urbanSTL

Thanks for posting the rendering. I like what I can see of the new tower.

I like what I see design-wise with the new tower, especially its closeness to the street corner.

It's kind of hard to see, but there is a cool staircase at the corner that leads up to the second level.



I wonder if the other three-story office building on 4th Street (which you can see in the rendering) would ever be redeveloped as a high-rise as well. Fourth Street would be pretty impressive!

Jackpot! New construction with flare, but downtown still needs lower cost apartments/condos for the nonmanagerial level people like the rest of us.



Luxury seems to be the easy and less risky business, but isn't the point about investing taking risks?

Well, it appears that this brick is rather modern, at least post-modern. From looking at the rendering (it's a little hard to make out scanned), it does seem like good massing, siting and streetscape for this improved corner. Even the new skin on the existing tower doesn't look terrible, but I think it could still make the other two towers look strange to lose their triplet effect.

That design looks great. First off I have no problem breaking up the 3 buildings. The less Miami beach the better I say. Such a project would include a new highrise at the corner of 4th and Washington, which would be great for that corner. I think the design in the paper not only looks good, it should help keep the pressure up on the rest of Mansion house to make there property modern and atractive.

Totally. And it has to be hard for Gentry's Landing and Mansion House to differentiate themselves from each other, since they both essentially offer an identical product.

Wow, that looks pretty good. No wonder the city is considering useing eminent domain if necesarry.

Fourth Street is going to become a fashionable address from the Pet Building on up. Fabulous Fourth Street.

Unfortunately, the current residents will be the ones "screwed" in the process. It's one of the few places downtown that are rented, and rents are reasonable. If and when the conversion takes places, all rentals will be eliminated and sold as condos. Don't know how many of us would be able to afford the prices that would be expected. So we'll be forced out of our current homes.

I generally like what I see on the new tower. Especially the siting and street-level interaction. I just hope the first floor retail will face the street, and not some interior arcade type thing.



Those pointy "gazeebo" roofs look pretty cheesy, though. They look like they're "off the rack" from Home Depot or something.



I hope they don't re-clad the original tower, though. I like them as a set. As has been pointed out, that's supposed to be the last phase, though, so they'll probably never get around to it anyway.

What a travesty!!!



While cowtowns like Des Moines and Kansas City are looking forward with exemplary contemporary design we can't even respect the wonderful legacy of modern architecture that we already have. The systematic destruction of our modern heritage has got to stop. There were a number of failed planning principles that are associated with the modern era but there are just as many (if not more) examples of beautiful, simple, and poetic designs from that same era -- of which the Mansion House complex arguably is one. We (as a culture) will be as admonished in the future for our apathy and bad taste as those who plowed over our beautiful 19th century buildings and neighborhoods in the name of "that tarted up old whore known as progress."

^^^true

I AGREE. Look what they did with that Hampton Inn. Not an improvement at all, in my opinion. They should have stuck with the clean, sharp modern lines instead of trying to make it look...whatever it is they tried to make it look like.

In St. Louis there are many great modern buildings. The American Zinc building is beautiful. Same with the ethical society building along Clayton Rd. However, just as many 19th C buildings are boring, ugly, oreven forgetable, not all 'modern' buildings are so valuabe/ beautful that there loss is something to worry about. Mansion House is both ugly and uninspiring. not much of a loss.

I agree with JMedwick on this. If they had done something like that to a building I thought was beautiful, I'd have a differing opinion. But I think the change generally works. I just don't like the way (we've discussed this before) the buildings there look. No big loss.

The funny thing is...I don't respect Modernist buildings for their visual appeal (or lack thereof). Many are downright ugly, or so plain and "brutal" to the eye that they are almost intriguing. However, Modernism deserves it place in the world of architecture for the underlying philosophy. It is fascinating to me that Modernists wanted to remove the building from time, in essence to make it eternal and undated. Modernism is such a profound idea to me that even the ugliness and bareness it produces means something and should be respected in that right. The greatest irony is that the Modernist ideal of evading definition in concrete terms of time and space absolutely dated every building built within the era of the height of Modernism, because no one after the 1970s built buildings like Mansion House anymore.



If you want to look into it even further, it's sort of a segway into the discussion of the Post World War II generation and the rise of existentialism. The world is indifferent and we are in total control of a life whose dealings we often want to assign to fate. Modernism reflects this bleak philosophy--that if we're all empowered to control every facet of our lives in a world that is callous and indifferent, why bother trying to stand out. There's no reward to it, in the eyes of the existentialist. The architecture reflects that.



Read the book/see the play "Waiting for Godot" and it is so mind-numbingly uncharismatic (is that a word?) and bleak that it just must have a relation to the shellshocked, existentialist world after World War II and its architectural Modernism.



Still, academic assessment aside, if you're mourning the loss of modern buildings downtown, there's always Clayton.

I agree with Cityboy. As I've said earlier in this thread, I LIKE the Mansion House towers.



Its funny...Looking through other threads, we all seem to be in complete agreement that the "recladding" that went on back in the 50's and 60's, in retrospect, was a huge mistake. Don't any of you get the sense that this project might just be a similar mistake?



The Mansion House towers may not be the BEST example of Modernist Style, but they are one of St. Louis' most PROMINENT examples. If we don't preserve them now, our kids are going to kill us in the future.

Another modernist style building that was destroyed was the American Stove office building on Kingshighway. Really nice until U Haul decimated it, it would have made a great residential conversion. Thank God for the current crop of preservationists.

southcitygent wrote:Another modernist style building that was destroyed was the American Stove office building on Kingshighway. Really nice until U Haul decimated it, it would have made a great residential conversion. Thank God for the current crop of preservationists.

http://remiss63.blogspot.com/2005/09/ma ... -view.html



http://remiss63.blogspot.com/2005/09/ma ... ation.html

That Magic Chef building is nice looking.



However, I don't think that all the recovering done in the 50's and 60's was bad. Sure the city lost a few nice facades. But then again the city also gained a few nice ones at the expense of small or forgetable buildings. Just beause something is old doesn't mean it is special. Ugly or not, the Mansion house buildings are forgeteable and not much of a loss if recovered. Besideds, under this plan only 1 of the 3 towers will be recovered, so there will still be 2 'great expamles' of modern architecutre.

I'm sorry, what a total joke. As I stated in another post, this addition to Mansion House looks like McRenovation to me. These three buildings are architecturally significant. Obviously just because they are "old" doesn't make them high quality. Look at the two (three?) buildings just north of the Civil Courts building on Tucker. I would be in TOTAL favor of those buildings having their exterior walls stripped off and reclad with a new waving wall of glass (for example). Those buildings are totally budget, and were not the highest quality when they were built, which was interestingly enough, done at the same time as Mansion House. So, obviously some buildings can be improved upon, but the three buildings near the arch are too important to have reclad with a faux traditional look. Honestly, where are these people from?

Jcity, I agree with you 100%. I remeber when Mansion House was built. They were quite attractive, even in that dark age of architecture. I would prefere these buildings be restored, and the new 14 story addition be something harmonious in it's lines (modern) and contrasting but complimentary in color.

As for the Majic Chef building, a quote from the September/October 2005 issue of Landmarks newsletter: "Built in 1946-47 from plans by St. Louis Architect Harris Armstrong, the million-dollar Magic Chef (American Stove) Building rated a 12-page spread in the "Contemporary Work" section of the May 1948 Progressive Architecture issue devoted to St. Louis. More recently, an historic photo of the lobby reception area with its swooping sculptured light recesses (designed by Isamu Naguchi and executed in plaster) was selected as the cover illustration by Eric Mumford for his 'Modern Architecture in St. Louis: Washington University and Postwar American Architecture' published in 2004. In the intervening years between PA and Mumford, the Magic Chef Building received approving mention in every edition of critic George McCue's architectural guide books. The last one, penned with Frank Peters in 1989, stated; "Boldly modern for its time and place, the severity of line is temperd by Armstrong's fondness for surface texture and color." Yet today, most people drive right past what is now the much-remodeled U-Haul Center without a second glance-unaware of its architectural accolades or important historical associations."