Do you love St. Louis MCM? Then watch the first 7-minutes of the February 17, 2020 edition of Living St. Louis on The Nine Network.

I am beyond excited and deeply honored to have been a part of this documentary project. We filmed the talking head portion in January 2019, and I supplied them with requested photos from my personal archive throughout the rest of the year. What buildings they asked me for photos of was the tip-off that their documentary was going to be phenomenal!

It is with lingering happiness that I recall the St. Louis Modern exhibit at St. Louis Art Museum because it was the first time an StL cultural institution spent time and money on celebrating mid-century modern architecture and design in St. Louis.

But let’s be honest: you will only ever get a small percentage of people to go to our art museum. Whereas hundreds of thousands of people see the wonderful documentaries on KETC Channel 9. So this means we have the potential for tons of folk who don’t think they care about StL MCM suddenly being jazzed and inspired by it. My Pollyanna view is that the more that people care, the more MCM buildings that are preserved.

From the Living St. Louis sneak preview of the full-length documentary, it’s a blast to see the producers connecting with architectural expert Esley Hamilton, lifelong ModernSTL members Neil Chace and Nathan Wilber and – best of all – conversation with architect Dick Henmi about his Flying Saucer (with a fast shout-out to Northland Shopping Center, for which he was the principal architect back in 1955).

In 7 minutes they did a masterful job of connecting threads and hitting highlights of why this style of architecture matters – then and now. To say I’m looking forward to seeing the entire documentary takes deadpan to new levels.