This project proposes alternative spatial environments within Downtown St. Louis, challenging the city’s fragmented identity and transient urban character. The site lies at a critical intersection: where the booming entertainment district of Ballpark Village (BPV), the civic openness of Kiener Plaza, and the iconic presence of the Gateway Arch converge. Despite these anchors, Downtown often lacks sustained vibrancy, feeling more like a place passed through rather than inhabited.
The proposed architecture operates as a machine for navigating and negotiating these overlapping environments. Suspended between two Hilton hotel towers and hovering above a grand, indifferent lobby, the building questions its own identity. It is caught between observing the city and being observed by it, unsure whether it belongs to the existing structure or stands in autonomous opposition.
The architecture is deliberately contradictory: bold yet uncertain, anchored yet adrift.
The physical model becomes a surrogate for the building itself—a constructed event inviting viewers to momentarily escape the banal and enter a curated fiction. These moments are not prescriptive but interpretive: users activate them, assign meaning, and give life to ambiguous spatial scenarios. The building becomes a vessel for such indeterminate experiences, offering users the opportunity to oscillate between reality and the speculative, the known and the surreal.
Entry into these alternate environments is mediated by ground-level “portals” that puncture the existing lobby, enabling encounters with spectacle, performance, or unexpected stillness. The transformed ground plane is made more porous, inviting greater pedestrian interaction and urban permeability.
Clad in a dense architectural scrim, the building’s interior is visually obscured from the outside, offering only vague silhouettes of its surroundings. For occupants, this produces a blurred, dreamlike relationship with the city—St. Louis becomes a backdrop, an impression rather than a defined context. The building simultaneously projects itself onto Kiener Plaza while absorbing the city’s presence onto its skin. This reciprocal exchange reinforces the building’s ambiguous identity and precarious position.
Ultimately, the architecture embodies a kind of spatial anxiety, both in its internal expression and its uneasy relationship with the host hotel. It challenges conventions of program, legibility, and permanence, proposing instead an architecture of fluid identity, open interpretation, and transient occupation.
“architecture will define the places where reality meets FANTASY, reason meets madness, life meets death.” -Bernard tschumi [manhattan transcripts.”]
