Des Peres City Hall

Architect: Patterhn Ives
Construction Manager: Navigate Building Solutions
General Contractor: Aspire Construction Services
Structural Engineer: KPFF
Civil Engineer: Civil Design Inc.
MEP Engineer: McClure Engineering
Location: Des Peres, MO

The back of a 1936 Lutheran orphanage is now the front of Des Peres City Hall. It has an old formal front facing Manchester Avenue and a service side at the rear. Over the years, parking was expanded on the service side until the rear became the de facto entrance. Rather than restore the original hierarchy and send visitors around to the original front door, the renovation formalizes the inversion, twice over. A regraded sloping plaza delivers visitors from the parking area into what was the 1930s basement. Now this is the public ground floor of city government, with its Public Works counter, Municipal Court, and restrooms. Accessibility, which is often shoehorned into historic buildings, becomes the main idea of the arrival sequence: the slope, the terraces, and a threshold now oriented toward the public park that was once the orphanage's grounds.