Valentine to a South City Apartment Building

Chippewa & Lindenwood Place
South St. Louis City, MO

I’m sending a Valentine to the Crystal Tower Apartments in the Lindenwood Park neighborhood because it deserves some lovin’.   Though it never pops to mind when someone asks me about my favorite St. Louis City buildings, my heart beats a little faster each time I pass this art deco charmer.  So on this day of cupids, chocolates and roses, I’m leaving a cyber Valentine in the Crystal Towers lobby ‘cos I’m sweet on it!

The apartment building went up in 1940, so its art deco flair is authentic.  It has 12 one bedroom apartments, and 6 two bedroom units.   So often with St. Louis City apartments of this vintage, the exterior is all handsome come on, while inside, the apartments are vanilla bland.  But courtesy of Craigslist, turns out Crystal Towers apartments are plaster cove ceilings and arches and gleaming wood floors and trim.  In short, it looks like it has been shown constant and loving care through all of its decades, which is a rare trait in apartments for rent.

While working on this Valentine, I found that my crush on Crystal Towers goes back as far as 2001, when I used its outdoor entry patio as an example of texture for a black & white photo class assignment.

Note that some 9 years later, the same concrete globe has been scrubbed of 2001 grunge, and someone keeps up on patching the cracks.   The entry has the subdued drama of a Hollywood movie set; maybe an exterior for Nick and Nora Charles in one of the movies from The Thin Man series?  The building is also slightly nautical, and even writes its name in cursive above the front door.

Shall we assume it took its fanciful name for this pillar of glass block?  Which, if so, just adds to its harmless and charming allusion of swellegance.  This is why I want it to Be My Valentine!

A Clip Joint

Natural Bridge Road
Bel Ridge, MO

Great name for a barber shop, isn’t it?

This tiny place, just east of the inner belt, fascinates me.  Built in 1930, it’s only 252 square feet, and appears to have always been a barber shop.

Barber shops, in general, fascinate me because it’s a Guy Place.  Ladies are no more welcome in them than guys are in beauty shops.  Oh sure, anyone’s welcome through the door, but when the opposite sex “invades” one of these places, you can cut uncomfortable with a knife.

When the Clip Joint is open, there always seems to be at least two cars parked around it.  Seems it would only take 3 people for the joint to feel crowded, but that’s probably part of the appeal of this joint.

Rock Star Architects

I ran across this picture in a 1964 issue of LIFE magazine, and gasped with pleasure.  Click to enlarge it and see Harris Armstrong, George Kassabaum and Hari Van Hoefen floating above downtown St. Louis.  The swooning teenage-girl thrill I got from finding this photo reminded me of the first time I saw this:

Here’s David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed in a moment overloaded with rock power.  They have given the world some of its most awesome music.

The Rock Star Architects gave St. Louis some of its most awesome buildings.

A Hari Van Hoefen greatest hits package would include Northland Shopping Center.  The George Kassabaum best of  (on the HOK label) would include the Planetarium, and Harris Armstrong already has a box set highlighting his best known hits and B-side rarities.

The music of Bowie, Pop and Reed is treasured and re-mastered and re-released because it matters very much.  I hope that soon - very soon - St. Louis will learn to do the same with the works of Armstrong, Kassabaum and Van Hoefen.

Touring Nine North

On November 5th, 2009,  City Affair took a tour of Nine North, the modern new condos on Euclid Avenue in the Central West End.

Rather than gush on about how much I truly loved the 4 models they graciously opened up for us to romp around in, I’ll share the video. This way, you can decide for yourself.

Because it was nighttime, I was not able to properly film the exterior aspects of Nine North.  Some of the balcony configurations create sublime spaces that I’m longing to see at different times of day and seasons.  And the way all of the condos face onto a swanky pool/hot tub outdoor courtyard is very Melrose Place, in the best possible way.

The Folly of a Tear Down

A 1929, 51-room mansion by architect Addison Mizner is now dust and memory.  It is reported to be the last home designed by the man who is credited with shaping the lasting legacy of Palm Beach estate living, and it is definitely one of the few Mizner’s outside the state of Florida.

Here’s video and a slide show of the demolition in Bryn Mawr, PA.

And here’s Palm Beach news about the lengths everyone went to to avoid such a senseless demolition.

Entry hall of La Ronda

In the mid-1990s, I came to know about Addison Mizner from the book Kiss Hollywood Good-by, by Anita Loos.  She had an unconsummated passion for Wilson Mizner, the ultimate raconteur rapscallion (my favorite quote from him:  “All of us are born with traits like optimism, faith and loyalty.  Just don’t deny them for the hollow pretense of being ’smart.’ “), but her stories about brother Addison inspired me to research his work:

He made a fortune as an architect by providing the rich with fake Spanish haciendas.  He erected the most elaborate palazzi without any schooling in architecture.  On one job, Addison omitted a staircase and was forced to pretend it was intentional; a flight of steps running up the outside was more artistic. As a side line, Addison operated a factory in West Palm Beach where he manufactured “antiques.”

That led to the book Florida Architecture of Addison Mizner, a picture book that conclusively proves that one man’s fantasy is another man’s social prestige.

Mizner’s mansions were florid, overheated interpretations of Spanish villas, Hollywood drama tarted up as history for the newly rich who were craving instant heritage.  Revivalism was a popular form of American residential architecture, and Addison just pumped up the kitsch, the square footage and the selling price.  He was a self-taught architectural hustler who created a pretend Europe in Florida, something I love and admire.  Luckily, the folks who still covet his homes in Florida feel the same way, so his legacy is secure.

I guess the colder climes of Pennsylvania robbed Joseph Kestenbaum of the whimsy a Mizner inspires, and he’s been such an ass during this saga that I can imagine a Scrooge-like visitation of 3 ghosts to his bedside… and Addison would be the Ghost of Villas Past, eyes twinkling with happy disbelief that his greenback PA folly of long-ago has inspired such deep emotions in this day and age.

Cuts Like A Knife

South Big Bend & Dale Ave.
Richmond Heights, MO

As you tool past it, this building gives the best optical illusions.

In the small sliver of space it occupies, it is both translucent and opaque, reflective and absorptive, grounded yet floating.   It has always struck me as passively menacing, which pretty much sums up how I feel about finance, so it’s appropriate architecture for a bank.

This building went up in 1978 for United Postal Savings, and remains a bank to this day.  As you can see from this aerial view,  the architect had to work with the odd angle of Dale Avenue and a small lot.  The building itself is only 3,228 square feet, which is small for a modern commercial building.  But it packs a lot of style and attitude into a tight spot.

The brown brick creating soft curves for the lobby entrance is the only relief from the severity of the right triangle, and it feels as if they had to design a less-threatening entrance just so people could work up the nerve to enter the building.

As with so many of the mirror-glass wall buildings of the post-modern architecture style, the inhabitants tend to feel uncomfortable with being exposed and ruin the aesthetic intent with yards of metal blinds.  In this case, the vertical blinds add a consistent texture that slightly reduces the ominousness, but also hampers the effect of reflective transparency.  Then again, people have to use buildings, so the function should be given as much weight as the visual impact.

But blinds cannot take away from the architectural editorial on the fine point of this building.  Depending on the angle, it looks like a cut-throat straight razor  or a plunging stiletto.  No matter the era, finance cuts like a knife.

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Put On A Happy Face

N. Rock Hill Road
Webster Groves, MO

Painters going in for the second coat of a saturated, perriwinkle purple on a home beside the train tracks.  Yeah, the roof needs some attention - structure- and shingle-wise - and replacement windows are overdue. But that type of maintenance costs.

Paint is the cheapest form of instant gratification, and in this case, mood enhancement.  The owners are thinking “put on a happy face;” the neighbors may be thinking “send in the clowns.”  I think there ought to be clowns.

One thing I love about New Orleans’ neighborhoods is their warm and abundant embrace of vibrant house colors.  This purple addition to the yellow neighbor is a mini-recreation of that Big Easy feeling in the Webster Groves hills.
Thank you for doing this.

Architecture Rock, St. Louis Style

Finn’s Motel and The Blind Eyes are two St. Louis rock bands that have something in common that makes this building geek deeply happy: a propulsive, uplifting song specifically about architecture.

Joe Thebeau was responsible for one of the very best albums of 2006, Escape Velocity.  It is an engrossing and far-reaching concept album about being a 40-year old family man and corporate drone who can’t escape the feeling that there’s something else waiting for him just beyond the horizon; how do you get to that place and what happens once you do?

Among the 17 songs that tell the tale is a piece that addresses the Gateway Arch as a metaphor for high and/or dashed expectations, “Eero Saarinen”:

Eero
Arching
Westward over my city
Stainless and brilliant
Eero
Arching
Skyward into the universe
Expanding
Expansive possibilities
The kind of vision I can look up to
Arching over
Into a future we couldn’t hope to
Live up to
Eero

Listen to the song “Eero Saarinen” by Finn’s Motel.

For the sake of full disclosure, Joe Thebeau asked me to sing with him on the song, but trust that it has nothing to do with why I love it.  It’s definitely a case of him inviting me because I loved the simple and emotional geometry of his sentiment.  It made me look at the Arch - something most of us in this city tend to take for granted - in a whole new and personal way, which was also reflected in the CD cover shot and other photos of the Arch he sent me out to capture.

Atop that, the song just frickin’ rocks! It’s 1:32 minutes of rapid heart beat and laser point precision.  Architecture has been described as frozen music, and I’d always “heard” the Arch as a wistful symphonic piece.  Thanks to Thebeau’s artistic vision, I will forever “hear” the Arch as the Red Bull energy required to be the eternal Gateway to the West.

Finn’s Motel is playing at Off Broadway on Saturday, August 22, 2009. Do go check them out, and ask them to play this song.

I have been listening to The Blind Eyes debut record for 7 days straight, and the brilliance of it multiplies with repetition.  During the first couple of listens - wherein I don’t pay attetion to lyrics, just overall sonics - I assumed from the chorus of “Brasil, 1957″  (“We could only make it on the plane, on a plane”) that the song was about The Mile High Club.

On the third listen I finally heard:

Moving westward up the river
Steel and concrete to deliver
Out of nothing springs a city
Monument to modernity

Holy crap, these guys are singing about the building of Brasilia, and by association, architect Oscar Niemeyer!  And - duh! - the T-shirt design (above) featuring Niemeyer’s National Congress building has way more significance than using it simply because Niemeyer is the coolest (and oldest) living architect.  Oh, and double duh, this also references/inspired the title of the record.

Listen to the song “Brasil, 1957″ by The Blind Eyes.

I’m not normally this slow on the uptake, and in defense it should be pointed out: how often do we hear a song that concisely and poetically sums up the construction of a mid-century modern capitol?  Previous to this, never!

The chorus of this ingenious song now takes on an extra layer of clever:  is it “plain” or “plane”?  Because both of them work.  The city of Brasilia was purposely built far inland on an empty plain.  Aerial views confirm that the city was purposely laid out in the shape of a plane.

What inspired them to tackle this as a song topic?  Is one of them a fellow architecture geek?  Until answers appear, I’m just impressed and thankful that it - and the entire record - exists. And I’m so proud that two St. Louis bands decided that songs about architecture should rock mightily.

Question

Aside from these two towering St. Louis musical achievements, what other rock or pop songs are specifically about an architect or a building?  The only other song that comes to mind is “Alec Eiffel” by The Pixies.

If you think of others, do let me know, and if enough of them exist, it could turn into the rare case of a second B.E.L.T. entry about architecture rock.

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An LV Home in St. Louis County

The July/August issue of St. Louis At Home lists an LV Home for sale in… South County? How odd, but very cool. Even cooler: it’s the only LV Home built in the St. Louis area and one of the few to be built atop a full basement (the majority are built atop concrete slab on grade), which doubles the size of this kit home to nearly 3,000 square feet. I exceeded all speed limits in a hurry to see an LV so close to home.

Summer 2004 is when I originally saw the LV display home in Perryville, MO, on assignment for a now-defunct design magazine to interview the LV creator and architect Rocio Romero. After a scenic drive through deep rural country, it was pleasantly jarring to see an ultra-modern metal box standing alone at the start of a farmer’s field. It appeared to be floating over a random, ironic site, and this urban/rural juxtaposition created a light tension.

Inside, the house felt spacious, sturdy and serene. The back wall of the house was a continuous series of floor-to-ceiling windows, which flooded the spaces with glorious amounts of natural light. The display home was the perfect size for two people, but the kits can be built to any custom size, so the possibilities for accommodating a family of any size was immediately apparent. The LV was sophisticated, casual and enchanting. The architect was passionate, industrious and detail-oriented. Altogether, it was a great concept cleverly executed and it was easy to understand why sales of the kits were on the upswing. Over the years, a cover feature in dwell helped spread the word, and it’s exciting to imagine this design dotting landscapes all over America.

Most everyone I know who has toured the LV display shares this observation: all the windows are great, and it makes total sense on an isolated lot, but could you insert it into a typical urban or suburban lot and keep a decent level of privacy? Would you wind up ruining the aesthetic by covering most of the windows with drapes to keep neighbors on 3 sides from knowing your business?

This is why I needed to see the South St. Louis County LV: how does it function in established suburbia?

It functions very well. Yes, it does immediately stand out from its surroundings, but within the context of the neighborhood it’s surprising rather than jarring. Plus, the homes along this stretch of Theiss Road come in a wide variety of architectural styles, so the LV is just another flavor. The galvanized aluminum can make it a bright flavor at certain times of day, but it’s not fussy or flashy. Initially, the immediate neighbors were skeptical as they watched it going up, but now they love and accept it as a normal part of the landscape, so the LV adapts very well to denser surroundings.

I learned this important piece of information because the homeowners - Joe and Jeanne Marie Spezia - were kind enough to give me a tour. They love their home and are rightfully proud of it, and are comfortable with the attention it brings. Their decision to build one was included in a cover feature about Romero in a 2007 issue of At Home, and in June 2009 was featured in both St. Louis Homes & Lifestyles and on the front page of South County Times newspaper.

Because the Spezia’s love living here, the home is not officially for sale, but if someone were to come along and pay the right price, they’d seriously consider it. Until then, the LV has become the unique template for expressing who they are and how they choose to live.

The place expresses an immediate and vibrant personality courtesy of the creative mind of Jeanne Marie, whose re-purposing aesthetic and mosaic art punctuates every room of the house. Her studio is in the basement, and you can see more of her work here, as well as in these pictures of their home.

The couple designed a unique back patio, whose half-wall is made of metal roofing straight off the Lowe’s shelves. Actually, many significant features of the home come from Lowe’s (like the foyer light fixture, below), which proves two things:
1. It’s not what you use, but how you use it
2. Limited budgets create imaginative solutions

And budget rapidly became a huge issue for the homeowners. Their house-building adventure wound up costing far more than anticipated because of an endless string of complications. But most everyone who has been through a custom home build has a similar list of complaints and complications without achieving such a spectacular end result.

Joe Spezia enthusiasticly pointed out every structural aspect of the house that makes it so exceptional: money-saving energy efficiency, 12″ thick vertical steel beams that make the place earthquake-proof (he jumped hard on the living room floor to illustrate that there is no vibrations, no movement), perfectly plumb surfaces and extra-thick walls and floors that effectively soundproof the house from the outside as well as create privacy inside.

For instance, Joe is a licensed massage therapist with a huge and relaxing studio space for his practice in the basement of this home. He recalls a time when, after clients had left, his wife asked if working in her studio next door with the TV on had bothered them. Joe replied that they heard nothing and he didn’t even realize she was down there. That’s how thick and insulated all the walls are.

The large master bedroom (above) has an equally large bathroom with the most gorgeous clear, green glass tile walls, a bathtub you could swim laps in and a walk-in closet bigger than most bathrooms!

The entire home is about natural flow of space creating instinctive comfort, and even more so than experiencing the original LV display home, it conjured within me the intense desire to live in this home, exactly as it is. But the mercurial mind of an artist like Jeanne Marie is constantly changing things up and she is seriously considering removing the metal siding on the exterior of the home and replacing it with cedar.

Initially, I was a bit shocked at this idea, but then I saw this photo of another LV Home that went with wood instead of metal, and it looks great. Which just goes to show two things:
1. Artists “see” things that the rest of us can’t
2. The very nature of the LV allows one to exactly create the home you see in your head.

See more photos of the Spezia’s LV Home here.

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The Frank Lloyd Wright Legacy Continues

In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Guggenheim Museum building, The Daily Beast offers up a piece about the battles between Frank Lloyd Wright and then-curator, James Sweeney.

Here’s the article.

And rather than add to decades of “told you so” over the difficulty of using this building for its intended purpose, I’ll just resurrect this bit:

A Case Against Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect.