GATEWAY ARCH MUSEUM | St. Louis, Missouri, USA | 2018

Architects: Cooper Robertson
Client: Gateway Arch Park Foundation
General Contractor: McCarthy Building Companies, Inc.
Photographers: Nic Lehoux

The expanded and renovated Museum at the Gateway Arch is located at the base of Eero Saarinen’s iconic Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, the underground Museum explores seminal events in American history such as the Louisiana Purchase, the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the role of St. Louis in the settlement of the American West.

The Museum had suffered from a lack of visibility and was in need of a more relevant and contemporary narrative about the westward expansion of the United States.

As a work of great monumental public art, Saarinen’s Arch is imbued with meaning, technological achievement, and beauty.

However, with the construction of the adjacent interstate highway, the setting of the Arch had diminished its potential to inspire ideas and emotions about relevant historic topics like migration and scientific exploration.

The design of the new Museum and surrounding landscape has more fully realized that potential through an ambitious but respectful intervention that interprets the spirit of the Arch and amplifies its relevance to our time.

The new Museum occupies a renovated underground space built concurrently with the Arch with a 47,000 square foot expansion to the west, and a new entrance and plaza facing the Old Courthouse, site of the landmark 1857 trial of the slave Dred Scott.

The majority of the existing space was demolished and reconfigured into new galleries, public amenities, and staff offices.

The original architectural elements of the existing public spaces were preserved, and their distinctive character highlighted with new lighting and other discrete interventions.

The addition houses a new lobby that also serves as a visitor center for the entire Park, as well as a great hall with monumental and animated interpretive elements – a giant map of North America where one can walk the path of Lewis and Clark, and life sized projections that create a vivid experience of their migration.

These introduce the visitor to major themes to be explored in the galleries.

The Museum design is fully integrated into the National Register-listed landscape and respects Dan Kiley’s original Park design.

The new circular stainless steel and glass entrance refers to the Arch in its materiality and form.

It is an arc laid on to the landscape and precisely inserted into the topography, allowing visitors to enter the building through the landscape rather than descending underground.

The luminous great hall is revealed with views deep into the underground Museum’s monumentally scaled exhibits, elevating and enlivening the visitor experience, and drawing one in.

The linear exhibition offers various ways to navigate multiple stories on single and successive visits, and merges seamlessly with the trip up the Arch, and then delivers one at its base to experience the great work itself.

The design creates a coherent and memorable visit by integrating the Museum content with the Arch.

The Museum project demonstrates that excellent museum architecture, great monumental public art, and well-designed outdoor public spaces can make great cities.

It is a key component of the larger plan to connect downtown St. Louis with the Park and the Mississippi Riverfront as the underground Museum expands towards downtown and opens onto a redesigned public square that now spans over the sunken interstate highway.

The new Museum and Old Courthouse create an ensemble of buildings of national significance that define a transformed public open space in downtown St. Louis.

Taken together with the Arch, this will become a new destination for those interested in architecture and history, contribute to the quality of urban life for residents, and drive economic revitalization.