Project Study

Brandon Roos

Ball State University

Landscape Architecture Department

LA 480_Unit 02

The selected images came from the design competition for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial.  MVVA won the competition.  The project site encompasses the parkways surrounding the St. Louis Arch in St. Louis, Missouri.  This park is roughly 100 acres, straddling the Mississippi River.  Various important contextual elements surround the arch.  Extending from the site is the mall in St. Louis (a strip of linear parks running through the city), the city’s central business district (CBD) is west of the site, and the landing (strip of old, historic businesses) in St. Louis is located just north.

One important aspect of the site is its proximity to the Mississippi River.  The site’s current design subtlety pays homage to the large flood which engulfed much of the city in 1993.  The significance of this is the bank leading down to the river is steep with a significant drop in elevation.  Beside the edge leading down to the river, must of the site is fairly flat.  MVVA decided to treat the river’s edge as a celebration space for pedestrian visitors.  It is currently centered on vehicles, with a wide road running along the river’s edge.  This new design limits vehicular traffic, giving way to plaza space for community events and festivals, which complements the site’s culture.  It is very much a celebration space, receiving much of its use from festivals and visitors coming to town for different sporting events.

Michael Van Valkenbergh’s firm stems out of Dan Kiley and Peter Walker’s work.  It begins to form new urbanistic approaches to design which look at ecological dynamism.  The project incorporates a naturalistic feel to the site, allowing visitors to get close to nature.  By this, MVVA incorporates ponds and prairie sections into the design with paths running through them.

The first image is a conceptual master plan for the site.  It was largely created with Photoshop, but the line work came from AutoCAD.  They placed a filter over an aerial photo to make it secede into the background.  Some line work was omitted from the project to keep certain elements from getting too busy.  The bridges over the Mississippi, for example, were simply cut out of the image, giving them the same grey filter used over the rest of the project.  From there, they placed a shadow on the image to make it stand out. 

The second image is the site’s money-shot.  It is a computer rendered perspective from the design which captures what the site is about.  It was largely created in Photoshop.  The designer used various techniques to add some realism to certain aspects of the image.  To add depth to the plants, an image would be duplicated, offset slightly, and the contrast would be manipulated.  The background is usually a photograph which is set in the image, and the arch is done in Photoshop also.  The designer pays less attention to detail as you get to the background of the image.

The third image shows viewers the ecology of the site.  You see plantings of wild grasses with a pond in the background.  Viewers have the ability to experience these natural elements because paths lead them right through these ecological elements.  Similar to the second image, this one was created largely through Photoshop.  They used the same techniques, but additionally, the water was brushed over to make it reflect the image’s backdrop.

The final image is a section combined with two diagrams.  It shows viewers how a sound buffer will be implemented within the site.  The diagrams are created in Photoshop, but the outline was imported from a section-cut of a model.  The idea of the section is to keep it simple, making it easier to read.  The graphs still correlate well with each other.

Works Cited

Ching, Frank. Architectural Graphics. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1975. Print.

"Jefferson Nat'l Expansion Memorial." Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc. N.p., 2012. Web. 24 Jan. 2013.