Saint Louis Art Museum

Dedicated in 1876 and the site of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in 1904, Forest Park is easily the most important landscape in St. Louis, the Midwestern city's version of Central Park. Forest Park is a place of recreation and learning for residents and visitors alike, with a zoo, history museum, golf course, municipal theater, tennis center, and other amenities within its 1,374 acres. The Saint Louis Art Museum is housed in a grand building designed by Cass Gilbert for the 1904 World's Fair. More than 100 years later, British architect David Chipperfield added the East Building, which quietly respects its predecessor and orients glass walls toward important parts of the Forest Park landscape.

Chipperfield's addition, though at odds with Gilbert's neoclassical edifice, respects it in a dark and reflective palette of smooth concrete and glass and by keeping a low profile. The new galleries are kept on one floor and sit above a 300-car parking garage. Visitors arriving by car either ascend directly into the entrance hall of the East Building or walk down a corridor that leads to the 1904 building.

Although the windows of the addition are limited to one expansive wall per cardinal direction, the entrance hall and galleries are full of natural light coming from skylights above the concrete structure that defines the ceiling of each space. Really, as soon as one enters the new building, Chipperfield's whole design is laid out right there: the concrete grid, walls that follow the grid, diffuse skylights, and wood floors that provide some warm relief from the white and gray surfaces.

Departures from the rigid design happen at the large windows, one per cardinal direction. The north window is given to the entrance and restaurant and looks toward the Grand Basin; the east window looks down the hill toward the Saint Louis Zoo; the south window overlooks the Kennedy Forest in the park's southwest corner; and the west window looks directly onto the museum's south terrace and new sculpture garden. Rather than just serving as end walls of the large galleries, Chipperfield provides narrow rooms with benches by the windows, inviting visitors to take a break and look outside. Skillfully, the coffers above these narrow rooms are solid, so the light coming from the walls does not compete with light from above.

Another departure occurs in a narrow, below-grade space between old and new that is occupied by Andy Goldsworthy's Stone Sea, a site-specific commission made as a series of limestone arches. The lower-level corridor from the parking garage to the Cass Gilbert building provides windows onto the installation, a surprising confrontation with art that is much different than the paintings and sculptures in the more traditional galleries upstairs. While the East Building is full of light and well-scaled spaces that serve the art well, it is an unrelenting design (it's no wonder Chipperfield is renovating Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin) that benefits from the windows on the park and could benefit from more surprises like the insertion of Stone Sea in an otherwise empty space.