Olive West is a densification project adjacent to downtown St. Louis, consisting of a masterplan of town and garden houses. With a collaborative approach in mind, we invited a team of renowned architects to work on the design of the houses, including MOS Architects (USA), Productora (Mexico-USA), and Estudio Macías Peredo (Mexico).
Emily Rauh Pulitzer, philanthropist and founder of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, initiated this project as an attempt to understand the housing typology of this century. Neglected for decades due to its typical single-row, townhouse typology, this neighborhood has been suffocating since St. Louis’ major economic crisis in the 70’s. However, situated among a confluence of residential, commercial, educational, and cultural spaces, it has attracted a booming interest of revival. Named after the street that it revolves around, Olive West recognizes the need for quality housing that predisposes communal development through shared spaces, and aims for more inclusive ways of living.
The masterplan provides a gradient of activity along its length, beginning with the meeting places in and around the rehabilitated historic Wolfner Building, extending eastward to increasingly scattered spaces for communal enjoyment and social gatherings. These spaces are situated between the houses and help blur the boundary between private lots, turning the project into a continuous landscape. The resulting symbiosis of private and communal outdoor spaces is what creates the project’s park-like atmosphere. And, it is the variety of layers of privacy and publicness that make these outdoor spaces comfortable for different kinds of activity.
Historic architectural elements, statues, and large-scale objects were recovered from the National Buildings Arts Center, and placed in the shared gardens. In its new context, they become curious objects of uncertain use, their presence invites incidental interaction, creating an open gallery where each artifact tells the story of the site through its past life.
Our design of Olive West South, a garden house inspired by the traditional dog-trot house, includes a central breezeway to ventilate the adjacent rooms during the hot and humid summers. The massing of the house is perpendicularly stacked to provide shade to the ground-floor porches while creating two modest roof gardens above, doubling the amount of potential usable outdoor living space for the family and creating various possibilities for private and public activities.
