Architecture students design and build new plaza in Grand Center; dedication Dec. 15

Grand Center has long served as St. Louis’ premiere arts and entertainment district, home to the Fox Theatre, the Sheldon Concert Hall, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra and other cultural organizations. In recent years, Grand Center also has added two major visual arts venues: the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis.

This fall, a group of 10 architecture majors from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts teamed up with Grand Center, Inc. (the not-for-profit organization that develops district arts initiatives and real estate) and the Pulitzer Foundation to design and build a new public plaza for visual art.

The plaza — located immediately south of the Symphony Orchestra’s Powell Hall, 718 North Grand Blvd. — will host outdoor exhibitions, site-specific installations, performance pieces and video and new-media work by local and nationally known artists, as well as information about Grand Center programs and events.

A formal dedication will take place at 11 a.m. Friday, Dec. 15, in Powell Hall. For more information, call (314) 935-6200.

“This has been a pretty remarkable project,” says Carl Safe, professor of architecture, who led the semester-long studio. “It’s a significant contribution to the streetscape, connecting Powell Hall with the block to the south. But the timeline was very short and students had to do a lot of learning very quickly.”

Safe has shepherded a number of similar design-build projects over the years, including “Bill,” a wooden shade pavilion adjacent to the University City Post Office, 561 Kingsland Ave.; and a shade pavilion for Market in the Loop, in the 6600 block of Delmar Boulevard. Yet he says that the Grand Center plaza represents a whole new scale and level of complexity.

Built on a former parking lot, the plaza is divided into two zones. A grassy area is located at the northern end, adjacent to Powell Hall, while the southern end is filled with 21 eight-foot steel poles designed to accommodate a variety of modular display panels. When not in use, those panels — also built by students — are stored in a long shallow enclosure formed by two overlapping masonry walls that border the plaza’s eastern edge. A small glass-enclosed gallery is located at one end of the storage space, which also houses a pair of Web-ready video projectors. Dozens of flood lamps, set into the concrete foundation, provide dramatic lighting.

“We were given a budget of about $45,000, but that doesn’t fully convey the scope of things,” Safe explains. “If you were to bid this work out it could easily have been $200,000 to $250,000. It’s a minor miracle that we were able to get everything completed.

“Students did an amazing job of getting materials donated and services volunteered,” Safe continues. “One company donated the block, another donated the mortar, another donated grout to fill the wall. We got reinforcing steel for 26 cents on the dollar. They were unbelievably resourceful.”

The entire project was completed in about 14 weeks. Design conception began in late August, with each student developing an individual proposal. By mid-September the students had formed teams and focused their efforts on two designs, which were then presented to a review board consisting of Carmon Colangelo, dean of the Sam Fox School; Peter Bunce, interim arts initiative director for Grand Center; and Matthias Waschek, director of the Pulitzer Foundation.

Once the final design was selected, students began the process of defining budgets, finishing construction documents and applying for city building permits. The class then turned its hand to actual construction, surveying the site and hauling 83 tons of gravel (in three wheelbarrows) to create a solid sub-surface. Students also built the concrete formworks, threaded steel rebar and worked with apprentices from the St. Louis Cement Masons Joint Apprenticeship Program, the Masonry Institute of St. Louis and the Ironworkers Joint Apprenticeship Program.

“We had a lot of help from the professional trades,” says Ivo Rozendaal, a graduate student in architecture. “We could not have gotten this far without their help. It’s amazing how many companies have come out here to support us.”

Though programming details are still taking shape, Rozendaal notes that the plaza was designed for maximum flexibility.

“The poles basically serve as an armature for artists to work within,” he explains. “We’re providing a ‘starter set’ of panels in a variety of materials, but they could be anything an artist wanted: solid or fabric, opaque or transparent. Projections could relate to an artist’s work, or include video, or just be changing colors. The space is really open to interpretation.

“The goal is to bring a little more street-life to the area,” Rozendaal concludes. “A lot of people just come down for the shows. We want them to stick around afterwards and bring some more vibrancy to the community.”