The Old Post Office Plaza in St. Louis serves as an urban catalyst for revitalization while forming an iconic event space for downtown. “There were two factors that precipitated the design decisions for the urban square,” says Mauro Javier Carrneño Chao, associate at Baird Sampson Neuert Architects, Toronto. “The first one was that the plaza is situated in front of the Old Post Office and surrounded by other existing heritage buildings. The south elevation of the American Theatre faced an alley and had to be addressed in the design proposal, so we opted for a wall.
“The second constituent was that the square will also serve as the site of a large figural sculpture, entitled the ‘Toroso di Ikaro’ by noted Polish artist Igor Mitoraj. It invokes the Greek myth of Daedalus and the doomed flight of his son Ikaro. The sculpture is made out of bronze and we wanted the design of the square and its formal elements to relate to the sculpture. Therefore we made the wall out of metal.”
The wall is composed of two elements, the “Cloud Wall” and the “Screen.” Wide-flange structural steel columns and serpentine tube steel connect both elements of the wall together. Architects chose Zinc as the cladding material in the “Cloud Wall,” both for the patina and the texture on the curved wall. The “Screen” is made out of perforated stainless-steel panels. Umicore Building Products USA Inc., Raleigh, N.C., supplied 6,000 square feet of its 0.8-mm VMZ Flat Lock panels in QUARTZ-ZINC, and Fabri-tech Sheet Metal, St. Louis, supplied 2,700 square feet of perforated stainless-steel panels.
“Zinc’s malleability allowed us to shape it to achieve the tight radius curves in the ‘cloud wall,'” Chao says. “The perforated stainless steel gave us the transparency we were looking for. The constant play of light and shadow casted onto the ‘Cloud Wall’ continuously transforms the appearance. Metal is what defines the overall spaces in the plaza. The walls are the border on the north side and they define the space. Metal is also present in the custom ‘Light Wing’ fixtures, and in all the guards and rails throughout the square.”
Old Post Office Plaza Sculpture, St. Louis
Completed: January 1, 2009
Total square footage: 6,000 square feet
Architect: Baird Sampson Neuert Architects, Toronto
General co ntractor: Kozeny-Wagner Inc., Arnold, Mo.
Structural engineer: Blackwell Bowick Partnership, Toronto
Metal fabricator / Stai nless-steel panels: Fabri-Tech Sheet Metal Inc., St. Louis, www.fabri-tech.org
Zinc WALl Panels: Umicore Building Products USA Inc., Raleigh, N.C., www.vmzinc-us.com