Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s to 1970s

Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s to 1970s is the first major exhibition to examine the complex connections among modern architecture, urban renewal and racial and spatial change in St. Louis in the interlocking histories of New Deal planning, the Great Migration and the civil rights and Great Society eras.

With material drawn from the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Missouri Historical Society and other collections, this exhibition situates some of the most celebrated works of modern St. Louis architecture within the context of mid-20th-century regional developments. Using architectural drawings, models, photographs, films, digital maps and artworks, Design Agendas explores a remarkably destructive, creative, dynamic and conflicted time in St. Louis’ architectural and urban history.

Most of the architectural works were created in a period of de facto racial segregation, an era that is now known for its often-racist modernist urban planning, such as the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project (1950 to 1956) and the clearance of the Mill Creek Valley neighborhood along with its 20,000 Black 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.