A design team consisting of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Cooper Robertson, and James Carpenter Design Associates with Trivers Associates and Haley Sharpe Design won the international competition for the opportunity to expand and renovate the Eero Saarinen-designed Gateway Arch Museum in St. Louis.
The expanded Gateway Arch Museum, designed by Cooper Robertson and James Carpenter Design Associates, has a dramatic entrance and plaza that is nestled into the historic landscape. The design includes new public spaces, a great entry hall that leads to re-imagined exhibitions and the fully renovated original Saarinen building beneath the Arch.
Nearly 45,000 sf of new museum space has been added and over 100,000 sf of existing space has been reconfigured into new exhibition galleries, public education facilities, and visitor amenities. The new Gateway Arch Museum extends west towards downtown St. Louis with a new entrance and plaza that connects to the redesigned and expanded Luther Ely Smith Square, which now spans over a depressed interstate highway.
Rendering courtesy Cooper Robertson.
The museum’s public spaces and surroundings are fully integrated into the overall plan for the Dan Kiley-designed 91-acre Park. The Museum and Park now connect directly to the 1862 Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis.
“The Museum design is fully integrated into the National Register-listed landscape,” says Cooper Robertson’s Scott Newman, in a release. “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.”
According to the Gateway Arch Park Foundation, the nonprofit group behind the project, one of the main goals of the renovation and expansion is to create closer and more robust connections between the Gateway Arch Museum, the landscape of the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial, and the city of St. Louis as a whole.
McCarthy Building Companies is the general contractor for the project.
The Museum will open to the public this year with an official dedication ceremony planned for July 2018.
UPdate
EarthCam has released a new time-lapse video showing the construction of the Gateway Arch Museum project. The one minute video shows the construction of the museum between February 2014 and March 2018.
Courtesy EarthCam.
Related Stories
| Nov 14, 2014
Bjarke Ingels unveils master plan for Smithsonian's south mall campus
The centerpiece of the proposed plan is the revitalization of the iconic Smithsonian castle.
| Nov 12, 2014
Chesapeake Bay Foundation completes uber-green Brock Environmental Center, targets Living Building certification
More than a decade after opening its groundbreaking Philip Merrill Environmental Center, the group is back at it with a structure designed to be net-zero water, net-zero energy, and net-zero waste.
| Nov 7, 2014
NORD Architects releases renderings for Marine Education Center in Sweden
The education center will be set in a landscape that includes small ponds and plantings intended to mimic an assortment of marine ecologies and create “an engaging learning landscape” for visitors to experience nature hands-on.
| Nov 5, 2014
The architects behind George Lucas' planned Chicago museum unveil 'futuristic pyramid'
Preliminary designs for the $300 million George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art have been unveiled, and it looks like a futuristic, curvy pyramid.
| Nov 3, 2014
IIT names winners of inaugural Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize
Herzog & de Meuron's iconic 1111 Lincoln Road parking garage in Miami Beach, Fla., is one of two winners of the $50,000 architectural prize.
| Oct 29, 2014
Diller Scofidio + Renfro selected to design Olympic Museum in Colorado Springs
The museum is slated for an early 2018 completion, and will include a hall of fame, theater, retail space, and a 20,000-sf hall that will showcase the history of the Olympics and Paralympics.
| Oct 23, 2014
Prehistory museum's slanted roof mimics archaeological excavation [slideshow]
Mimicking the unearthing of archaeological sites, Henning Larsen Architects' recently opened Moesgaard Museum in Denmark has a planted roof that slopes upward out of the landscape.
| Oct 16, 2014
Perkins+Will white paper examines alternatives to flame retardant building materials
The white paper includes a list of 193 flame retardants, including 29 discovered in building and household products, 50 found in the indoor environment, and 33 in human blood, milk, and tissues.
| Oct 15, 2014
Harvard launches ‘design-centric’ center for green buildings and cities
The impetus behind Harvard's Center for Green Buildings and Cities is what the design school’s dean, Mohsen Mostafavi, describes as a “rapidly urbanizing global economy,” in which cities are building new structures “on a massive scale.”
| Oct 12, 2014
AIA 2030 commitment: Five years on, are we any closer to net-zero?
This year marks the fifth anniversary of the American Institute of Architects’ effort to have architecture firms voluntarily pledge net-zero energy design for all their buildings by 2030.
