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Dec 10, 2023

The Flower of Forest Park: Innovation in Architecture

Author’s note: This article contains architectural terminology. For clarity, a brief glossary of terms can be found at the end. Erupting above the tree line of Forest Park in the historic city of St.

Author’s note: This article contains architectural terminology. For clarity, a brief glossary of terms can be found at the end.

Erupting above the tree line of Forest Park in the historic city of St. Louis is something remarkable and beautiful—a skyscraper of a new kind—One Hundred Above the Park. Thirty-six stories of shimmering glass and aluminum, the new residential tower sticks out from the architectural morass of the Central West End neighborhood like a spaceship in an impound lot. It’s not just a flashy oddity, though: One Hundred has something to teach us about the history of skyscraper design, the future of apartment design, and the philosophy behind great new architecture.

The building, designed by Studio Gang and completed in 2021, has stunning views of the city and world-class amenities, but what makes it revolutionary is its canted (outward leaning) glass facade design.

Most apartment blocks consist of identical floor plates stacked vertically upon one another, but the floors of One Hundred get larger as they go up, and then every fourth floor shrinks back to expose an open rooftop balcony. The result is a building that branches and bursts from itself like the blooms of a stalk flower. It is striking in photos and mind-bending from the sidewalk. More important, though, are the ways this simple design idea improves tenants’ quality of life and creates one of the most individualistic apartment complexes in the world.

Interestingly, this is not the first time that St. Louis has been home to a design breakthrough in architectural facades. Some 130 years before One Hundred opened, now-legendary architecture firm Adler and Sullivan opened the Wainwright Building in St. Louis’s downtown, which became known as the father of the modern skyscraper. Every breakthrough in architecture has technological and artistic components. In the Wainwright Building’s case, the technological component was the steel frame, and the artistic breakthrough was the slender, illuminated brick piers that wrap and decorate it while allowing maximum space for windows. In the case of One Hundred, the technological component is the cantilevered concrete floor slabs and the “curtain wall” glass that clips onto them. The artistic breakthrough is Studio Gang’s canted and scalloped facade design, which takes advantage of those technologies to allow the building’s tenants a unique kind of exposure to views and sunlight.

Wainwright photo credit: STL From Above. One Hundred photo credit: Mac Properties.

It’s important to note that cantilevered concrete floor slabs and glass curtain walls have been used heavily for decades. What’s new here is the specific application that capitalizes on them.

One Hundred would have been impossible to build with more conventional rigid masonry because bricks can’t be stacked leaning outward. Similarly, Wainwright would have been impossible with the then-conventional stone block construction because bulky load-bearing stone would have crowded out the windows and taken too much interior space. These examples illustrate the synergistic relationship between technology and artistic expression. Even in the classical orders of ancient Greece, technical innovation was the engine of aesthetic achievement. The proportions and shapes that neoclassicists re-create today were once derived from the physical material capabilities of stone and wood.

A building is more than its facade and structure, though—it must marry these elements with its central purpose, and at One Hundred, that purpose is to provide its residents an exceptional home. Studio Gang achieved this on three fronts: complexity, connectivity, and views.

For complexity, consider the floor planning. Not only do the floor plan sizes change from floor to floor, but almost all the individual unit windows are turned toward the south, along the scalloped and angled wall. The result is a building in which every apartment is effectively a corner unit, and every perspective is unique. In a world of basic, uniform, boxy apartments, One Hundred facilitates a level of complexity and individuality in its floor plan rarely (if ever) seen in high-rise residential construction.

Credit: Mac Properties

The next front of innovation is social connectivity. How do you enhance people’s ability to get to know their neighbors and be part of a community without compromising their privacy? The strategy at One Hundred is threefold: First, provide generous and beautiful central amenities (pool, gym, garden, game room) to all tenants to incentivize oscillating movement to and from the units; second, extend the balcony spaces to meet those of neighboring units to encourage interactions and horizontal movement between neighbors; and third, use the floor-plan variations to incentivize vertical movement between floors. Because each apartment is different from the ones above and below it, the balcony tenants can host events in the spring and summer, and the upper units have larger living rooms to entertain year-round. Whether you’re moving in and out, side to side, or up and down through the building, One Hundred’s unique architecture makes the space much more rewarding to explore than a typical apartment block.

The final front of One Hundred’s innovative design is its attention to views. Not only do the units boast dramatic floor-to-ceiling glass, but because of the corner unit effect and the canted facade whose windows lean out, the visual effect is like flying on land. The view from the upper units focuses not simply outward at the St. Louis skyline but also downward to its streets and gardens. Each unit provides views in two directions at once, giving varying vantages as you walk around the room instead of a single picture frame.

These three fronts—innovation, complexity, connectivity, and stunning views—are a step into the future of apartment design. The competitive edge in residential architecture is no longer a serviceable unit that meets basic physical needs but a unit that enables new heights of flourishing.

Here, One Hundred has room for improvement. The balconies, for all their novelty, are too narrow to make a good recreational space, and because all that stands between you and the street below is a sheet of glass that leans outward, they can be uncomfortable even to stand on in high winds. The horizontal connectivity between balconies was also not fully executed, with a bar guard to provide a sort of half privacy, when what was really needed was an operable gate. Some notching of the floor plan, a slight increase in the guardrail height, and a simple railing to lean against could easily double the effective usable space on the balconies in future designs. A similar notching of the ground floor combined with some additional facade or landscape features would have made the building more interesting to pedestrians. Instead, the ground floor’s aluminum cladding is decidedly bare, monolithic, and unengaging. Last, although the building’s common spaces and exterior have a striking and consistent modern aesthetic, and the floor plans do wonders to break up the monotony of standard residential units, the finishes and details inside the units are surprisingly monochrome and bog standard, saying to the tenants, “We gave you the outward views, but the inward views are up to you.”

Though the building has both highlights and shortcomings, a broader philosophic significance to One Hundred stands regardless: Form follows values. Some say that a building’s design should be traditional and pay homage to the past. One Hundred says, “Here is an homage to the future.” Others say that housing should be made to cost as little as possible. One Hundred says, “Here is a lifestyle worth its premium.” Still others say that architecture should have a minimal environmental impact. But as the sun sets in autumn, and the canted glass facade bounces the waning light and orange leaves down toward the fields and pathways of Forest Park, One Hundred says, “Here is a building that doesn’t just impact its environment—but revolutionizes it.”

With every major artistic and technological feature, One Hundred Above the Park is a building that does not cower and compromise but, rather, reaches for new heights. In this regard, let us hope that, like the Wainwright Building before it, One Hundred is just a beginning.

A cantilever is an element (such as a beam or floor slab) that is attached on one end, with the other end projecting out (usually horizontally) into space.

A canted element is one that slopes or tilts at an oblique angle.

A scalloped element is one that jogs in and out along a plane, creating a pattern of inside and outside corners.

A pier is a vertical rectangular element used to surround a column or to serve as a divider between spaces.

A curtain wall is a wall that is suspended on clips from a structural frame such that it bears no direct load onto the ground.

Seamus is a lead draftsman at ERDMAN (Healthcare Architecture), and an architectural designer of experimental buildings. His goal is to create the best buildings possible to our age by mastering the philosophy which underlies good design. He has completed an internship with Objective Standard Institute.