This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, April 18, 2011 - When Minoru Yamasaki's Lambert air terminal opened in St. Louis in 1956, travelers and architects alike recognized it as a singular accomplishment, embodying in its weightless vaults and sleek detailing the very spirit of air travel -- the chic sense of belonging to the jet-set, the heady elan of taking to the sky, the future as experienced now.
Ian Monroe's Currents exhibit at the St. Louis Art Museum is an equally impressive accomplishment, for it reformulates Yamasaki's bracing modernist design in a series of works that allow us to appreciate it anew.
Employing vinyl on acrylic, Monroe has made a series of sleek, nearly abstract paintings depicting Lambert from a variety of perspectives, including the architectural design process, the heavy traffic on opening day, the views of the jet engines and the excitement of preparing to launch.
Monroe's color scheme derives from a Harry Bertoia metallic screen that formerly graced Lambert's terminal -- and has mysteriously disappeared. Indeed, Monroe's entire enterprise -- the paintings and the sparkling central sculpture, "ambassadors club," which recreates a sense of the chic design and cocktail-spiked glamor of TWA's early days -- works like a haunting reprise of a lost time when traveling by air was chic and exhilarating, in stark contrast to the brute annoyance and crass mundanity that characterizes the process today.
We still have Yamasaki's Lambert terminal, but who stops to appreciate it fully anymore?
Monroe, who as a Washington University undergraduate passed through its sparkling spaces more times than he can likely remember, was impressed enough to do something about it, and to remind us to slow down and breathe in the glorious, promise-filled past.
Ivy Cooper, a professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, is the Beacon art critic.