06.23.24
Schlafly Library, St. Louis, MO.

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Amy Scherer is an architect who worked with Bob Cassilly on Cementland and City Museum.

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Daniil:

Could you share a little about what you do?

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Amy Scherer:

My name's Amy. I am an architect. I've been working in the field, oh golly, for over 20 years now. It's not my first career, but that's the career that I'm happy to have settled into. Now my work is not nearly as interesting as it had been, but I work as an in-house designer for a design and construction firm. I really enjoy solving problems with design and space. I've been there going on six years. And prior to that, I've worked in a lot of different firms, doing just all scopes and scales: super large scale like senior living and super small scale like tiny restaurants. And usually I get the weird projects. I'm a little more off the wall than some folks. So I get little oddball projects or things that require a little more bird-dogging. It's really rewarding work and I'm glad to still be at it.

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Daniil:

And has that all been in St. Louis?

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Amy Scherer:

For the most part. With the work that I do now, I travel all over the country. I have buildings that I've designed, in Texas, Mississippi, Florida, Washington State, Chicago, and just all over.

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Daniil:

Did you go to school here?

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Amy Scherer:

I did. I went to Washington University, both undergrad and grad. My undergraduate was not in architecture. I actually had thought that I was going to be an engineer and finished the program, worked at it for five years and realized that was not where I needed to be. I went back to school and got my master's in architecture at WashU as well.

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Daniil:

How did you get involved with Cementland?

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Amy Scherer:

It was totally luck of the draw, honestly. At the time, I was working for a very small firm called M Squared Architecture, and they were a very small outfit on Washington Avenue. So we were just a couple blocks down from City Museum. Bob had been working with another firm, and I guess he wasn't happy with how things were going and their availability and their turnaround time.

And this was right after the big 2008 crash. So I had actually been working at a firm before; I got laid off and I got picked up by these guys in the fall of 2008. Bob had been working with an engineer who had worked with us. His name is Ron Fisher. Ron's amazing. When I last talked to him a year ago, he was in his eighties and still working.

Ron came in, and I happened to not have anything on my desk. And so they're like, "Hey, Amy, you got some bandwidth?" I'm like, "Yeah." So Ron's like, "Do I have a project for you."

Actually, it wasn't Cementland at first, but it was Bob still working on projects at the [City] Museum. And so the first project we did together was putting the ferris wheel on the roof. I remember going in there and seeing the crew all rough and tumble, and feeling a little intimidated. And I knew of Bob, but I didn't really know him. And all these larger than life figures. And then Ron, being Ron who can talk to anybody, introduced me. And then we go upstairs, and everybody turns to eyeball me to make sure this is going to work out.

But it was great. Launched right into it. The thing with most of Bob's projects, including Cementland, is that it was usually more forensic architecture than it was drawing ahead of time and building later. He was very much of the mind of asking for forgiveness, not permission. And so he'd work until he'd get a stop work order, and then we'd make permit drawings out of what had been built. And then Ron would engineer 'em up so that the numbers would work, and we'd submit them. The numbers always worked. I'm not saying that he did anything false because Bob and the crew of artisans always had a great sense of structure. If anything, everything was overbuilt by 10 times. Ron would run the calculation, structurally speaking, and I would draw the drawings. And we would submit them for permit, and then we could move along. That was the process starting there.

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Daniil:

Can you elaborate a little bit on the forensic architecture aspects of it?

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Amy Scherer:

Basically, you're documenting what was already done. And then you talk to the crew and say, "Oh hey, Leif, what kind of weld did you put on this?" Or, "What kind of bolts did you stick this together with?" Or, "What's the diameter of the material?" Because everything is found objects.

And that's the other thing—it's used, found stuff. And so it might not be standard building materials that you can get off the shelf at Home Depot. So you have to measure it, draw it, and then you have to go to the tables and try to figure out, what's the loading of this thing? Will this hold all this stuff? There's a lot of rules of thumb about how much stuff a one inch fillet weld will hold.

So there's a lot of documenting and then going back and reverse engineering to say, "Yes, this is structurally stable. This is fine." And if there was any question about what we could and couldn't see about how things were put together, then we'd actually just do load tests and put barrels of water on it to figure out the maximum load and show that it would hold up.

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Daniil:

I imagine it must've been a little tricky putting stuff on the City Museum roof and then trying to make sure it's structurally sound.

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Amy Scherer:

Well, this whole adventure on the roof started before I was with Bob, but Ron Fisher had been working with him forever. I think even when Bob had bought that building, Ron was working with him. And one of the first things he wanted to do is put that bus up there. That bus was supposed to move and not be static, but of course things that move require maintenance. And so that was a thing that somebody advised him wisely against. Although all the hydraulic stuff is still there. If you look under the bus, the springs and the hydraulics—it's all there. It's just disconnected and frozen in place.

So it started there, and because he wanted to put the bus on the roof, Ron actually did an existing condition load calculation based on what information they had. Obviously, the building is probably stronger than what is documented, just because he documented based on if the concrete had no reinforcing. But everything is reinforced to the nth degree in there. There's probably more steel than there is concrete in that building.

That was the first thing that happened. They had a pretty good sense that you could put a lot of stuff on that roof, and then stuff started getting added to the roof. So by the time I had gotten involved in the project, the dome and the praying mantis were already up there. I think they just put the slides in. They had not done all the landscaping, the ponds and all that yet. And we were working on putting the ferris wheel up there and expanding that area. And then the next project after that was a climber. If you go inside of the dome, there's this whole climber that you can climb to different levels. That was the next project that we did and documented and drew.

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Daniil:

And how did the transition from City Museum to Cementland happen?

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Amy Scherer:

I think Bob was losing interest with City Museum, and I think he was also getting a little frustrated with having to work in the confines of that space. His ideas were always so much bigger than what anybody could imagine. So he had already started working on Cementland before I got involved working at the City Museum. He would bounce back and forth between the two, but focusing more and more time on Cementland as time went.

So he had me come out there, and I'm trying to remember what the first thing was that we were working on. I think it had something to do with the bridge and the silos. He had mounded all this dirt up against the silos. And then we were going to design some paths and stairways, and I think a bridge.

So that was the first foray out there. Just mucking around out there, marching up along all these mounds, and going through all these buildings. Then he handed me this drawer, which was all the microfiche. Cementland had been, obviously, a cement plant, so they had documented every single building, every single project that they had done out there as engineering drawings that had been put on microfiche. And I think it was a civil engineer who either had the equipment or had the connection of somebody who had the equipment to take those microfiche drawings and actually print them out to a size that you could read something off of. So there were reams and reams of that paper that came my way.

So some of it was just documenting what was there. And then as time went on, things got more ambitious as far as like, "Oh, we're going to put a water slide over here, and we're going to put a skate park in the bottom of the clinker building." There were a lot of things that were going on there. They put the turtle building together. We did that one.

And the interesting thing about that property is that it's split between St. Louis City and Riverview. And that worked in his favor, because he'd work in St. Louis until he'd get a stop work order, and then I'd work on drawings to try to catch up with whatever he had a stop work order on. And then he'd move over to Riverview, and then he'd work over there until he got a stop work order over there. So he bounced back and forth just to keep projects moving along, and I was trying to keep up with drawings. And he was really focusing a lot more energy and time and creativity out there, because it was just such a much bigger palette to play with.

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Daniil:

So would you say your role was mostly drawing and documenting the existing plant and the structures that they were putting out? Or were you also taking part in the design of stuff that they were building?

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Amy Scherer:

The design almost always was just Bob. It was some input of the crew, but mostly Bob. He had the vision. He actually had a model, which I have a picture of somewhere, of what his overall idea of the whole property was going to be. And he'd get little fascinations about things or creatures or shapes or processes that sometimes he'd throw in there. But generally, he was holding fairly true to the idea of what that large scale landscape model was.

A lot of it was him just pushing around dirt and sculpting it into forms that he wanted to be this grand, almost Mesoamerican creative thing out there. But also he was all about the near death experience. And a lot of the things out there were designed to give you this intense sense of fear as you were experiencing them. There were these bridges that felt like they were going to fall apart, and there were these very high things. Obviously, they were all safe and had railings and what have you.

We tried, as much as we could, to draw things before he built them. But that didn't always happen, because he just wanted to keep going. And sometimes, my workload was such that I couldn't keep up. 

We had a whole process of communicating, because he definitely didn't communicate in normal ways. So he'd say, "Hey, Amy, come in. We're going to talk about this project." Okay, well, what area are we going to be working on? And he's like, "Ahh we're going to be working on this area." Okay. So I'd bring prints of what I had as far as any existing documentation, whether it was microfiche or it was something I'd already drawn. I'd take that out there, print it as large as I could on our plotter.

And he mumbled. I mean, you could never understand what the hell he was saying. So you had to lean in really close to understand what he was saying. And I had a couple different colors of pens. I'd give him one color pen, and then I'd have a color pen. And he'd be doing his big sketches on the paper and mumbling, and we'd be like, "Okay, so what you're saying is this." So I'd write it down in words in my color pen or sketch a little more specifically what he was talking about. "Is this what you're talking about?" "Aha, aha, yeah, yeah." Then he'd mumble some more and sketch.

So when we were getting through something that hadn't been built yet, that was pretty much the process. Then I would flush it out and make sure it met code, and I'd tuck it back and forth with Ron. And we were always using these bits and pieces that were salvaged from wherever; he had quite the storehouse of stuff. It was like, "Well, this is the span that we're doing. What do you got in your attic?" And we go through like, "Well, we need at least this big of an I-beam or something to support this thing." So it was mostly his vision with us collaborating to make sure that it could work in reality.

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Daniil:

Were Bob and Ron the people you were working with mainly, or were you interacting with other crew folks too?

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Amy Scherer:

The crew were always around. Obviously, he always had the vision, but they executed a lot of it at the end of the day. So they would always offer input. Of course, Bob always got to overrule them.

He had a couple of really trusted people that had been working with him for a long time. So Mary, the welder, and Kurt and Ricky and Bobby, they had a longstanding relationship. So I think they could raise questions and have artistic input, because they had worked together and could add to that vision and how to execute it. So I interacted with all those guys. As I mentioned, my first meeting, I was really intimidated by this band of Merry Misfits. And now I would like to say that these are my closest friends, just amazing humans.

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Daniil:

We heard that Kurt Knickmeyer was part of a lot of the design decisions, as far as figuring out construction for some of Bob's sketches. Did you guys work together much?

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Amy Scherer:

Yeah, especially later after Bob passed, unfortunately. Obviously, there was a bit of a hiatus on anything, but I think Kurt really started taking up that creative role, and I worked with him a lot then. Less so, I would say, when Bob was still alive.

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Daniil:

And did you start at Cementland around 2010?

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Amy Scherer:

No, it was 2008 when I first started working with Bob at the City Museum, and it was probably just a few months after that we transitioned over to Cementland more and more. And there were still projects at the Museum. All of that forest that is now downstairs on the first floor—I documented and drew all of that. Had to come up with a standard tree mounting detail, a funny thing there. So every once in a while there'd still be stuff at the museum, and I think that would also be in the winters, when the weather was not really conducive to mucking around on a bulldozer.

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Daniil:

And were you there on site a lot?

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Amy Scherer:

Oh yeah. Especially when we were kicking off a new project, or if there was any question about verifying anything. I was out there quite a bit.

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Daniil:

Did they have a little office space there or something?

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Amy Scherer:

They had sort of a base of operations. I wouldn't really call it an office. I don't even know if it was really 100% closed. But they did have a shed that had electric, and where they stored a lot of the equipment. And there might've been a desk or a table there. Mostly we didn't stay in there though. It was a lot of trumping around and pointing and waving at things and sketching and talking.

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Daniil:

Could you walk us through a typical workday? Was there a fixed schedule?

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Amy Scherer:

No, it was 100% at Bob's whim. But it was never weekends or anything like that. He was always very respectful of the fact that we all had lives outside of the workday. But I'd come to  the office around nine o'clock, and I'd get a phone call, "Hey, I want to work on this thing. You got some time to come over?" I'm like, "Yep." So I jump in my car and drive up to Cementland down Hall Street and then Riverview Drive. He's like, "I'm over by the clinker building." Okay. I'd wander around and find him out there, and he'd be in the middle of something; he wouldn't be waiting for me. Then we'd start our mumble conversation, sketch, and whatever the new project was.

Typically, I'd stay out there for a couple hours just to get a gist of what was going on and if anything needed to be further field verified. And then I'd run back to the office and start drawing on it. We did it all on the computer. At the time, it was mostly CAD. Later, we actually started using 3D programs to document stuff.

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Daniil:

And were you interacting with city officials a lot?

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Amy Scherer:

Oh yeah. Ron and I both tag teamed that. Ron always joked that he was older than dirt, but being the elder statesman, he had a very long standing relationship with a lot of the folks that were in the city. So often, he would go in with me just to smooth the wheels a little bit. He knew one of the guys we always talked to. So Ron would have this whole conversation before we could even sit down and talk about the project, but that was kind of the way to do business there.

But yeah, I was down in the city and there were two officials that I worked with the most down there for those projects. They knew who I was and why I was there. And even if everything was perfect, they'd still have to find something to mark up, and then I'd have to come back and do it again. It was a known process.

We would always have Bob review what we were talking about. He'd just look over and say, “Yeah, that's what I was getting at." Will this get through the city—usually that's the big question. So once he gave his blessing on it, then we would go to the city. There was a standing relationship, and they knew who we were. And I think as time went on, the city officials really appreciated the City Museum, despite the fact that it seemed like they were always trying to work outside the bounds. They knew what a value it was to the city. There were no blind eyes turned, but I think they understood that we were operating with a lot of creative license, and I think that they at least were flexible enough to deal with that.

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Daniil:

So do you think that the City Museum cred carried over to them being a little bit more lenient with Cementland?

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Amy Scherer:

A little bit. I think they knew Bob, and so that was a plus and minus. They knew what Bob was capable of, and that if this thing ever came to fruition, it would be a great thing for that area. It's not in the really hard part of the North Side, but it's still not very populated, and there's not a lot going on up there except for the riverfront. Whether or not the residents up there would like it, I don't know. But I'm sure that the cities would. As far as Riverview, it would be great revenue and great publicity. So I think that was the positive. But they also knew Bob in the negative, in that he could be combative. He often tried to get away with as much as he could before anybody would stop him. And so it was a balancing act that I know they had to play, and we had to play.

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Daniil:

And were you in conversation with Riverview officials too?

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Amy Scherer:

Yeah. Not nearly as much as the city, partially because I also did work for the City Museum, so there was just proportionally more of a load down there. And I think that the portion of the property that's in St. Louis City is a little larger than what was in Riverview.

And then we also designed some stuff at the riverfront. I can't remember if it ever came to fruition. He owned that piece of property right on the river, where there was a big barge dock as well. So we were working on some big fence designs there, but I don't know if they ever got built.

But yeah, the Riverview officials basically had a double wide trailer as their City Hall. So it was a little bit of a different process than working with St. Louis City.

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Daniil:

How was it different?

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Amy Scherer:

In some ways, because it's a much smaller municipality, they were probably trying to be a little more strict. But at the same time, it was both strict and loose. So I don't know, just different.

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Daniil:

So what sort of city offices were involved in approving everything by code and all?

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Amy Scherer:

Generally, we only worked with the Building Department in either municipality. Because everything that we were doing at the moment, especially at Cementland, was nowhere close to running power or plumbing or anything like that. It was just straight up the Building Department. And because of where we were, we were outside of Cultural Resources, so we didn't have to worry about any of the historic stuff. It was just Tim Klaus and Ron, those were the two guys that I worked with the most out of the city.

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Daniil:

We spoke to someone from the Chain of Rocks area who runs an organization there called CORCA.

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Liz:

It's kind of like a community "keep the neighborhood beautiful" commission, where they pick up trash and plant stuff.

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Daniil:

And she was telling us that Bob hosted at least one town hall meeting for Chain of Rocks folks at Cementland. Do you remember any of that?

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Amy Scherer:

I'm not sure when that happened, but I don't recall being invited to any of those if they happened when I was working with them.

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Daniil:

So would you talk to people from Chain of Rocks or Riverview outside of those official meetings at all, or would they ever come to the site?

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Amy Scherer:

Not really. I mean, I think that there were always curiosity seekers that were more like, "What's going on here? Why are there cement truck rear ends sticking up out of the ground?" But I can't recall dealing with any public outside of just getting it done. And I don't know when those meetings would've occurred, because he'd been working on that project for some years before I got involved. He'd had that property, and I don't know if he just started messing with it or if he tried to get engagement from the community before that happened. But unfortunately, I only got three good years of working with him before the accident. So that was towards the later part of what was going down at Cementland.

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Daniil:

You said earlier that the city officials were maybe somewhat enthusiastic about Cementland, because it would've been a revenue generator, but you mentioned that you're not sure if local residents generally would've been as into the project. Could you speak more on that?

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Amy Scherer:

Knowing that neighborhood up there, it's pretty quiet, and I think some people move up there because it's quiet. Bob had a house up there as well. I know he bought a house up there just because it was closer to Cementland, so he didn't have to commute so far. He had the condo at the Museum, and it's maybe a 15 minute drive to get from point A to point B. But with a five minute drive, it's a lot easier to jump on a bulldozer when you feel like it. So he bought that house and had all kinds of crazy stuff going on there.

But that neighborhood seemed pretty quiet and pretty established, and it wasn't really that far away from Cementland. So if I were a resident in a nice quiet neighborhood like that overlooking the peaceful river, and then all of a sudden you've got all this traffic and people coming and going for the parking at Cementland, depending on how it's managed, I could see that might be an issue.

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Daniil:

Were there any elements of Cementland that you thought were particularly unsafe?

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Amy Scherer:

Before anything was designed or built? Sure. I am concerned even now about knowing that there's people, urban explorers or whatever you want to call them, that sneak in there and run around. Because there's a lot of unprotected areas and big material that could shift. But anything we touched and built, I felt was considered for safety and stability. But also for the thrill element. So you might have that near death experience, but it's all controlled.

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Daniil:

Were there any particularly big hurdles with getting any of the elements approved?

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Amy Scherer:

I think the silos. We had to do a lot of due diligence, and I think we had to modify things a little bit with the silo project, just because there were a lot of openings and a lot of tall spaces that had to be protected. And I think he was initially a little cavalier about how much of that we needed to do. But since the end result was that there was going to be public there, we had to really design it as if the public were there tomorrow. So I think that was the initial moment of, "Oh, okay, this is the way we've got to approach these things."

Honestly, the biggest thing that I remember, and this may have been before or after he passed, was the site right adjacent to the railroad. In my recollection, that rail is still used. Not frequently, but it is used. He'd been mounding everything up there, and that dirt was really undocumented fill. I think that the slope that they had put it at for that particular type of soil was too steep. And they had a couple events where we had a big rain, and some of that washed out on the track. So I think that we did run into some big issues on the fact that we had to regrade that in order to keep what was outside of the property clear.

That was really the biggest hurdle. And I know that Bob didn't want to mess with it, because that was against his design, and he wanted to have that barrier between him and the rest of the world on that side of the property. So I think that was a little bit of a fight.

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Daniil:

Was that the big mound that's on that side?

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Amy Scherer:

Yeah, right adjacent to the railroad. So I think it was closer to the silos, where all of the really big mounding was. And they had mounded a bunch of earth against the silos as well, to submerge them. East-ish or south-ish side of the silos.

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Daniil:

And you said it was undocumented fill. What do you mean by that?

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Amy Scherer:

When I say undocumented, I mean that its source was not well recorded, and what the content of the earth was wasn't well documented. So there might be concrete and earth and bricks and rocks and clay, an unknown composition, because it might've just come from someplace that needed to excavate something. And so he was just like, "We're going to dump the dirt here."

When you're mounding up earth or doing fills, you typically take into account the composition of the soil, so that you know how much you need to compact it to make sure that it's stable, and whether there is something that you need to treat it with to make sure that the next lift that you put on it is not going to slide someplace. And I know a significant portion of that was not documented.

We had a couple of choices on how to deal with that. We could stabilize it with plantings, which we had attempted to do. But because of the weather and the slope, it still needed to be knocked down a little bit. And he didn't really want to do that.

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Daniil:

How would you describe the idea of Cementland to someone who might not be familiar with the project at all?

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Amy Scherer:

There's two ways I could describe it. One assumes that they know what the City Museum is. If they knew what the City Museum is, I'd say it's like the City Museum on a 42 acre scale. If they didn't know what the City Museum is, I would say it's the biggest industrial amusement park made out of found objects and sculpted earth that you could imagine.

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Daniil:

Have you worked with other adaptive reuse projects before?

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Amy Scherer:

Yeah, I've done a lot of work in the historical renovation space. The firm that I worked for did a lot of work for the McGowan Brothers and on the whole of Washington Avenue, doing adaptive reuse for the existing buildings. And they weren't nearly as creative and cavalier as Bob, but they liked to use some of the stuff that they found in the building to repurpose for decorations or parts of the bar or something like that. So on a much smaller scale, but yes.

During that period, it was a heyday for Washington Avenue, and there was a lot of development happening there. People were excited about loft living, and we were on the front end of that. So we did a lot of work taking some of these old buildings and reconfiguring them such that they could be used for loft living. We'd always try to put some interesting details that we'd find in there as part of either the wall structure, or if there wasn't enough left, then maybe it would be in the lobby to make it really cool. Those same developers were actually pretty good at managing restaurants, like Rosalita's and Lucas Park Grille and Blondies, and we did a lot of work on those spaces as well. Reusing those old factory buildings into something a little more modern. 

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Daniil:

What are your thoughts on Bob's approach to reuse and repurposing?

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Amy Scherer:

I thought it was visionary. He would actually get stuff from the scrap yard, and a lot of stuff that would've gone to the scrap yard and would've gotten either smelted or put in a landfill. And he was able to see the beauty in that and how it could be used in a different way. And his artistic mind was such that he could see patterns and forms on a different scale than the rest of us. Where we'd see a bread pan, he would see an amazing field of these bread pans making a really cool shape.

Cementland was interesting in that he was using a lot of those industrial pieces more closely to how they originally had been used, but for a different purpose. So we're going to use a catwalk that had been used to connect two stone vats, but we're going to use that to span between these things that used to be parts of a kiln, and you can walk over this meadow of stuff instead.

I think when people hear the name City Museum, it sounds so boring. But really, it is an homage to the city. Taking the pieces that would've otherwise been buried or thrown away and putting them back together in a way that we can still see them for what they were, but also see them in a different way.

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Daniil:

Did you think Cementland was likely to be opened to the public when you were working there?

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Amy Scherer:

Oh yeah, absolutely. Before the accident, we were working out there constantly. I don't know that he had a deadline for an opening day, but we were making significant progress. We had this whole water slide feature that we were working on, and they excavated all that out. And I think they actually started guniting it, and things were really starting to come into shape. You could understand how people could occupy the space and move through and enjoy it.

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Daniil:

What did your work look like after Bob's passing? Did you continue to work on Cementland for a little bit?

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Amy Scherer:

Things at Cementland pretty abruptly halted, for the obvious reason that Bob wasn't there. I think there was also just the shock that his accident happened there. The bulldozer was still there, so that was really hard. And even though everybody knew where things were going, I think most of that was still in Bob's head and in that model. Everybody took a pause, because there was the shock of him leaving such a big hole to fill. It never got filled. Everybody just tried to figure out, "What does this mean? What's my role in all this? Yes, this work can continue, but how does it continue, and what does that look like?" I think people had to figure out what shoes they were going to fill.

And then we also had the complication of Bob's wife. I think she wanted Cementland to continue, but she obviously didn't have the same sort of vision that Bob did or the same people skills. So that, unfortunately, fizzled out pretty quickly. For me at least, work resumed again at the City Museum. We never picked anything back up at Cementland after that. Kind of on smaller scales here and there.

I continued working with the Museum after people got their bearings, and I think some of the legal stuff had to get sorted out as well. I worked with them until probably about 2017 or ‘18. I moved from M Squared, and I went to a place called Vessel Architecture, and we eventually did pick some stuff back up at the Museum. And then, sadly, once I left Vessel and went to this design–build outfit, I wasn't able to be involved directly with the Museum. And things changed at the Museum too. They had the change of ownership, and they got more corporate, and I think they've got their corporate designers now to do a lot of their stuff. But I still hang out with the crew, and we get together here and there.

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Daniil:

Are you still interested in reuse and restoration?

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Amy Scherer:

Oh, absolutely. When we have the opportunity. A lot of the work I do now, I'd say 70%, is new builds. We do get the opportunity here and there to renovate, and it depends on the client and where we're building. Some people are very interested in that aspect of things, and some people are just like, "No, I want everything new." So we try to do it when we can.

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Daniil:

Are there any reuse or restoration projects that you worked on that you thought were particularly interesting?

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Amy Scherer:

Not really. Not since Bob's stuff. There was more stuff with the Museum, so there was a lot of that work that was still very interesting. I think the last thing I worked on there was the toddler play area with the castle inside on the fourth floor. And there were a few slides that we got to mess with more recently. But once I went into the world of design-build, there's been very little of that.

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Daniil:

What do you think are some other ways that some of the industrial facilities in St. Louis can be given a new life?

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Amy Scherer:

I think that there are a lot of ways. Unfortunately, a lot of that industrial work is gone, so I don't know that we can use them for what they were initially designed for. We did work with a couple people to look at them for housing for the underprivileged. There were some runs at trying to put in more community amenities, whether that's places for kids to go or even grocery stores. We got a lot of food deserts going on, especially in those areas. And there's a low population, so it's hard to get people excited and invest in the community.

So medical centers, all those sorts of things, cause those are huge spaces. You see even in suburban areas, people are taking these giant box stores and changing them into educational facilities and things that are more community oriented. But there's only so much of that that's going to actually have a use, especially in the less populated areas. I'd hate to say dismantle them and use the materials elsewhere, but that could also be something appropriate.

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Daniil:

Were there any specific housing projects you worked on?

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Amy Scherer:

Well, we worked with a few people. The intent was good, but their understanding of needs for humans and also just building codes was such that many of them were unfeasible. I don't pretend at all to understand all the needs of either the unhoused or folks living further on the edge. I know that there's a lot of services and needs that would need to be included in something like that, and I think it can be done. And I think that some of those places would be appropriate and offer a lot of space, and you can segment things such that you do have places for rehabilitation, places for medical stuff, places for learning, and still have places for people to stay. So I think that those are possible, but I don't feel like we ever got close enough to a realizable concept.

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Daniil:

Was it big private developers you worked with?

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Amy Scherer:

I think they were smaller, and that was part of it. They were smaller people with really good intentions, but probably just needed to do a little bit more due diligence and maybe a little more fundraising.

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Daniil:

From the nonprofit world?

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Amy Scherer:

Yeah, nonprofit.

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Daniil:

With Cementland potentially having toxic chemicals and cement dust, was environmental hazards something you had to consider?

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Amy Scherer:

We tested for asbestos. I think there might've been some repair areas that had some hydraulic oils that might've been of concern, but most of it was really just stone and rock. And they didn't really grind things down to a fine enough powder. I think it was more just aggregates for cement, and then they would bring in the other stuff to mix in for those. But aside from asbestos, that was the only big concern that we encountered and tested for.

The siding on the clinker building was all asbestos. And so I do recall that Mary and one other person went and actually got their certification to mediate.

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Daniil:

What are your thoughts on people breaking into Cementland?

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Amy Scherer:

I have mixed views on it. I totally understand the fascination, and I love that people want to see what it was and share that with the world and maybe keep that idea alive. But I also do have a little bit of a problem generally with urban exploring. My studio space is adjacent to the Falstaff Brewery that's been vacant for many years. And I will tell you that a lot of the folks are coming in and taking stuff and tagging, and they're making it harder for a place like that to ever even have the possibility of being rehabilitated, because it takes so much stuff out of it. So I don't agree with that at all.

I think it's fine to go in with a camera. Be safe, try not to fall down the stairs or into a cave or something. But when it goes beyond just curiosity seeking, and things are getting taken as a souvenir or to sell or scrap, or you're damaging the property by painting it or tagging it, I think that goes too far.

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Daniil:

Cementland was purchased by a trucking company, and from what we understand, the plan was to make it into a big trucking parking lot. With those soil issues you were talking about, do you think that kind of development is possible?

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Amy Scherer:

It is. As a person who deals with sites that are undocumented often, anything is surmountable if they want to spend the money on it. I assume they're going to do their due diligence as we do, and we don't do anything until we have a soil report. You get a geotechnical engineer out there, and they bore down until they reach something decent, and they will give you the report of what your soil is, what you have to work with. And they'll also give you recommendations on how to deal with it. Does it get compacted? Does it get taken off? Does it get amended with things to make it more stable? So it's probably not going to be cheap, but it's feasible.

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Liz:

Since Cementland was such an unorthodox project, I'm sure you had to do things a lot differently and think outside the box a lot more than you would have. How has working on a project like that informed what you've done after it and even today?

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Amy Scherer:

I'd say that in many ways it has. And it actually has in my own personal life. Bob's scale of thinking was so much bigger than anybody I'd ever met and probably anybody I'll ever meet. And I think the notion of "go big or go home" really got embedded in my ethos. And so my husband and I take on ridiculously huge projects. Most people are like, "Why are you doing that?" Because, well, why not? If you can see the vision of where it can go, then just get it done. So I think being able to scale up thinking has definitely helped. And I think being flexible about process and materials, and not staying in the lane of, "This one thing can only do this one job," has been very informative in my design work going forward.

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Daniil:

Is there anything we haven't asked about that you would like to share?

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Amy Scherer:

The only thing that I'd add, and this is the biggest part of the sadness of Bob passing, is that Bob had actually offered for me to have an office at City Museum. He was upset, because he only had me 80% of the time as opposed to 100% of the time. So he wanted to have unfettered access for me to do his projects. So I was going to quit my firm, and I was going to work for Bob, and we were going to work it out. 

In the meantime, my husband, who's a fabricator, had his space that he'd been leasing to do fabrication also coming to an end. It was like, well, let's see what we can find for what he was proposing for a lease amount. So we found this amazing studio space right in the Falstaff Brewery complex. And we took that on. So that was going to be my office for Bob and my husband's fabrication space. And we still have it, but we had signed the lease just months before [Bob died]. We hadn't really moved anything into it yet. And it was my husband's birthday when we got the news. And I was going to have this little surprise birthday party for him at the studio. And instead of this celebration, we were just like, "Oh my God, we've got this big space, and Bob's dead. And what do we do?" We figured it out, but it was a really sad, hard time.

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