Design Agendas: Q&A with Curators Eric P. Mumford and Michael Willis

“Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s–1970s” is the first major exhibition to examine the complex connections in St. Louis among modern architecture, urban renewal, and racial and spatial change in the interlocking histories of New Deal planning, the Great Migration, and the civil rights and Great Society eras. The exhibition, now on view at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University in St. Louis, is curated by Eric P. Mumford, Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at WashU, and Michael E. Willis, FAIA, NOMA.

This is an edited abridged transcript of the Q&A Mumford and Willis participated in as part of the exhibition’s opening, moderated by Sabine Eckmann, the William T. Kemper Director and Chief Curator of the Kemper Art Museum.

Sabine Eckmann: Why do you think this exhibition is an important one, and why now?

Michael E. Willis: I think that this exhibition is about showing how St. Louis was a part of the design movement, shaping architecture and cities in the same eras, and allows us to examine the precedents that still exist. I believe it will give us a perspective about design and get us to ask questions. Part of what we can learn from the buildings that we’re going to show in the exhibition — if we keep our eyes open and understand how those buildings came to be — will help us answer current questions about design and city building. I’m looking for this to open the minds of the viewers and start some conversations about what it’s like to live in the city now.

SE: Eric, would you give us an introduction to the exhibition?

Eric P. Mumford: We began with the kind of well-known buildings that many of us admire, things like the Gateway Arch by Eero Saarinen or Lambert International Airport by Minoru Yamasaki. Others include Erich Mendelsohn’s B’nai Amoona Synagoge, which is now COCA, and Gyo Obata’s Priory Chapel.

At the same time, we have been very aware of the very dark and negative aspects of these histories. The issues of clearance and erasure — Pruitt-Igoe, Harland Bartholomew’s highway proposal, Mill Creek Valley, LaClede Town — all of it somehow part of this period of modern architecture in St. Louis. And so, the show attempts to bring these things together in a single exhibition.

SE: It has become really clear from your description that what is unique about this exhibition is the connection between urban planning on one hand and individual modernist buildings on the other. That is new to the field and to the history of exhibitions about modern art and architecture in St. Louis. I thought it would be nice to have a little more information on your selection process — not only about the architects but also the commissioners who played a role in both the so-called urban renewal and these modernist structures.

EPM: A lot of my interests have always been about how design ideas are realized. What are these designs as sketches or drawings, and then how do those get realized as buildings or artifacts?

We were really fortunate to get things like working drawings for Priory Chapel leant by Kiko Obata and all the material around Old Man River’s City. The archives here at WashU have been really helpful in finding Armstrong drawings and Bernoudy drawings.

There’s also the question of who are we familiar with — Saarinen, Mendelsohn, perhaps Yamasaki. The local figures like Harris Armstrong and Frederick Dunn are important as well. The timeline in the lobby is really worth looking at, because there’s just an endless number of really interesting figures and projects.

SE: I think it’s a moment to dwell on a little bit more on the effects of this modern agenda. And that is demonstrated predominantly through urban planning, a very decisive history of racial segregation, large scale demolition, massive and repeated displacements — especially of the African American communities here. Michael, since you experienced much of that history, it would be great to have you talk more about that part of the modern agenda here in St. Louis.

MEW: Well, thank you for that. I have to start out with my first introduction to Pruitt-Igoe. It was a radically new experience for my family and me. We were the first residents of our apartment in 1956. In this new approach to urban housing, it was radically different from the neighborhoods we lived in before and after Pruitt-Igoe. In the beginning, we were all together as kids on the playground. Parents would set up cartoons and movies in the basement and we’d bring popcorn. We’d walk to school and the library.

Back then, segregation was legal. The Pruitt buildings were for Black families whereas Igoe was for white families. The ethos changed, the whole idea of the place changed when white families left the Igoe apartments and it became a totally Black neighborhood — well, it wasn’t a neighborhood. We navigated those changes as best we could, but at some point, the challenges of living in a disconnected figure ground of a good idea gone wrong… we left before my tenth birthday. We were there about five years, and we had to leave before it really started to crumble.

LaClede Town was different and better in many ways. We were back to living in a village of two- and three-story townhouses with shops, laundry, pubs, and coffee houses connected to the surrounding neighborhoods and to schools. It was an experiment in mixed income, mixed race, wildly talented populations of musicians, writers, actors, blue-collar workers, and college professors. When we were just 14 or 15 there, we could go to the coffeehouse and see plays by Camus and listen to first-rate jazz musicians. This was just the atmosphere of LaClede Town — it was actually kind of magic, like a Brigadoon. The development took the neighborhood that was there away, but this idea of making a less dense, smaller, connected neighborhood felt more like a place that you wanted to live.

EPM: The planning story is a complex one. We try to cover that some in the reader, and certainly in the Harland Bartholomew 1947 plan drawings in the exhibition. You know, it’s a pretty remarkable effort to create a decentralized region that was still focused on downtown during a period when the whole region, like much of the country, was completely racially segregated. We’re still living with basically the failed effort to do that. We live in a decentralized region, but the downtown is not really the focal point. So, all of that’s part of the story, too. And I think that’s certainly Pruitt-Igoe’s context and Mill Creek Valley’s and so on. Those weren’t random events, but really part of a systematic effort to remake the whole region in what now seems like an almost crazily ambitious way.

MEW: Just as a note, as an architect, we’ve done projects all over the country, and this didn’t only happen in St. Louis. It happened in Portland; it happened in Detroit. It happened in New Orleans. And the thrust was to take these formerly segregated communities and tie them back into the neighborhoods that surrounded them. We were able to do that with conversations with the community, both in the former public housing space and then the neighbors around them who are saying, ‘you’re going to let people do what now?’ And we’d explain, we’re just going to reconnect the streets. And the playground for the neighborhood is going to be on the property that used to be the public housing site, but you won’t see a dotted line. It’s just the playground that you can walk to.

I’m not going to say that this was easy. We had some pretty tough conversations. But in the end, it was the community members who said, ‘you know, we’re going to do this.’ So it wasn’t just our idea with cool-looking buildings. They had to come to the point where they said, ‘this is our idea and we want it to happen.’

SE: It’s a nice forum for this conversation to switch back and forth between buildings and urban planning. I think it is fair to say, at least from an art historical perspective, that the modern movement in architecture also coincided with a democratization of many European countries. From the very outset, if you think about the Bauhaus, for example, modern architectural forms are somehow always connected to some form of democratic social organization. How did this play out here in terms of the buildings? How were these buildings supposed to carry a Democratic message or articulate a form of democratic life?

EPM: It’s politically complex. Much of this work grew out of The New Deal. The New Deal did not have a single architectural style — it wasn’t a patron of just modern architecture, but of many other styles as well. By the postwar period, I think a lot of architects were very much affected by European developments; the work of Le Corbusier, as well as many others who belonged to a group called the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM). Joseph Murphy, the first modern dean of WashU’s school of architecture invited Alfred Roth, a Swiss Corps member, here in 1950. He designed a very innovative, modern school, in the suburb of Berkeley, up near the airport, which quite remarkably, still survives. It’s now been repurposed as a church.

So there was really a lot of effort to connect new materials, new technologies, new forms, to new ideas of political organization. One example is the one-story school, which would have more relaxed and pedagogically contemporary methods than the old, rigid schools with classrooms where the desks were all bolted into place. The whole idea of the modern airport as something like a train station, but involving all these complex flows of people and luggage and goods and trucks, all of that was being approached in a way that was really quite different than what previous, classical architects were able to do. And so that was related to democratic ideas, but I would say in the U.S., rather vaguely related. It’s very hard to argue that Pruitt-Igoe, for example, is a truly democratic or politically positive kind of project. That’s where some of the complexity of the topic comes in.

MEW: When I was in practice, I got to travel around Europe and see many of these examples that modern architecture came to be known by. I went to these iconic neighborhoods that were designed by Le Corbusier, Bruno and Max Taut, and Mies van der Rohe. There is still a community of workers’ housing in, well, everywhere. I particularly focused on the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart. It’s white boxes that were — and here’s where the difference was — it’s still being used. It’s not a museum piece. It’s housing. You can walk to the train station from there. You can walk to open space. It’s in a neighborhood and it’s supported by the neighborhood around it rather than this disconnected moat of 33, 11-story buildings.

Those democratic ideas are still there for you to see, but the interpretation of them here has been difficult. They didn’t inspire that same sense of connectivity and wonder, but it was a very utilitarian way of getting as many people in housing as possible, but not in a way that would make it a desirable neighborhood.

SE: I think many of these, at least from my knowledge — and this is maybe one of the contradictions of modern architecture — many of these concrete slab high rises existed in Europe, too, and they also failed. And what is interesting to think of is that they failed in the democracies, while they did not fail in the socialist countries. That’s a point that another book, another project could elaborate on.

Let’s talk about the impact of modern architecture on St. Louis in comparison to other American cities, and also the role of the school of architecture here on campus during the modern period.

EPM: I think St. Louis is really interesting in the way this innovative, structural aspect is important to thin-shell concrete. It’s quite different than Mies van der Rohe’s influence in Chicago. And I think that’s something that we could think more about that in some ways. There’s also this very much highway orientation here, that is like Los Angeles or Southern California, and that a lot of these buildings are designed to be seen, like the planetarium, from the highway. I think there’s a lot more research that could be done.

The school of architecture is, you know, remembered as a place of international visitors. There’s also very interesting and active teaching and practice, the firm of Smith & Entzeroth, the former Dean Constantine Michaelides, Fumihiko Maki — whose first building we’re sitting in — and many others. There are really a lot of layers to that.

SE: I think it’s amazing, in particular, that so many Japanese Americans and Japanese architects had such an impact here on the school.

MEW: One of the things I learned while being in school here is we did have these architects coming from all over the world and bringing ideas from Europe and India and beyond and it opened my eyes to a way of seeing architecture in a broader sense than what was happening in my area code here in St. Louis.

SE: I think one very important aspect we have not talked about is the architect Charles Fleming, who received the Dean’s Medal back in April and who unfortunately recently passed away. He really had a lot of influence through his energetic personality and all the buildings he built here in St. Louis, in Los Angeles, in San Francisco.

And Michael, you were a student of Charles Fleming and worked for him. So maybe this is a good opportunity to talk about, his legacy.

MEW: Charles was my mentor and it turns out a former neighbor in Richmond Heights, which I didn’t know until later. I worked for him on significant projects, some that are still extant. He showed by example how to build a practice, how to work with cities and other professionals, and to create architecture that was strong, practical, and aspirational.

One of the buildings we feature, the Comprehensive Care Center in North St. Louis, I saw after I was already in college. I was walking by our old neighborhood on Belt Avenue, and I saw this building and I said, ‘I want to work for whoever designed that building.’ And it was Charles. So I joined him in 1976, and in 1982 I opened his San Francisco office, and in 1988 I opened my own office. He was a figure worth understanding, both in how he built the firm and how he had a ripple effect on others.

It was great to see him being recognized with the Dean’s Medal and the proclamation from the City of St. Louis that April 18 was Charles Fleming Day. You could see he was totally awestruck by it.

EPM: It’s really Michael that made all that possible. Five years ago or so, Michael and I were having a conversation, and he said, ‘you’ve got to get this guy on video.’ And so we did that. We also brought in Shantel Blakely, who’s now at Rice University. There’s an essay in the reader about Charles’ career. It’s all really great that that’s been possible.

SE: Thank you all so much and congratulations on the opening of the exhibition.

Design Agendas is on view at the Kemper Art Museum through Jan. 6, 2025. Mumford and Willis will continue the conversation about modern architecture, urban renewal, and racial and social change at a public symposium October 25-26 at WashU’s Sam Fox School. For more information and to register, visit kemperartmuseum.wustl.edu.