Photo by James Ewing
Washington University's redesigned East End: This image shows the spatial relationship between the Gary M. Sumers Welcome Center (foreground), the Craig and Nancy Schnuck Pavilion (top left), and Henry A. and Elvira H. Jubel Hall (top center).
In 1536, Michelangelo was given a monumental task. Pope Paul III commissioned the Renaissance painter, sculptor and architect to redesign one of the most sacred places in Rome. The Capitoline Hill had once been the center of the ancient Roman world’s religious and civic life, but by the early 16th century, it had become a collection of revered but disjointed buildings built up over the course of the Middle Ages. A redesign would be no simple task; two of the buildings sitting in the heart of the Capitoline, the Palazzo del Senatore and the Palazzo dei Conservatori, sat at awkward angels to each other on an unpaved piazza.
Via Wikimedia Commons
An engraving of Michelangelo's plan for the Capitoline Hill by Étienne Dupérac, 1568
Michelangelo’s solution to this medieval violation of classical balance and unity was ingenious: He “corrected” the imperfections of the Capitoline by first building a third building, the Palazzo Nuovo, in a mirror image of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, and then adorned all three buildings in his ensemble with a new colossal order of classical pilasters and columns. While the piazza is in fact a trapezoid in shape, Michelangelo was able to create the optical illusion of a perfect rectangle through the use of architecture. He finished his composition with an elliptical pavement design, adorned with ancient Roman sculpture and a bronze equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius as the focal point. The result is a triumph of Renaissance rationality and invention combined with ancient precedent.
I thought of Michelangelo’s design for the Capitoline Hill last week while viewing Washington University’s near-complete re-envisioning, years in the making, of the Danforth Campus’ East End. The team of architects that Washington University chose to redefine what is essentially the historic front door of a St. Louis institution faced their own daunting challenge: to preserve and enhance iconic buildings over a century years old while simultaneously integrating relatively new construction from the last decade.
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Missouri History Museum
The Italy World's Fair Pavilion sat just southeast of Brookings Hall, which was the Administration Building for the 1904 World's Fair.
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Photo by Emil Boehl; courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
Brookings Hall in 1905
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Photo by Joseph Hampel; courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
Brookings Hall in 1946
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Photo by Ralph D'Oench; courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
Brookings Hall and the main quadrangle, c. 1961
The sacred centerpiece dominating the hilltop on the west is Brookings Hall, of course, which everyone in St. Louis recognizes, even if they don’t know its name. Modeled after English Tudor architecture such as St. James Palace in London, it looms, atop its low hill, like a sculpture on a pedestal. Through much of the building’s history, trees and shrubs partially hid it, even though the university’s master plan placed the building as its eastern terminus. Because the campus continued to Skinker, the broad meadow slowly turned into a giant parking lot, bisected by its iconic pin oak allée. Much like the Capitoline Hill in Rome, the East End began to acquire an assortment of beloved buildings, including two by Fumihiko Maki. Meanwhile, Washington University’s mid-century experimentation with Modernism ended, and the 21st-century buildings rising along Forest Park Parkway harkened back to the pink granite academic style up the hill. I certainly heard plenty of criticism of this postmodernist turn, but I was never hostile to the new buildings.
I am extremely impressed, however, with the final results of the East End renovations, which have brought humane order to traditional disorder. The giant parking lots, added more in reaction to the slow encroachment of the automobile in the last century than out of principle, have been completely eliminated, down to the last parking spot. In their place, Michael Vergason Landscape Architects has created a space that feels both cloistered and open at once. The roar of traffic on the dysfunctional artery of Skinker Boulevard is blocked by the gentle embrace of a new addition to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum by KiernanTimberlake, dramatically improving that building’s visual appeal, and the James A. McKelvey Sr. Hall, designed by Perkins Eastman.
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Courtesy of Washington University
An aerial view of the East End in 1927
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Courtesy of Washington University
An aerial view of the East End in 1948
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Courtesy of Washington University
An aerial view of the East End in 1960
The Ann and Andrew Tisch Park, as the new green space is called, forms a visual anchor between McKelvey School of Engineering to the north, with its more traditional architecture, and the fine arts buildings to the south, with their Modernist architecture. The two sides are not bisymmetrical; rather, they are compositionally balanced, and the use of trees and paths across the lawn create a unified public space. I was pleased to learn that four different species of trees have been planted; monoculture, as we learned at the Gateway Arch—when all the ash trees were felled by the threat of the emerald ash borer—is folly. The trees are currently small, but they will mature to a greater height, consoling those who miss the stately old pin oaks that were about reach the end of their natural lifespan along the old allée. (Their wood was reused in in tables and chairs throughout the new buildings.)
The choice of different architects for many of the buildings could have gone horribly wrong, but has instead turned out well. There seems to be a theme running through all of the new additions to campus: See, Modernism can peacefully coexist with traditional architecture! We see this with Henry A. and Elvira H. Jubel Hall, the new entry to the north (engineering, left-brained) side of the East End. Its compatriots are soundly traditional, looking as if they had stepped out of a book on 17th-century French and English architecture.
Photo by James Byard; courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis
Located on the north side of Ann and Andrew Tisch Park, Henry A. and Elvira H. Jubel Hall, designed by Moore Ruble Yudell, houses the McKelvey School of Engineering’s department of mechanical engineering and materials science. Jubel Hall is designed to promote interdisciplinary collaboration between the McKelvey School and the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.
Jubel Hall, designed by Moore Ruble Yudell, serves as a transitional building, clad in part in pink granite but breaking the mold of its northern neighbors. To Jubel’s immediate west, The Craig and Nancy Schnuck Pavilion, a glass box which is mirrored across the East End’s invisible central axis by the Gary M. Sumers Welcome Center, goes fully Modern. The two pavilions, designed by KieranTimberlake, fully embrace their green surroundings; indeed, what I most enjoyed about them during my visit was the ability to look straight through them, seeing fountains and sculpture on the other side of two glass walls. Most important, they are the two new buildings sitting closest to Brookings Hall, and their simple clean lines do not detract from its Tudor complexity. Frankly, it would have been kitschy to match its style.
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Photo by James Byard; courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis
The central staircase in Anabeth and John Weil Hall overlooks the second-floor Kuehner Family Court. In the background are studio spaces for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts’ Graduate School of Art.
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Photo by James Ewing
With abundant natural light and flexible, loft-style studios and workspaces, the 80,670-square-foot Anabeth and John Weil Hall will house programs for the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art’s Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design and Graduate School of Art.
Crossing over to the right-brained side of the East End, we face the new Anabeth and John Weil Hall, which houses the architecture school designed by KieranTimberlake. A long bench integrated into the north façade facing the Tisch Garden gives students a place to congregate right outside the windows of the dean’s office. Freed from a forgotten terrace by the Kemper, a collection of sculptures graces the lawn in front of Weil. Inside, stairs lead up to a series of light-filled student work areas. Classes were already in session when I visited, and the building was alive with activity. Its centerpiece is quite literally alive, a lush green wall of plants, carefully tended, forming one side of a student lounge.
Photo by Chris Naffziger
The sunken garden that leads to the parking garage
A cantilevered portion of the third floor of Weil Hall hangs over a beautiful sunken garden whose swirling paths evoke rivers, cutting through the trunk of one of the old pin oaks from the former allée. It is a beautiful space, but it also serves the function of drawing the visitor down into the parking garage, whose roof curves up towards Brookings Hall, mirroring the topography of the hill. Designed by BNIM and KieranTimberlake, the garage serves as the lock that binds all the new buildings together underground. Lightwells break up the subterranean nature of the space, and I was encouraged to learn the garage was designed for conversion to other uses if a more enlightened future no longer requires so much room for automobile storage on campus.
Perhaps that is what is most successful about the new East End: the banishment of the automobile to the underworld and the focus on a human-focused environment aboveground. The Kemper no longer sits on an intimidating temple platform, but rather allows access at ground level. While I have long argued for the preservation of the street grid in an urban environment, the campus of Washington University is really sited in early 20th-century suburbia. Can anyone really say they will miss driving on the streets that once cross-hatched the East End? I could already see students scattered in the gardens in relaxed a way that the open lawns further up the hill behind Brookings cannot provide.
The most important question: Does the new surpass what it has replaced? The answer is yes.
