Design Agendas

An examination of the complex connections in St. Louis among modern architecture, urban renewal, and racial and spatial change.

Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s–1970s features essays on the modernist architects Charles E. Fleming, R. Buckminster Fuller, Eric Mendelsohn, and Gyo Obata by contributing scholars Shantel Blakely, John C. Guenther, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, and Winifred Elysse Newman, as well as a memoir by Michael E. Willis, FAIA, NOMA. Editor and architectural historian Eric P. Mumford situates the work of these architects and others within the context of St. Louis urban development against the midcentury backdrop of New Deal planning, the Great Migration, and the civil rights and Great Society eras.

Most of the featured architectural works were created in a period of de facto racial segregation, an era that is now known for its often racist and destructive modernist urban planning, such as the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project (1950–56) and the clearance of the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood with its twenty thousand African American residents (1959). These and other urban renewal initiatives were also part of several interlocking design agendas that used modern architecture and planning to propose and express new and then thought to be more liberating, ideas about social organization and forms of architecture and planning.

This publication adds to the small but growing number of studies on modern architecture in St. Louis.