Maki Designs Art Complex in St. Louis

In 1960, Washington University in St. Louis commissioned a young faculty architect to design Steinberg Hall as a home for the school's highly regarded art collection. The architect, Fumihiko Maki, has more recently won a Pritzker Prize (1993) and the commission to design Tower 4 at the World Trade Center site.

Nine years ago Washington University again selected Maki, this time to envision an entire arts campus, which opened on Oct. 25. Called the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, Maki's $56.8-million complex in the long neglected southeast corner of the campus includes newly renovated Beaux-Arts-era halls for fine art and architecture; the new Walker Hall, a high-tech art facility housing studios, classrooms and faculty offices; and Maki's Steinberg Hall, which faces his new 65,000-square-foot Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum -- the centerpiece and public face of the complex.

Like many Maki buildings, the Kemper has a modernist sensibility. It is essentially a multilevel grouping of cubes pressed into a rectangular footprint. Clad in limestone block, the building's gridded exterior mirrors that of the rusticated stones of the facing fine art and architecture buildings. Windows and undercuts dramatically punctuate the Kemper's limestone grids. The south facade boasts a three-story curtain wall of glass. In the southeast corner a long horizontal window between the lobby and basement levels allows visitors to look down into the art and architecture library. A broad, multilevel plaza unifies the five-building complex. ...

•	Maki Designs Art Complex in St. Louis January 2007 issue Art in America, Monday, Jan. 1, 2007 Byline: Mel Watkin

•	Reality Bites: Making Avant-garde Art in Post-Wall Germany Dexigner.com, Monday, Jan. 8, 2007 Byline: NO BYLINE

	Story also ran in 2 others:  St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Where Magazine-St. Louis