had given over to the future in St. Louis. But for the time being in decades around the year 1900 until World War II, the firm would fight for classical architecture.

Perhaps what distinguishes the firm of Mauran, Russell and Garden, later Crowell, was the architects’ education. While in the past, prominent architects and proponents of the Beaux-Arts style in St. Louis had graduated in their teens from local universities, John Lawrence Mauran and William DeForrest Crowell graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Mauran began his career in Boston before coming to St. Louis to work in his firm’s local office in the city. He formed a new firm in 1900 with Ernest John Russell and Edward Gordon Garden, and the three soon established their own reputation out from underneath the shadow of their former Boston-based employer.

And also what differentiated the three was their lack of local roots, and experience in Chicago and the East Coast; Russell was even born in England. The trio quickly became adept at winning commissions for the massive new commercial buildings rising to the west of the 19th-century commercial district in St. Louis. While the Romanesque Revival had often dominated office buildings in the 19th century, Adler and Sullivan had shown in St. Louis with the Wainwright, Union Trust, and St. Nicholas Hotel the limitations of that style. Ironically, Mauran, Russell and Garden’s addition to Henry Ives Cobb’ Chemical Building, which expanded the skyscraper to the north along 8th Street, demonstrated their ability to adapt preexisting construction. They then moved their offices into the top floor.

They next designed the Grand Leader department store of Stix, Baer and Fuller, which finally ended its life in retail as Dillard’s. The massive Butler Brothers warehouse in western downtown was an illustration of their ability to adopt monumental designs for rudimentary functions. The Second Baptist Church, from 1907, is a masterful study in Italian architecture, carefully reproducing the transition so often seen from the Romanesque to the Gothic in a single building. 

Also, during this time, and of critical importance, the firm began to push for the greater influence of the English School of architecture in the Gothic Revival in St. Louis architecture. For much of the 19th century, architects had favored the German, French, and even the Italian Gothic for inspiration in ecclesiastic architecture, and finally, in the huge churches of the West End, Clayton, and University City, England’s grand cathedrals would be the inspiration. The same would happen in residential architecture; while in the 1800s Italian and French architecture dominated, now the Tudor Revival, inspired by the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I of England, would show in the houses of the private places and avenues west of Union Boulevard.

Garden moved away to San Francisco in 1909; Mauran and Russell brought in MIT and Ecole des Beaux-Arts grad William DeForest Crowell, and the fortunes of the firm continued to rise. Perhaps the most prominent commission to come was for the Railway Exchange Building, the towering mass that fills an entire city block (such sized buildings seemed to be a specialty of the firm). The cube-like building could have easily been a failure, but the three architects broke up the monotony of the façade by delineating where the hulk of the department store ended and the O-shaped office tower above it began. The use of bright white terracotta in a repeating but non-monotonous pattern further gives the building a modern feel.

And the modern era was encroaching on the traditional, classical designs favored in the first decades of the 20th century. Mauran, Russell and Crowell seem to adapt their designs, perhaps invigorated with the addition of their younger third partner. In quick succession, they received the commission for several major civic commissions in the new public forum around the intersection of Market Street and what is now Tucker Boulevard. Tastes were clearly changing, and a more streamlined classical architecture with Art-Deco influences was needed in this increasingly modern age. The three responded with the new Police Headquarters, built in 1927; the new Federal Courthouse in 1932; and the Soldiers Memorial in 1938. The Civil Courts Building by Klipstein and Rathmann from 1930 fits in nicely with this new severe classical style. 

The architects certainly saw their craft as a battle between opposing forces of moderation versus excess. In a 1933 newspaper article in the Globe-Democrat, Russell commented on the state of architecture and how it had been moving in the wrong direction. in his opinion:

“Architecture as an art has benefited immeasurably by the [Great Depression] in that ultramodernism in construction has received a distinct setback and the architects have been forced to turn to more utilitarian tasks.”

One must wonder who these “ultramodernists” were that Russell was so concerned about, but by the 1950s, after the dramatic changes in the world brought about during World War II, the successor firm of the old guard who had helped steer St. Louis architecture on a more conservative track in the first half of the 20th century had metamorphosized into Russell, Mullgardt, Schwartz & Van Hoefen. This new firm was decidedly modernist and was now designing some of the most groundbreaking buildings of suburban St. Louis such as the Northland Shopping Center, which has now been demolished much like its older more traditional ancestors.

Mauran, born right after the Civil War, would die in 1933, right before the rise of Nazism in Germany. Russell, also born while the South was still rebuilding after the destruction of the 1860s would die in 1956, just over a year before the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik. His house, one of three in St. Louis designed by famed Boston architect Henry Hobson Richardson at 5814 Cabanne Avenue in the West End, was donated to the city; it was torn down for a park named in his honor. Crowell died in 1967, the last of the original four members of the storied firm. One can only imagine what a man, born in 1879 thought of the Beatles, let alone the architecture that had long taken over from the lavishly ornate styles he had once designed 50 years before.

Sign up for the Recap, St. Louis Magazine's email overview of the week's top stories.
Or, check out all of our newsletters.