Three teams from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts took top honors in the recent St. Louis Gateway Mall Follies Ideas Competition.
Typically found in parks or on the grounds of stately homes, follies are extravagant or fanciful structures that often appear to be something other than what they are. Though especially popular between the 16th and 18th centuries, modern follies can be found in Chicago’s Millennium Park and the Parc de la Villette in Paris.
The St. Louis Follies sought to generate innovative and unexpected ideas for the Gateway Mall, a large open space located downtown along Market Street, immediately west of Eero Saarinen’s iconic Gateway Arch. Projects would serve as “visual anchors” for the area, highlighting the interplay between the physical and the virtual, while also facilitating public movement between the Arch and the downtown business district.
The $1,500 first-place award went to Stephanie Beamer, Crystal Ellis, Hillary Petrie and Tyler Survant, all 2005 graduates of the Sam Fox School’s College of Architecture. Their project, titled “Interface,” proposes a series of high-tech poles that would be set in an irregular, zig-zagging grid pattern across the length of the mall.
“Like pixels, each pole is an individual part of a composite whole,” the designers explain. “The poles would provide one of six functions: light, sound, communication, wireless internet, mist and heat … A pole could be used by a single person to search the internet or to cool off on a hot day, and also by a multimedia artist to create one programmable surface.”
A second-place award of $1,000 went to the team of Dimitrios Gourdoukis — a current student in the Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design — and Karina Tryfonidou, a lecturer in architecture. Their design, titled “Parasite,” consists of a large hexagonal honeycomb, built of steel wire frame and translucent plastic, that would cover the front façade of an existing parking structure on the Mall’s eastern edge. Individual honeycomb “cells” would house walkways, bridges and multimedia spaces and would change color every minute.
Jen Maigret, a Weese Fellow in Architecture, split the $500 third-place prize with Glenn Wilcox + Anca Trandafirecsu of Ann Arbour, MI. Maigret’s proposal, “Urban Fabric,” would employ emerging CNC (computer numerically controlled) technologies to create a public plaza of twisting, curving brick between the Old Courthouse and the Gateway Arch.
The St. Louis Follies Competition was conceived by Jasmin Aber, an architect and visiting scholar at the University of California-Berkeley, as an outgrowth of the Market Street Charrette, an intensive, weekend-long design session sponsored last October by the St. Louis Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).
Aber organized the follies competition with Heather Woofter and Sung Ho Kim — both assistant professors of architecture as well as principals of the firm Axi:Ome llc. All three served on the competition jury, which Aber chaired. Other jurors included Eric Mumford, Ph.D., associate professor of architecture and Director of the Urban Design Program; Adam Whiton of MIT’s Media Lab; Carl Ray Miller, associate professor at the Art Institute of Chicago; and Kevin McGowan of McGowan/Walsh Urban Developers.
Administrative support was provided by the AIA. Other sponsors included Berkeley’s Institute of Urban and Regional Development; the Downtown St. Louis Partnership; Friedman Group Ltd. Realtors; the Landmarks Association of St. Louis; McCormack Baron Salazar; McGowan/Walsh; the City of St. Louis’ Planning & Urban Design Agency; and Washington University.
For more information about the St. Louis follies, visit www.stlfollies.com.