Dedicated to Art ... Free to All

Only one building remains in Forest Park from the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, better known as the 1904 St. Louis Worlds Fair. The former Palace of Fine Arts, now the St. Louis Art Museum’s main building, overlooks vestiges of the fair’s Grand Basin from atop Art Hill. The fair’s organizers had intended from the beginning for architect Cass Gilbert’s Palace of Fine Arts to remain as their gift to the city. It was the only building constructed of steel and stone instead of the temporary material used in the fair’s other buildings, a mixture of plaster-of-paris and hemp on a wood framework.

Saint Louis Art Museum began in 1879 as the Saint Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts, associated with Washington University, then located in the western part of downtown St. Louis. When the museum moved into the Palace of Fine Arts after the fair, the citizens of St. Louis voted for an art tax to fund the museum and its collections. That was the beginning of the city’s longstanding tradition of support for the arts, embodied in the motto on the entablature of the museum’s north entrance: “Dedicated to Art and Free to All.”

The museum endeavors to be comprehensive, including objects from across all cultures and time periods. It is renowned for Oceanic and pre-Columbian art, ancient Chinese bronzes, and for its European and American collections of modern art, particularly German expressionism. Saint Louis Art Museum’s permanent collection comprises more than 30,000 works. Special exhibitions range from small single room showings of selected museum holdings, to world-class featured exhibitions.

The Art Museum made additions to the original Cass Gilbert building in the 1950’s, in 1971, and most recently in 2013, when the East Building, designed by Sir David Chipperfield, opened. At 200,000 square feet, the new addition increases the museum’s available public space 30 percent, and allows the display of many larger format contemporary works. 

One must-see work is Andy Goldsworthy’s sculpture Stone Sea, a series of interlocking dry laid stone arches.  The piece was designed site-specific for a courtyard between the old and new buildings. Be sure to view it from the ground level inside the building, as well as above from the exterior.  Stone Sea is a recent example, like many others in the St. Louis Art Museum, of the integration of art with architecture that Cass Gilbert sought: “I have always felt that architecture, painting and sculpture were so closely akin that the highest form of art would be the combination of them all."

Getting there from CONSTRUCT 2015:

Driving: 15 minutes. Highway I-64/US40 west to Hampton Exit at Forest Park, and follow the signs to the Art Museum. Limited parking available on surface lots; pay parking available under the museum.

MetroLink: From Convention Center Station 14 min. to Forest Park Station, transfer to #90 Hampton bus (#03 Forest Park Shuttle also available in season, check schedule.) Or skip the bus and take a 15-20 minute walk from station to musuem (moderate hill from the lagoon to the museum).

Taxi: Budget $15 each way.

Shaw's Garden

Hidden in a residential neighborhood a short drive from downtown, the world-class Missouri Botanical Garden exists because of the generosity of one of St. Louis’s best-loved citizens, Henry Shaw. Retired before forty after amassing a fortune selling hardware, he invested heavily in land on the city’s outskirts. By the time of his death in 1889, his philanthropic works included: a public school building; land for a city hospital; endowment of Washington University’s School of Botany; the Missouri Historical Society; and development of Tower Grove Park, the city’s second largest.

Shaw’s most enduring legacy to St. Louis is the botanical garden he established at his country estate. In 1859, in an act of largesse that seems impossible today, he opened his private gardens to the public during his lifetime and while he was still living on his estate. During the last three decades of Shaw's life, ordinary citizens shared the garden’s beauty and rubbed elbows with perhaps the richest man in the city. Early on, Shaw himself created the name still used today: Missouri Botanical Garden. But talk to natives and long time St. Louis residents  and you more likely hear the name in vogue for 150 years: “Shaw’s Garden”.

This beautiful and ever-changing urban woodland contains almost 80 acres of horticultural displays. The grounds immediately around Shaw’s Tower Grove House showcase formal Victorian gardening, including the prerequisite living maze. Just down from the house visitors encounter the English Woodland Gardens, resplendent in spring with blooming rhododendrons, azaleas, and dogwoods. Next, Seiwa-en Japanese Gardens is a carefully crafted world featuring waterfalls, beaches, and islands, surrounding a four-acre lake. 

Henry Shaw’s architect was George I. Barnett, designer of the Old Courthouse in downtown St. Louis and the Missouri Governor’s Mansion in Jefferson City. On the garden’s grounds, Barnett’s works include the Tower Grove House, Shaw’s beautiful mausoleums, the Museum Building, and the Linnean House – reputedly the oldest public greenhouse in continuous operation west of the Mississippi. All of these buildings were constructed during Shaw’s life, as were the stone walls that surround the garden, and the old main gatehouse, now the Spink Pavilion.

Of the garden’s modern buildings, the centerpiece is the Climatron, one of Buckminster Fuller’s early geodesic domes, designed by T. C. Howard, of Synergetics, Inc., and executed by the architects Murphy and Mackey. Opened in 1960, the Climatron features a free-span diameter of 175 feet, and rises 70 feet to its apex. The building is the first completely climate controlled greenhouse, allowing a wide range of climatic conditions within the more than one half-acre of enclosed space. An interesting side note – one of the Climatron’s cycad plants, Dioon edule, a primitive ancestor of pines, is the actual specimen that was exhibited at 1904 World’s Fair.

Today’s garden visitor, admiring the abundant beauty, might be surprised to learn that Missouri Botanical Garden is not just a pretty face. As a world leader in botanical conservation and research, the garden employs dozens of scientists behind the scenes at its facilities in Missouri, as well as at remote sites throughout the world. The garden today is a fitting legacy to Henry Shaw, a man passionate about botany, appreciative of beauty, and determined to share his creations in perpetuity with the citizens of his adopted city, and the world.

Getting there from CONSTRUCT 2015:

Driving: 15 minutes (without traffic). Follow Eighth Street south past Busch Stadium (it becomes Seventh Street) and continue until you see the entrance ramp for Highway I-44/I-55. Take I-44 west to Vandeventer (Exit 287). Turn left on Vandeventer, then left on Shaw. The Garden parking entrance will be on your right. Parking available on surface lots.

Taxi: Budget $15 each way.