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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St. Louis in National Geographic, November 1965

St. Louis was extensively covered in the November 1965 issue of National Geographic. The Arch was almost complete, the new Busch Stadium was under construction, and wiping out old ugliness for new (federally funded) progress had many optimistic for the resurgence of the city that was just around the corner.

Much thanks to Jonathan Swegle and Jeff Vines for putting this issue in my hands.

Click on each individual spread and it will pop into a new window so you can read it. Within the following pages, many projects are mentioned. Please help me keep track of the following:
Which buildings are now gone?
Which remain?
Which projects panned out as expected?
Which ones didn’t?
Is there anything to be learned from this snapshot of the past?

RELATED
Busch Stadium Farewell
Eero Saarinen, Shaping the Future
We Brick This City
Pius XII Library, St. Louis University

Remembering Famous-Barr
Missouri Botanical Garden

Eero Saarinen: Shaping The Future

The Kemper Art Museum is my new favorite place for wallowing in mid-century splendor. Their new exhibit on Eero Saarinen is even better than Birth of the Cool, and it is an embarrassment of riches to be able to say that.

As always, taking pictures (or leaning) in the Kemper is strictly forbidden and studiously enforced, so I can only share with you these crappy cell phone shots.  Shown above are architectural models of the TWA Terminal and Dulles International airports! Below, a color rendering Eero did of one of the TWA lounges!! And this is what is in just one corner of one room!!!

The exhibit is very thorough without being ponderous, and displayed so that one can skim lightly and take away useful tidbits (Eero could write with both hands at the same time and write backwards) or really dig in and start to feel what it was like to work with him as he created and refined an idea.

Everything the man touched conjured a new design reality, and this energy reverberated well past him to affect and elevate those who brought his creations to life.   Look at the photos of the TWA Terminal or the Ingalls Hockey Rink during construction and be blown away by the intricate wood forms the men built to mold the concrete.  Marvel at new fabrication tricks invented to create structural panels for the IBM Research Center building.

There are original sketches of his iconic tulip chairs within one room dedicated solely to his furniture designs.  There’s an 18-minute documentary about Eero’s life and work created just for the exhibit.  It is easy to get lost for hours in this exhibit, but luckily it is in residence until April 27, so there’s plenty of opportunities to do it piecemeal, or just keep gorging on this architectural buffet.  Kemper is open most all times you need them to be open, so there’s no excuse to miss it.

Need more convincing?

Here’s a quick blast of photos from the exhibit.

Here’s a short video about the exhibit.