The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (JNEM) is defined by the single grand design gesture at its center. The monumentality of the Gateway Arch makes it impossible to transform the Memorial and its grounds with one bold stroke. Instead, the MVVA team proposes a network of finer-grained interventions incorporating natural science, engineering, and design into a holistic philosophy of ecological urbanism. The city has an ecology. It is a complex ecosystem in which the divides between the built and the organic, between nature and culture, break down. Our philosophy seeks to underscore and celebrate the blurring of these lines through art, architecture, engineering, and public programming—with revolutionary landscape design at the center of it all.
Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates is a leading practitioner of this new ecological-urban paradigm, and the MVVA team structure is based on our experience synthesizing the efforts of many disciplines to achieve positive reciprocity between the constructed and living environments. United by a commitment to sustainability in all its forms, the MVVA team is composed of interdisciplinary pairs, each crucial to addressing the dramatic range of interrelated issues—of urban renewal, preservation, commemoration, social connections, and ecological restoration—that are reflected in the competition’s scope and ambitions. Each member of the MVVA team has tackled a project of this complexity and scope before, making this team uniquely positioned to hit the ground running in a proven collaborative mode.
Responding to the Memorial’s monumental scale is the central challenge of this assignment. Given the site’s sheer immensity, sectional complexity, and competing scales—all in a parcel surrounded by a crushing maze of infrastructure—we believe that expanding the site’s scalar and experiential range is crucial to engaging the wide-ranging competition goals. The creation of a new range of more intimate experiences, based primarily in landscape, will be the main engine for the transformation of the Memorial and its relationship with both the city and the river. We imagine a powerfully connective landscape that operates simultaneously in several ways—a landscape that will not only draw visitors from around the world but also serve as a new locus of civic energy in the daily lives of the citizens of St. Louis. The redesigned Memorial will be a centerpiece of civic culture, an engine of regional economic growth, a showcase for sustainable ecological restoration, and a celebration of the national significance of this historic place.
