Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe, and scores of others left the Midwest with an enviable architectural legacy. St. Louis, however, was rarely the recipient of the well-known masters’ works. Its architectural treasures were delivered more discreetly by local legends like Harris Armstrong.
Interstate 44 crosses Kingshighway Boulevard in a gritty, industrial area of south St. Louis, Missouri, whisking tens of thousands of commuters each day past an imposing but otherwise unremarkable U-Haul self-storage facility. Drab and boxy, its windows long ago covered with concrete and brown sheet metal, there is nothing about the structure to suggest that it was once one of the most important buildings in St. Louis.
When the building was designed in 1946 by the St. Louis architect Harris Armstrong as a headquarters for the Magic Chef appliance company, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat marveled that its glass façade and whimsical lobby ceiling by the sculptor Isamu Noguchi made it “an outstanding example of contemporary design.” Perhaps it is Armstrong’s misfortune that he did most of his work in St. Louis, a city that sometimes prizes its rich architectural heritage from the late 19th and early 20th centuries at the expense of a small—and dwindling —stock of mid-century-modern structures. Several of Armstrong’s St. Louis creations have been cannibalized, as the Magic Chef building was, or demolished outright to make way for new construction.
But in 1997, when Anne Bergeron and Steve Wellmeier bought a small split-level ranch house in suburban Creve Coeur, Missouri, that Armstrong designed in 1954, they decided to take a different approach. Bergeron and Wellmeier, who were relocating from New York City, were able to look past a half-century of grime and benign neglect to see a low-key jewel. They offered $240,000 for the privilege of restoring it.
For help with the project, Bergeron and Wellmeier turned to Andrew L. W. Raimist, a St. Louis architect who was also working on a book about Armstrong. Starting in the kitchen, Raimist helped Bergeron and Wellmeier brighten what had become a dreary space by installing a beige plastic-laminate countertop. He used black and white automotive paint to give the original metal cabinets a high-gloss sheen. A dowdy fluorescent light fixture proved too costly to remove, so Thomas McGraw, a Washington University architecture student who was working for Raimist at the time, fashioned a V-shaped cover that hid the tubes behind layers of Plexiglas and rice paper.
Downstairs, Raimist fixed a nagging flooding problem and then created what Bergeron calls “the funkiest laundry room on the planet” by hiding the washer and dryer behind a wall of translucent polycarbonate. At Bergeron’s insistence, the tar and gravel on the shallow-pitch roof were removed and replaced with white marble chips, which Armstrong had called for in his original design.
Bergeron says that her first ideas for restoring the house gradually gave way to a more pragmatic approach of preserving certain things and updating others. “We took a preservationist approach but we were somewhat liberal with it,” she says. “Talking with Andy, we just thought, What can we do that’s in keeping with the spirit of the house, and what can we do where we can have a little bit of fun?”
To his surprise, Raimist found that a house he had initially dismissed as one of Armstrong’s less significant works ended up informing his understanding of the architect as much as some of Armstrong’s more celebrated projects, including the Magic Chef building. Typical of Armstrong’s experiments with passive solar design, the home’s functional spaces—the kitchen, bathrooms, and staircase—are grouped along its north side behind a brick wall with glass blocks set into the masonry. On the south side, a cantilevered roof shields large windows from direct sunlight in the summertime, when the sun hangs high in the sky, but allows it to shine through and warm the interior during the winter.
The completion of the project in 2000 coincided with Bergeron and Wellmeier’s return to New York, where Bergeron had been offered a job as a fundraising coordinator at the Guggenheim Museum. They sold the house for under $400,000 to a couple who eventually built a pair of additions totaling some 3,600 square feet, more than tripling its size. And so, sadly, the Bergeron/Wellmeier residence has joined the Magic Chef building on Raimist’s list of Armstrong buildings that have been altered almost beyond recognition.
“I feel that the integrity of the original house is gone and the scale has been completely lost,” Raimist says. “The original house is just kind of overwhelmed by the other things that they’ve done.”
Despite the saga’s disappointing coda, both Raimist and Bergeron have fond memories of restoring the house. In February, Raimist accepted an award for the project on Bergeron and Wellmeier’s behalf from the Missouri Alliance for Historic Preservation. After taking a break to complete an addition to his own house, Raimist is again hard at work on his book about the life and work of Harris Armstrong, preserving at least the memories of the structures, if not Armstrong’s designs themselves.
2 / Armstrong never finished high school. His formal training as an architect was limited to night classes at Washington University, which he took while he was working as a draftsman for the St. Louis architect Louis LeBeaume, and a single year at Ohio State University. He received his architect’s license in 1942 at age 43.
3 / During World War I, Armstrong dropped out of high school and joined the Army Air Service. His lack of formal schooling prevented him from becoming a pilot, so he served out the war as a cook on an army base in Texas. He remained an avid cook for the
rest of his life.
4 / Armstrong met his wife, Louise McClelland, on a commuter train in 1925. The two had been neighbors as children, but McClelland didn’t immediately recognize Armstrong as he chatted excitedly about his architectural work. The couple eloped on New Year’s Day, 1926.
5 / Armstrong spent a few months in the early 1930s in the New York offices of the architect Raymond Hood, but otherwise he lived and worked in the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood. Most of his projects were built in St. Louis and its suburbs, with a few notable exceptions, among them the U.S. consulate in Basra, Iraq.
6 / In 1937, Armstrong won a silver medal at the Paris World’s Fair for an International Style office building in suburban Clayton, Missouri, that he built for orthodontist Leo M. Shanley.
7 / In 1947, Armstrong was among five finalists in the design competition for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial on the St. Louis riverfront. The winner was Eero Saarinen, whose stainless steel Gateway Arch serves as the memorial’s centerpiece. Armstrong was the only St. Louis architect to be selected as a finalist.
8 / When hired to design a $7.5 million engineering campus for McDonnell Douglas near Lambert–St. Louis International Airport, Armstrong parked a rented trailer near his office in Kirkwood to accommodate the temporary help he’d hired.
9 / Armstrong was a prolific writer of letters to the editor on matters ranging from churches to car design. More than 50 of them were published in St. Louis news-papers during his lifetime.
10 / Armstrong, who retired in 1969, passed away in 1973.
