Metropolis Editor Looks for Bright Ideas Here

Metropolis editor-in-chief Susan Szenasy stopped in St. Louis on Monday to take her design innovation tour to the headquarters of design firm HOK. While here, she had a few things to say about the Arch.

Szenasy is traveling the country with "Brilliant Simplicity," a short movie about recent winners of the Metropolis design innovation award winners, to encourage large design firms to incorporate innovation into their projects. She acknowledged that business and economics constrain what a firm can do, but she encourages companies to search their portfolios for a project where the owner would be open to incorporating "high end innovation" into their building.

"We have stopped being about innovation in our country and we have to rekindle it," she said. While admitting that most owners want only proven
technologies in their buildings, she asked her audience to think about what it would take to prove new technologies. "If every large design firm did
just one project that incorporated high-end innovation, think how much it would move architecture forward," she said.

Szenasy said she is very excited by HOK's new partnership with the biologists of the Biomimicry Guild and she looks forward to seeing what comes out of it. "Collaboration with academic researchers in non-architectural fields is the way for us to move the built environment to the next level," she said.

In a conversation with CNR before her meeting with HOK designers, Szenasy expressed astonishment that St. Louis has done so little embrace the Arch.
"Cities around the world would die for a symbol like the Arch," she said. "The question is: what is the city doing around it?"

She agreed with John Berendzen of Fox Architects that how one develops the boundaries between the park and the city is of special importance. The
initiative by John Danforth, the former senator, and Mayor Francis Slay to get park land turned over to a private entity "is the wrong conversation,"
she said, and won't do anything for how the city embraces the park.

"There is plenty for everyone to do: the feds, local government, and the private sector," she said. "For example, you go to the Arch and what do you
see - a Cargill grain elevator. Couldn't they at least spruce that up?"

Columns