Top: The Fumihiko Maki-designed Kemper Art Museum features Olafur Eliasson's Your Imploded View (2001), a 600-pound aluminum sphere that swings like a pendulum from the atrium's vaulted ceiling. Below: The Kemper Art Museum.

When Jane Maxfield, associate director of Viva Vox Arts Mentoring, recently brought a group of at-risk teens to the new Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, it was the first time some had ever set foot in a museum.

"They were very engaged with the work and responded to it. They had a primary experience with art, able to actually see works and how tactile the works are," Maxfield says. "They had a very positive experience. It's nice to have the support of Washington University and the museum."

The Viva Vox students represent but a small fraction of the community groups and other visitors flooding into the museum. Since its opening in October 2006, it has averaged some 1,000 weekly visitors, according to Michael Murawski, the museum's coordinator of education and public programs. Those visitors include grade school and high school students, church groups and other organizations, classes and individuals, who come for panel discussions, performances, artist talks, and to view the art and architecture. And they have a lot to see.

"We were extremely fortunate to have a world-class architect, Fumihiko Maki, to design a building for one of the finest university art collections in the country," says Carmon Colangelo, dean of the Sam Fox School and the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts. "It's a facility fitting the level and stature of the collection."

The School's five-building, $56.8 million complex also features Maki's new Earl E. and Myrtle E. Walker Hall. Like the museum, Walker Hall is defined by its open, flexible floor plan and abundant natural light. Ceramics, woodworking, and metalworking facilities are located on the main floor, with undergraduate sculpture studios on the lower level. The upper level features undergraduate painting as well as the interdisciplinary Nancy Spirtas Kranzberg Studio for the Illustrated Book.

These buildings are contributing to a cultural and artistic renaissance in the St. Louis community, says Colangelo, and extending Washington University's community presence. "We're aspiring to bring more people in from the community, to expand educational programs and special exhibitions for school children and high school students, so they understand the context of contemporary art," he says.

That enhanced understanding can be witnessed in the experience of Nerinx Hall High School humanities students who visited Reality Bites, an exhibit of post-Berlin Wall German avant-garde art that was organized by museum director and curator Sabine Eckmann.

"Reality Bites really struck them," says Lori Hunt, Nerinx Hall aesthetic education coordinator. "It made his-tory seem real to them and helped them understand a place in time in a way they hadn't thought about."

Eckmann concurs: "By throwing a sharp focus on the real life around us, this art can spark thinking, feeling, and acting freely, warding off self-imposed or external censorship." In addition to the Reality Bites exhibit, Hunt also praised the thematic arrangement of museum art and the knowledgeable docents--students who act as museum guides.

"It was wonderful for students to see landscapes or portraits from different eras, and so helpful for high school students to see how styles and techniques change," says Hunt, "which the docents hit on."

That art-viewing experience is further enhanced by the new 65,000-square-foot, limestone-clad museum, which triples the previous exhibition space at Steinberg Hall. The new space is ideally suited for displaying large-scale and new-media work. "Maki's interiors are informed by a modernist sensibility, which he realizes through a proportional application of grids and geometric forms," Eckmann says.

A central barrel-vaulted atrium is flanked by curtain-wall glass entrances. The Ebsworth Special Exhibitions Gallery and the College of Art Gallery feature 25-foot ceilings with generous skylights and banks of windows. A floating limestone grand staircase takes visitors up to the Bernoudy Permanent Collection Gallery, also marked by large skylights. And an elevated 5,000-square-foot plaza extends the museum's exhibition space outdoors. Colangelo says Maki's work at the Sam Fox School can help inspire and engage the community in the art, architecture, and design worlds.

"His designs are innovative and inspirational," Colangelo says. "In many ways they exemplify our own aspirations and our vision for the future of design and the visual arts."

That inspirational aspect already can be seen in the Kemper experience of a 14-year-old Viva Vox student, whom Maxfield describes as "having a lot of challenges but gifted."

After gazing without apparent interest on the works of French painters, she stopped in front of a collage by the late American artist Romare Bearden--transfixed, says Maxfield. "She said, 'This ... this is what I want to do.'"

Rebuilding New Orleans and St. Louis

John Hoal, associate professor of architecture .

New Orleans and St. Louis have much in common: the Mississippi River, French heritage, and major shifts in population--the former suddenly, with Hurricane Katrina, the latter gradually, through 50 years of urban decline and decay. But John Hoal is working to revitalize and rebuild both cities by capitalizing on unique attributes that each possesses.

"We're trying to develop a confidence in people that you can rebuild New Orleans," says Hoal, associate professor of architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, "and tying that to improved safety."

His firm, H3 Studio Inc., one of five selected from a national field of 65 to develop the Unified New Orleans Plan, had primary responsibility for the renowned Garden District and Central City, a heavily damaged predominantly African-American neighborhood, as well as the Lower 9th Ward, the most devastated area within New Orleans. The firm's project team included Derek Hoeferlin, affiliate assistant professor of architecture in the Sam Fox School, Laura Lyon, GA00, Bryan Taylor Robinson, GA04, Jess Garz, LA06, Tyler Survant, LA06, Sam Caplan, LA06, Peter Elsbeck, graduate student in architecture, and Hillary Petrie, LA06. The H3 Studio plans now are being incorporated into the city's rebuilding efforts, Hoal says.

Hoal and Hoeferlin also taught a pair of traveling studios in New Orleans for Sam Fox urban design and architecture students. Brian Michener, architecture graduate student, went to New Orleans with Hoal last winter as part of a semester-long urban design studio to assess conditions along the riverfront in the Lower 9th Ward, where he saw an opportunity to create a park at the levee to help lure residents back.

However, Michener says helping revive New Orleans is "immensely complicated." Hoal agrees. "The community is facing overwhelming odds," Hoal says. "Some people aren't coming back, but new people will come in, though no one can predict its size or how the city will become. But we're working to keep its uniqueness. New Orleans has fabulous architecture, but New Orleans is really about a kind of spirit."

Similarly, Hoal's work in St. Louis seizes on singular assets--such as Forest Park, an architecturally significant Downtown, the antebellum Lafayette Square neighborhood, and the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers--to drive revitalization.

"These are special and unique areas," Hoal says. "We're taking the old infrastructure, upgrading it, and making desirable places to live, work, and play."

While the St. Louis region grew dramatically in the latter half of the 20th century, the core city lost half a million people, shrinking from a population of 860,000 in 1950 to its present 360,000. But now people are moving back, lured by urban assets in neighborhoods such as Downtown. There, Hoal's recovery plan incorporates a mix of housing and commercial uses.

Big Read yields big returns

Jewell Thomas (right), a freshman in Arts & Sciences, and Danika Cooper (in white shirt), AR07, docents at the Kemper Art Museum, explain to University City High School students how art can support the concept of freedom of thought.

Students from St. Louis public schools and elsewhere viewed the Kemper Art Museum's Reality Bites exhibit, avant-garde art from Germany created after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as part of The Big Read.

A nationwide National Endowment for the Arts community reading project, The Big Read encourages communities to read and discuss a single book.

The program focused on Ray Bradbury's science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451, which portrays a society built on book-burning, censorship, and numbness to life. Big Read events were produced by the Department of English in Arts & Sciences and the Office of Govern-mental and Community Relations, in partnership with many local organizations. More than 12,000 people attended 50 public events.