Design team of Cooper Robertson and James Carpenter Design Associates with Trivers Associates and Haley Sharpe Design presents the Gateway Arch Museum, nearing July opening.
A team of renowned design firms, partners in the competition-winning entry for an ambitious expansion and renovation of the Eero Saarinen-designed Gateway Arch Museum in St. Louis, will soon unveil the building’s transformation.
The new Museum’s designers — Cooper Robertson and James Carpenter Design Associates — were part of a team led by landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) that won the closely watched international competition, “Framing a Modern Masterpiece: The City + The Arch + The River 2015” organized by the nonprofit Gateway Arch Park Foundation. The result, which will open in early July, is the cultural centerpiece of a comprehensive renewal of the U.S. National Park Service’s Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.
Both regarded for award-winning cultural and museum architecture, Cooper Robertson and James Carpenter Design Associates (JCDA) have designed an expanded Gateway Arch Museum with a dramatic entrance and plaza in the historic landscape by the renowned Dan Kiley. With new public spaces, the impressive great entry hall leads to re-imagined exhibitions and the fully renovated original Saarinen building beneath the famed Arch. The exhibitions are designed by Haley Sharpe Design of London and Toronto, and the St. Louis-based associate architect, Trivers Associates rounds out the design team.
According to the Gateway Arch Park Foundation, the nonprofit group behind the effort, a primary goal of the long-term, multi-million-dollar project is to create closer and more robust connections between the Gateway Arch Museum and the landscape of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial and the city of St. Louis as a whole. Nearly 45,000 square feet of new museum area has been added and more than 100,000 square feet of existing space has been reconfigured into new exhibition galleries, public education facilities, and visitor amenities.
According to the architecture and design team, the new Gateway Arch Museum is extended west towards downtown with a new entrance and plaza connecting to the redesigned and expanded Luther Ely Smith Square, now spanning over a depressed interstate highway. The design for the expansion and renovation of the Museum strengthens the physical connections between the city and the Arch by means of a dynamic linear plan with amenities at the entry level, followed by a narrative exhibition by Haley Sharpe that leads to the Arch itself.
With the new entry plaza and landscape designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, the Museum’s public spaces and surroundings are fully integrated into the overall plan for the Dan Kiley-designed 91-acre Park conceived and executed between 1948 and 1965. The new Museum’s memorable spaces by Cooper Robertson and JCDA at the landmark Saarinen Arch, elevate the cultural complex to become a more cohesive and engaging international destination. The Museum and Park now connect directly to the 1862 Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis, while also engaging with and reinforcing the presence of the Arch — an internationally recognized icon — and directly supporting the revitalization of downtown St. Louis.
The architecture and design initiative has helped coalesce significant support in St. Louis and regionally for the improved park and expanded museum. Partners of the Gateway Arch Park Foundation include Bi-State Development, Jefferson National Parks Association, Great Rivers Greenway, and the National Park Service. The project design team has been led by Michael Van Valkenburgh, founder of MVVA, Cooper Robertson’s Scott Newman, FAIA and Andrew Barwick, R.A., and JCDA’s James Carpenter, founder and principal, and Joseph Welker, studio director.
“The Museum design is fully integrated into the National Register-listed landscape,” says Cooper Robertson’s Newman. “The new entrance is precisely inserted into the topography, allowing visitors to enter the building through the landscape rather than descending underground. As one enters, a luminous great hall is revealed with views deep into the Museum’s monumentally scaled exhibits below, elevating and enlivening the visitor experience, while respecting Dan Kiley’s original Park design”
JCDA’s Carpenter describes the new Museum experience, “On arrival the new entry is announced by an arc of glass laid flat on the ground, reflecting the image of the sky above, while the Arch itself scribes an arc against the sky beyond. This welcoming gesture leads visitors down into the spaciousness of the new Museum expansion, embedded within the landscape.”
The design creates a coherent and memorable visit by integrating the Museum content with the Arch, says the architect Newman. “A linear exhibition offers various ways to navigate multiple stories on single and successive visits, and merges seamlessly with the trip up the Arch, and then delivers one at its base to experience the great work itself,” he explains.
An official dedication ceremony is planned for July 2018 and the Museum will open to the public this year, according to the Gateway Arch Park Foundation.
About Cooper Robertson
Recognized internationally for its successes in making thriving places, the award-winning design firm Cooper Robertson integrates architecture and urban design at many scales, from buildings to parks to city districts. Founded in 1979, the firm is directed by a core group of diverse and accomplished professionals including Scott Newman, FAIA, who leads the cultural and educational practice. One of the foremost museum planners and designers in the country, Newman has served as partner-in-charge of the firm’s work with more than 30 museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, Gettysburg, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Yale Center for British Art, Monticello, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Other acclaimed works by the firm include large-scale urban redevelopments such as Battery Park City, major cultural and educational buildings, waterfront sustainability and resiliency plans, and exceptional residences and resorts. Visit www.cooperrobertson.com.
About James Carpenter Design Associates
James Carpenter Design Associates is an internationally recognized, award winning design firm founded in 1979. The firm is a cross-disciplinary practice working at the intersection of Architecture, Fine Arts and Engineering and is recognized for it’s innovative and distinctive approach to the use of natural light which serves as the foundation of its design philosophy. JCDA brings a deep technical knowledge and artistic sensibility to its building projects and planning for cultural and institutional clients, leveraging this expertise to exploit the aesthetic and performative aspects of natural light at a variety of scales. Major projects include the Israel Museum’s expansion and renewal (2005-2011), an 18 acre campus in Jerusalem incorporating an outdoor sculpture garden (Isamu Noguchi), the Shrine of the Book (Frederick Kiesler) and the primary museum buildings. JCDA is currently undertaking the planning and design of the Bornholms Kunstmuseum and the Bornholms Museum (Art and Cultural History) on the island of Bornholm in Denmark. Visit www.JCDAinc.com.
Design Team Statements
Cooper Robertson
“As a work of great monumental public art, Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch is imbued with meaning, technological achievement, and beauty that must be compared with the most important American icons, like the Statue of Liberty. However, the setting of the Arch had diminished its potential to inspire ideas and emotions. The design of the new Museum and surrounding landscape has more fully realized that potential through an ambitious but respectful intervention that interprets the spirit of the Arch and amplifies its relevance to our time.
“This project is about how architecture, great monumental public art, and well-designed outdoor public spaces can make great cities. The underground building has expanded west towards downtown with the Museum entrance opening onto a redesigned Luther Ely Smith Square that now spans over the depressed Interstate 70. The new Museum and Old Courthouse, site of the landmark Dred Scott trial, create an ensemble of buildings of national significance that define a transformed public open space in downtown St. Louis. Taken together with the Arch, this will become a new destination for those interested in architecture and history, contribute to the quality of urban life for residents, and drive economic revitalization.” –Scott Newman, FAIA
James Carpenter Design Associates
“Since the inception of the Gateway Park, originally proposed in the early 1930s but not executed until the 1960s, the critical interconnectivity of the city to the Gateway Park and to the Mississippi River embankment has been missing. This has primarily been due to the divisive presence of Interstate 44, a six-lane-wide highway trench, cut in the landscape. A significant piece of MVVA’s new work has created a landscaped park over the highway that now links a sequence of parks into a unified thread of green space connecting from West to East: Washington Square Park, Poelker Park, Serra Sculpture Park, Citygarden, Kiener Plaza, the now restored Old Courthouse (site of the Dred Scott Case), Luther Ely Smith Park and to the now accessible Gateway Park and the banks of the Mississippi. Following this sequence of parks, when arriving at the Gateway Park, one now has the direct connection and visibility between the Old Courthouse, the new West Entry and the Arch as a seamless pedestrian experience.
“The semicircular, glass-enclosed entry volume mediates ones passage into the Museum lobby, modulating the brightness from outside to inside. As visitors transition into the below-ground entry foyer, the curved profile of the ceiling becomes immediately apparent, mirroring the presence of the landscape above while leading the eye down to the point of transition into the original building. The ceiling’s distinctive undulating field of light heightens the awareness of this luminous volume as a powerful reflection of the Arch grounds and sky above.
“This clarity of circulation is always maintained through the new entrance and lobby. At the moment of entry, you see down to the intermediate level mezzanine, an educational interpretive space, enlivened by a large scale floor map of the Mississippi River and its tributaries, illustrating the routes taken both by Lewis and Clarke as well as the tens of thousands of pioneers moving by wagons further to the west. Looking further down into the new expansion, one sees the beginning of the new exhibitions leading into the restored Saarinen Museum and the lifts that will take you to the top of the Arch. The main escalator circulation is ‘carved’ into both side walls of the new West Entry and they are flanked by open stairs which connect to the mezzanine and lower level. Beneath the mezzanine is an open glass education space for school groups or special functions.
“From the exterior, the main axis of the entry is emphasized with both cantilevered and clear span open roof structures, which allow views down into the museum while behind, the Old Courthouse, establishing an intimate visual link between the two landmarks. This notion of the open central axis is essentially what the Arch itself presents: that all circulation symmetrically moves one towards or away from the implied ‘center,’ whether one is moving through the landscape, the new entrance, Museum entrance hall or exiting from the base of either leg of the Arch. One meanders upon sinuous paths through the site, capturing changing views of the landscape above as well as enriching ones sense of the interior spaces and exhibitions below.
“The new entry, Museum entrance hall and the transformed original museum are defined by a deep vocabulary of luminous materials and light. The museum’s new sense of spaciousness and generosity directly responds to and references the revitalized landscape of the Arch Grounds and its new engagement with the city, river and region, establishing a new place that engages hope for a positive and sustainable future.” — James Carpenter
Trivers Associates
Trivers Associates has worked as a partner with Cooper Robertson and James Carpenter Design Associates for the expanded and renovated gateway Arch Museum below the internationally recognized St. Louis Arch. Trivers’ involvement in the coordination with the National Park Service to maintain the integrity of a National Landmark has been imperative in executing a project that is historically sensitive yet modern in function and form. Trivers has collaborated with our design partners to solve constructability issues presented in renovating a subterranean structure that needs to address high levels of security affording a structure with National Landmark Status yet remaining open and accessible to the public.
MVVA
“The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (JNEM) in St. Louis, Missouri is the site of a modern icon – the Gateway Arch – and a historic 91-acre landscape by Dan Kiley. At the time of The City + The Arch + The River international design competition in 2010, the site’s challenges were varied and complex: the city sought improvements to its downtown and relief from the interstate highway stranglehold on its riverfront. At the same time, the National Park Service, which manages the memorial, sought more sustainable management practices to engage new audiences and visitors, and to define an expanded role for itself in the region. Through the creation of accessible connections to the site, which realized Modernist elements first conceived by Kiley and architect Eero Saarinen but never implemented, and by introducing management practices related to regional ecologies, MVVA’s winning entry to the competition identified common ground among the project partners and presented design and planning solutions that were both visionary and constructible.
“As of today, the MVVA team has led many of the landscape improvements defined in the competition through design and documentation phases and into implementation. In-progress and recently completed elements include a new multi-modal riverfront boulevard with event and vendor space; enhanced, accessible pedestrian connections from the city to the JNEM site via the Park over the Highway and from the JNEM site to the riverfront via the East Slopes paths; the transformation of a former parking garage into the North Gateway area which includes a bike path, gardens and event spaces for public use; a soils improvement program which borrows radish and rye cover crop techniques from Mid-Western agricultural science and incorporates compost tea applications to restore soil biology; revitalization of the city’s Kiener Plaza with new play and public spaces; and the acquisition and planting of nearly 900 matching London planetrees along the park’s historic allées in order to forestall devastation by the Emerald Ash Borer (the allées were previously planted with ash trees) and further Kiley’s original landscape intent. Within the next two years, an addition to the Museum of Westward Expansion located beneath the Gateway Arch will greatly expand and modernize exhibition space, while a new public plaza at the museum’s west end will offer a more direct and inviting entry from the downtown to the Arch.
“The Memorial is a pilot project for a new kind of urban National Park, one that is oriented – physically and culturally – toward the life of the city and supports and celebrates regional ecologies within its urban context. This new role for the Park Service, in turn, serves as a foundation for the sustained social and economic vitality of the city of St. Louis.”