The influence of the International style on modernist commercial architecture in St. Louis reveals a deep and wide lineage of works, including some recognized even internationally for their genius, while also showing fits of timidity and artistic mediocrity. Generally St. Louis clients favored less stylistically-pronounced building forms, and no local designers were dogmatic adherents to the style. The city’s restrictions on curtain wall construction until 1961 inhibited the development of the style in the city limits, forcing designers to embrace a masonry-bound strain of the International style that emphasized heavy geometry and melded on each temporal end with Art Moderne and New Brutalist movements.

The term “International Style” entered common usage when Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock entitled the catalog of their seminal 1932 exhibition “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition” at the Museum of Modern Art as The International Style: Architecture Since 1922.  Hitchcock and Johnson stated that the International style had three defining principles: it was an architecture of volume rather than mass, it relied on largely asymmetrical compositions based on the rhythmic repetition of units, and it did not have ornament of any kind.1  Johnson and Hitchcock associated these traits with a band of European modernists that included Walter Gropius, Eric Mendelsohn, Alvar Aalto, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe and Le Corbusier.  Although these designers produced diverse work, they embraced the three principles and radically changed architectural practice around the world. During the same year as the exhibition, the striking 36-story skyscraping Pennsylvania Savings Fund Society Building (1932), designed by Howe & Lescaze, rose in Philadelphia to present the style’s promise to America.

Modernism Reaches St. Louis Commercial Design

The styles of the Modern Movement reached St. Louis relatively slowly, but attained influence over commercial architecture between 1930 and 1970. Architectural historian Eric Mumford, whose scholarship on modernist architectural practice is St. Louis is definitive, writes that “[t]raditionally brick St. Louis does not seem to have been particularly receptive to the International style.”2 While there may be few buildings with fully resolved stylistic traits, there are many that evince a preponderance. This essay analyzes both buildings with defined programs and those with many major traits (which Mumford and other historians might consider “streamlined” or “streamlined modern”).

 The traits of International style design were heavily influenced by the daylight factory movement, to the point where the emergence of deliberate stylistic choices for commercial buildings mirrors the functional, engineer-driven designs of early twentieth century daylight factories. Perhaps it is not surprising that St. Louis’ earliest cited indelible example of International style influence on commercial architecture is a small factory and office building downtown, the Tums Building on South Fourth Street, sometimes reported with a construction date of 1930. The Tums Building’s streamlined form is a flat-roofed austere masterpiece defined by large window ribbons, a black terra cotta base and stark painted concrete upper floors.  Yet the Tums Building actually dates to a 1951 building permit. In keeping with the crossover from industrial design, the Tums Building was not designed by an architect but by engineer Arthur J. Widmer, principal of Widmer Engineering Company. Widmer, who had studied mechanical engineering at Cornell University. Widmer’s career included designs for industrial structures, over one thousand bridges and the reinforced concrete frames of warehouses and office buildings whose designs often are attributed to architects.2

Among actual early major works to employ streamlined geometric designs influenced by the emergent International style were worker and public housing projects, including Neighborhood Gardens (1935; Hoener, Baum & Froese; NR 1/31/1986; extant) and the city’s Carr Square Village (1942; Klipstein & Rathmann with Murphy & Wischmeyer) and Clinton-Peabody Terrace (1942; Mauran, Russell, Crowell & Mullgardt with Angelo Corrubia) public housing projects (both aesthetically vandalized by hipped roofs and hoods today).  Commercial development was fairly static during the Great Depression, but several small works brought the International style to St. Louis ahead of the postwar era.

Mumford writes that Harris Armstrong’s Shanley Building (1935; NR 9/20/1982; extant) is “generally considered to be the first example of modern architecture in St. Louis.”3  Built for an orthodontist and employing a rigorous white-stucco geometric form, the Shanley Building was the first of several small medical office buildings that would bring modern architecture to St. Louis in the late 1930s.  Edouard Mutrux’s office and residence for Dr. Samuel A. Bassett (1938; NR 2/3/1993; extant) in Richmond Heights and Armstrong’s Grant Medical Clinic (1938; extant) in the city’s Central West End further explored International Style traits including flat roofs, mitered or curved window banks, avoidance of ornament and contrasting cubic masses.  Mumford suggests that the Grant Medical Clinic “seems to reject the International Style,” a judgment that reflects Armstrong and other local modernists’ general ambivalence about that style.4

Another design from the 1930s that embraced traits of the International Style was the Order of Railroad Telegraphers Building at the southeast corner of Lindell and Vandeventer avenues, completed in 1939. Designed by the firm of Schmidt & Paolinelli, headed by former Tom P. Barnett Company designer Sylvester G. Schmidt, the two-story building presented an asymmetrical mass with a pronounced entrance block. The west elevation’s window ribbons were comparable to those found on the earlier Tums Building, while the compositional form had some similarity to Italian Rationalist modernism (Marcello Piacentini’s 1932 Senate building at the University of Rome, for instance). The white limestone cladding pointed forward to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Printing Company Building and Magic Chef Building’s use of a traditional cladding material, while a few instances of ornament might disqualify the building as a pure exemplar.

Soon thereafter several major commercial structures in the city of St. Louis advanced interest in the International style.  The now-lost A.S. Aloe Company Building at the northeast corner of 19th and Olive Streets (William P. Wachsman; 1940) presented a stark mass punctuated by window ribbons, a rounded corner -- anticipating the similar feature on the Famous-Barr branch department stores – and somewhat apostate ornament stating the company name in two locations – a feature picked up by Armstrong with the Magic Chef Building, though.

The second building was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Printing Plant (1942; NR 8/29/1984; extant) at 1111 Olive Street downtown, designed by Mauran, Russell, Crowell & Mullgardt.  The three-story building consists largely of alternating bands of steel windows and limestone above granite base piers.  The spare building was, according to Lawrence S. Lowic, “the first consciously designed International Style building in the city's Central Business District, and the only one constructed there prior to the 1950s when the style was widely adopted.”5  

Still, most downtown construction at the time consisted of remodeling.  Architectural historian Julie LaMouria notes that “[b]etween 1933 and 1955, $22.4 million was spent on construction downtown, with sixty percent concentrated on alteration of existing structures.”6  “Slipcover” cladding over existing buildings downtown between 1933 and 1955 allowed for the introduction of Modern Movement architecture, with results on a bell curve of architectural inspiration. Some slipcover projects simply concealed older elevations, others ground ornament back or removed it and some even completed refaced stripped building frames.

Architect W.G. Knoebel, working for the design/build Bank Building and Equipment Corporation, employed the linear idiom of the International style in his designs for the “slipcover” designs he applied to H.W.J. Edbrooke’s 1889 Commercial Building (1950) and Widman, Walsh & Boisselier’s Kinloch Building, renamed the Farm & Home Savings and Loan Association Building (1954).

Style and Form After World War II

more of a harbinger for later design was Harris Armstrong’s American Stove Company-Magic Chef Headquarters on South Kingshighway (1947; extant), a six-story office building with partial curtain wall construction.  While adhering to the city building code, Armstrong pushed boundaries by enclosing the first floor of the main building volume in glass and having the window ribbons above span the full width of each floor.  The cubic form utilized brick and limestone as well as glass block and plate glass.  The nearly fully-glazed base treatment would be emulated by designers in subsequent years, and pointed toward liberation of the heaviness of upper floors still required to have masonry cladding under the city’s building code. The main block offered clear floor plates with services located in a core tower articulated for maximum sculptural drama.

While the Magic Chef Building stands partially altered, with the latent presence of its drop-ceiling-concealed Isamu Noguchi ceiling the subject of legend, the contemporary Century Electric Building at 1805 Chestnut Street was all but destroyed.7 Built in 1947 and designed by a partnership of Louis B. Pendleton and William B. Ittner, Inc., the building today is unrecognizable following a postmodern renovation designed by Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum in 1989. Previously, the building provided a strong point in a discussion with Union Station across Aloe Plaza. With a tower of contrasting dark terra cotta and a pale body broken by banks of sheltered windows, the building remains an unfortunately obscure part of local modernist design.

With capital normalizing after World War II, alongside the disintegration of downtown retail, local department stores advanced the International style by building substantial branch department store buildings. The highest-regarded of the seminal group is the Clayton Famous-Barr designed by Samuel Marx of Marx, Flint & Schonne with Mauran, Russell, Crowell & Mullgardt (1948), which attenuates the idea of the rounded corner with a grand gesture at the corner of Forsyth Boulevard and the store parking lot.

The projecting base canopy and coping along with extruded square windows are marks of an inventive modernism that Eric Mumford traces back to Eric Mendelsohn, whose B’Nai Amoona Synagogue (1945) stands not far away in University City.8 Harris Armstrong’s Scruggs Vandervoort and Barney Branch (1950; demolished) a few blocks to the west was a less exotic specimen of the mode, with characteristic concern for natural light.

William P. McMahon & Sons’ Wellston J.C. Penney (1948) in the Wellston loop shopping district constituted an urban shopping district homage to precedents like Corbusier’s Villa Savoye (1931) and Edward Durrell Stone’s Museum of Modern Art (1937). The white-painted concrete mass terminated in a geometric openwork canopy at top. By comparison, Hoener, Baum & Froese’s Southtown Famous-Barr Store (1951; demolished), in whose parking lot Steve McQueen would plot the Great St. Louis Bank Robbery, seems partially native in its employment of familiar red brick and white limestone – although its curved corner and resolute lack of fenestration always marked it as a peculiar guest to the panoply of 1920s revival style commercial rows on South Kingshighway. Elsewhere in the St. Louis area, the International style continued to influence department store branches and early retail centers, including the Russell, Mullgardt, Schwarz & Van Hoefen-designed Northland Shopping Center (1954; demolished) in Jennings.

After World War II, there was a nationwide boom in new commercial architecture both suburban and urban, and the Modern Movement styles were even more popular. Leland Roth writes that the boom led to a flowering of International style architecture in the United States:  “Following the war corporate clients sought to fix their public images through building, and in the process gave architects like Mies, Johnson, and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill opportunities to realize the normative, universal and technically pure architecture that they had been advancing for twenty years.”9

The Office Buildings of the 1950s

Corporate St. Louis embraced the International style to some extent during the 1950s, with several small- to mid-sized office buildings deploying cubic forms, absence of ornament and partial to full curtain walls depending on location (the city forbade curtain wall construction until 1961). To some extent, the austerity of the style and the generally linear spatial planning fit both cost efficiency and interior planning goals of the period. Not surprisingly, engineering firm Sverdrup & Parcel is responsible for two designs from this decade, the staid red brick Nooter Corporation Building (1959) in St. Louis’ Kosciusko district and the Granite City Steel Building (1959) in Granite City, Illinois, which featured a buff brick masonry tower and gridded curtain walls marked by blue enamel panels.

The Bank Building and Equipment Corporation (BBEC), skilled expert at the transmogrify of older buildings into fresh modernist designs, concocted one of the strongest International style office building designs ever built in the city. The firm’s Falstaff Corporation Headquarters opened in 1957 as a purpose-built administrative center for the brewer’s 300 employees.10  BBEC here delegated the design to chief architect W.A. Sarmiento, whose career would include other International style-inspired designs, including the expressionistic cube of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1 Hall (1957) in St. Louis. For the Falstaff building, Sarmiento placed services in brick towers framing a low-rise, four-story office block clad in buff brick around a grid of windows and colorful enamel panels. The Magic Chef Building’s formal influence was very evident. 

On Lindell Boulevard throughout the 1950s and 1960s, many modern movement buildings of various uses rose, and included some with pronounced International style characteristics. The stark, almost sarcophagal General America Insurance Companies Building at 3750 Lindell (1956) is a masonry-heavy example, while a three-story office building at 4236 Lindell (1957) designed by Shapiro &Tisdale shows a curtain wall treatment of the upper floors. Two of Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum’s earliest commercial buildings show International style influence, although fairly conventional gridded rectangular layouts: the Remington Rand Building at 4100 Lindell (1956), with its minimal steel framing of upper floors overhanging the first floor, and the IBM Building (1959) at 3800 Lindell, a near-twin save the concrete block brise soleil – unfortunately removed recently – shielding the glazed upper walls. Perhaps the generic programs of these buildings reflect the zeitgeist of corporate organizational planning in the period.

In the postwar period, several early office building designs would set national precedents for the ensuing twenty years: Pietro Belluschi’s “glass box” of the Equitable Savings and Loan Association Building in Portland (1944-48; extant); Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Lever House in New York (1951-2; extant), a gridded glass box high-rise atop a lower base supported by columns or pilotis; and Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe and Philip Johnson’s soaring Seagram Building in New York (1954-58; extant).  

The 39-story Seagram Building would prove to be an especially strong model for later commercial designs, although few would match its clandestine allegiance to classically Palladian symmetry and internal regulation.  The Seagram Building made use of a paved, raised entrance plaza, a glass-walled first floor sheltered behind a steel-columned verandah, a body of glass and metal spandrels accented only by prominent mullions, a service block concealed at the rear to allow for a glass front, and a minimal crown instead of the typical cornice.  The Seagram Building would become the most famous non-residential expression of the “glass box.”  The resulting wave of buildings that explored the traits of the Seagram Building – as well as Van Der Rohe’s equally famous S.J. Crown Hall at the Illinois Institute of Technology (1950-56; extant) were dubbed “Miesian” by critics.13

St. Louis architects took note of these designs, but largely pursued more idiosyncratic paths.  Mumford writes that “[b]y the mid-1950s modern architecture had become the norm in St. Louis.”14 In 1959, the St. Louis Chapter of the American Institute of Architects published a member portfolio entitled Progress Through Architecture that supports the architectural historian’s observation.  The volume shows that most local firms had embraced modernist principles, although examples shown are far more eclectic in execution than the staid work of Gropius or Van Der Rohe.  

The International style influenced some works shown in the publication, including institutional buildings: Harris Armstrong’s Medical School Laboratories at the Washington University School of Medicine (1951; extant) with its grid of concrete and brick infill surrounding large banks of windows is one of the purest examples.11  Hellmuth Obata & Kassabaum’s Riverview Gardens High School Library (1958; extant), which seems to be the I.M. Building’s literary doppelganger.12  The L. Douglas Abrams Federal Building (completed 1961; extant) downtown designed by Murphy & Mackey with William B. Ittner, Inc. demonstrates a reverent adherence to the International style through its pronounced Miesian building podium, deep verandah with exposed structural columns at the base and dramatically algorithmic grid of windows on the main body.15

Among smaller buildings included in Progress Through Architecture, several show the influence of the International style. A brick box in Smithville, Missouri, designed by Edward J. Thias for the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company, bears a resemblance to Mies Van Der Rohe’s Robert F. Carr Memorial Chapel of St. Savior (1949-1952; extant) at the Illinois Institute of Technology.14  Harris Armstrong’s McDonnell Douglas Engineering Center (1959) presents a series of office fingers extending from a corridor spine. The fingers are typified by a wall grid that reinforces a right-angle geometry; sheltering overhangs on the south elevations are both functional and decorative.16

Although local architects were exploring the tenets of the International style, for projects in the City of St. Louis they were working under a building code that still forbade the pure curtain wall construction that made buildings like Lever House and the Seagram Building so significant.  The 1948 city building code required masonry construction and limited designers to defined ratios of sold to void on all exterior elevations.17 A good example of the compromises needed for code compliance was the speculative Thomas Jefferson Building (1959)  designed by Jamieson, Spearl, Hammond & Grolock as part of a modernization and expansion of the adjacent International Fur Exchange Building (1919). The Thomas Jefferson Building was the first major private speculative office building opened downtown since 1929 (the Missouri Employment Security Building of the same year, by Hellmuth Obata & Kassabaum, and the Peabody Coal Company Building of 1958, by Ralph Cole Hall, contend for related boasts).18 The ten-story Thomas Jefferson Building, today heavily altered, combined heavy brick side walls with light curtain walls of window ribbons and metal panels on the main faces. The building may have been an unbounded force free from the masonry requirements, but directly struck the limits of the city’s building code.

A New Building Code Opens Possibilities

In 1956, prompted by regional building trade leaders seeking to use new technology, St. Louis Mayor Raymond Tucker initiated an effort to rewrite the city building code.  Deliberations lasted several years, and it was not until March 31, 1961 that Mayor Tucker signed the new code into effect (as ordinance 50502).  The new lengthily-named Revised Code of the City of St. Louis, Vol. II, Enacted Pursuant to Ordinance 50502 permitted curtain walls of glass and finished metal panels to enclose exterior walls.  At long last Miesian commercial buildings could be built in the City of St. Louis, such as the prospective slender Seagram-like tower at “Lewis and Clark Square” – purportedly drawn in part by Washington University architecture faculty -- that would have replaced the Old Post Office had the city successfully implemented the recommendations in A Plan for Downtown St. Louis (1960).

Two modernist buildings followed the enactment of the code and demonstrated the wide range of its potential.  On Lindell Boulevard in the Central West End, the new code allowed architect Charles Colbert to design the proposed DeVille Motor Hotel (completed 1963, now demolished) as an E-shaped building clad in aggregate concrete panels with large glazed window bays between.  The DeVille Motor Hotel, with its white-painted concrete rounded stair and utility towers, showed the influence of Oscar Niemeyer, Edward Durrell Stone and others playing with the International style rather than interpreting it strictly.  

The second major commercial project following the new code was a rather strict embodiment of Miesian design: the 20-story Executive Office Building at 515 Olive Street downtown (1962; NR 11/14/2012).  Designed by the Chicago firm of A. Epstein & Sons, the Executive Office Building presented curtain walls to each of its two street frontages.  The first two floors had wide-span openings between strongly emphasized columns below a grid of glass and metal spandrel panels spaced horizontally by 6” carbon steel I-beams.19 The composition avoided any ornamentation or geometrically differentiated elements; this was strictly perpendicular geometry that echoed S.J. Crown Hall or the Seagram Building. However, the building could well have been an early 20th century commercial block, with its boxy form and sidewalk placement.

Construction of new commercial buildings in 1961 was relatively light in the City of St. Louis compared to St. Louis County.  Concentrations of new Modern Movement buildings would continue to grow Downtown, along Lindell Boulevard between Grand and Kingshighway, in the Mill Creek Valley after clearance was started in 1959, and along Hampton Avenue in south St. Louis.  The Bel Air Motel (NR 5/1/2009; extant) at 4630 Lindell Boulevard, designed by Wilburn McCormick and built in 1957 with additions in 1959 and 1961 is a good example of International style design in one of these concentrations.

The International Style’s Later Influence

A later commercial building embodying the Miesian strain of the International style was the headquarters of Horner-Shifrin Engineering at 5200 Oakland Avenue (1969; extant).  With its raised podium, curtain wall placed behind a dramatic verandah, use of brick for contrast and its generally austere form, this building is definite kindred to the Hamiltonian Federal Savings and Loan Association Building and predecessors. Other architects, including Sarmiento and Schwarz and Van Hoefen, were more hybrid in influence. Schwarz & Van Hoefen’s Optimists’ Club Building (1962) at Lindell and Taylor conjures Oscar Niemeyer, while Sarmiento’s circular Archdiocesean Chancery (1961) one block east engages Edward Durrell Stone’s revolt against purist doctrines.

The apogee of strong International style influence on local commercial architecture can be seen in the two large mixed-use projects that Schwarz & Van Hoefen designed in the late 1960s, the Mansion House Center (built 1967, designed in 1961) and Council Plaza (1965-9), and the Laclede Gas Building (1969). To some extent, the geometry of these projects was outdated by the years of completion. The Schwarz & Van Hoefen projects rely on cubic forms punctuated by counterpoised abstract forms like Mansion House Center’s spired chapel and Council Plaza’s hyperbolic “flying saucer” gas station. These projects’ definitive towers suffer from indistinct articulation, however, and appear derivative of earlier precedents like Lever House at a late moment.

Designed by Emery Roth & Sons, a prolific New York firm which served as associate architect on Minoru Yamasaki’s World Trade Center, the Laclede Gas Building offers a fitting synthetic capstone to local design. Its austere form, curtain wall cladding scored by a pronounced grid, glazed first floor and commanding emphasis on height draw upon nearly every predecessor.  Architect John Randall panned the building as “representative of the anonymous mid-twentieth century Seagrams-cliché,” but these words support a more positive reading of the building as a clear, if not greatly  distinguished, descendant of International style design.20  If the modernism of the International style owes a debt to Louis Sullivan’s primitive skyscraper of the nearby Wainwright Building, the proud and soaring thing at Eighth and Olive streets known as the Laclede Gas Building remains a visual remuneration.

The range of International style commercial buildings in St. Louis confirms architectural historian Kenneth Frampton’s “little more than a convenient phrase denoting a cubistic mode of architecture which had spread throughout the developed world by the time of the Second World War.”21 A building that opens Frampton’s assertion to interrogation is Raymond Maritz’ A.G. Edwards & Sons Building (1970) at Market and Jefferson streets at the center of the Mill Creek Valley urban renewal project.

Critic George McCue favorably noted the building’s “strong definition of a highly visible site.”22 The L-shaped building’s orientation around brick service towers and regimented grids of limestone and large windows carries forth Armstrong’s Magic Chef and McDonnel Douglas Engineering buildings, and meets the generally accepted historic definitions of the International style. Yet the heavy masonry grid could well be read a precursor to the generic strain of Brutalism that permeated interceding corporate design between the years of high modernism and postmodernism. Perhaps the stylistic category remains in the eye of the beholder.

Erstwhile Harris Armstrong offered a capstone to his engagement of the style with the Joseph H. White Building at 1500 Brentwood Boulevard in Brentwood (1965). The $2 million building housed 90,000 square feet of office space in a central tower set atop a wide-span two-story base, with parking concealed behind.23 The White Building is perhaps the most innovative building from this era of local International style quotation, because its sources range from the concrete piers of Luigi Pier Nervi and Oscar Niemeyer to Skidmore Owings & Merrill’s John Hancock Building in San Francisco (1960) rather than the usual local sources. Armstrong’s orientation of the office tower in some ways repeats the Magic Chef Building’s solar orientation and placement of the service core, but the narrow blind ends allows for the curtain walls to unfold as one passes by. From the street, the building is a severe sculptural mass. From an angle or the sides, the walls erupt in a checkerboard curtain wall that is definitely whimsical. The White Building’s checkerboard curtain wall paralleled that of Armstrong’s more massive Richard Bolling Federal Office Building in Kansas City (also 1965).

St. Louis’ International style-influenced buildings spanned the gamut of formal boxes to geometrically experimental forms. In the next two decades, buildings ranging from W.A. Sarmiento’s curving Clayton Federal Building (1962-70) to Hellmuth Obata & Kassabaum’s Equitable Building (1971) and Boatmen’s Tower (1977) continued the teleological reach of the International style’s principles, but without the formal purity. The influence became regional, and could be identified in the Metro East as well as the St. Louis side of the river. Hellmuth Obata & Kassabaum’s campus building designs for Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (1965) and Smith-Entzeroth’s Alton Box Board Company Headquarters (1971; now gravely altered) in Alton are indebted to International style principles of cubic form, massing and fenestration.24

A late coda in the local suite came through Edward Larrabee Barnes’ 20-story 1010 Market Street (1981). Despite its granite cladding (Italian luma pearl white, to be exact), de riguer for the postmodern era but suitable pale to reference Bauhausian and Corbusian white concrete, the office tower formally mimicked International style conventions. The austerity of firm, raised entrance plaza, glazed first floor (at least on the formal elevations), windows ribbons and stark pale mass were inexplicably reverent gestures. Barnes’ double setback of the building corner, however, marked a cheeky jab at the orthodoxies of his predecessors. Nearly a half-century after the comparably diminutive Tums Building was completed a few blocks away, a new downtown building adopted its vocabulary to offer a putative final word to the International style in St. Louis commercial design.

NOTES

1.  William H. Jordy, American Buildings and Their Architects Volume 5: The Impact of European Modernism in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 119.

2. Eric Mumford, “Triumph and Eclipse: Modern Architecture in St. Louis and the School of Architecture,” Modern Architecture in St. Louis: Washington University & Postwar American Architecture, 1948-1973 (St. Louis: Washington University School of Architecture, 2004), p. 43.

2. Robert Sharoff and William Zbaren, American City: St. Louis; Three Centuries of Classic Design (Victoria, Australia: The Images Publishing Group, 2010), p. 89.

3.  Mumford, p. 43.

4.  Mumford, p. 44.

5.  Lawrence S. Lowic, National Register of Historic Places Inventory Form: St. Louis Post-Dispatch Printing Plant Building (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 1984), p. 8.0.

6.  Julie La Mouria, National Register of Historic Places Inventory Form: Farm and Home Savings and Loan Association Building (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 2008), p. 8-11.

7.

8.  Leland Roth, A Concise History of American Architecture (New York: Icon Editions, 1980), p. 277.

9. Mumford, p. 45.

10. Kirk Huffaker, “Falstaff Brewery Headquarters (1956),” Defining Downtown website. Accessed 29 March 2015. <http://www.midcenturybanks.recentpast.org/architecture/featured-buildings/item/53-falstaff-brewery-headquarters-1956>
10.  Roth, p. 284-5.

12.  Mumford, p. 52.

13.  Rex Becker et al., editors, Progress Through Architecture (St. Louis: St. Louis Chapter, American Institute of Architects, 1959), p. 12.

14.  Becker et al., p. 25.

14.  Becker et al., p. 47.

15.  Becker at al., p. 69.

16.  Becker et al., p. 15.

17. Matt Bivens, National Register of Historic Places Registration Form: Executive Office Building (Washington, D.C.: Department of the Interior, 2012), p. 8-9.

18. “New Office Building Completed,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch 1 November 1959.

19. Bivens, p. 8-13.

20. John D. Randall, The Art of the Office Building: Sullivan’s Wainwright Building and the St. Louis Real Estate Boom (Self-published, 1972), p. 53.

21. Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), p. 248.

22. George McCue, The Building Art in St. Louis: Two Centuries (St. Louis: Knight Publishing Company, 1981), p. 64.

23. “Luxurious Look in Brentwood,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 5 March 1965.

24. McCue, pp. 179-180.