KAF Big Top Site Feasbility

St. Louis, MO

The Gap

The Seed

The Sprout

The Kranzberg Arts Foundation needed to relocate its Big Top performance tent onto a constrained urban site in Midtown St. Louis already holding two independent art commitments with their own geometries, footprints, and spatial logic. "Under the Sun," a landscape installation by Arbolope Studio with Jonathan Stitelman and the Sam Fox School of Engagement, was recently installed along the site's northeast edge. A proposed Counterpublic installation — mounded seating, a lifted stage, decomposed granite pathways — was designed for the central lawn. Fitting a 17,100 SF tent alongside 11,500 SF of art installations, two support tents, and shipping containers on 1.77 acres required a site strategy that gave each element its place without one overriding the others.

Gap

Seed

Sprout

A Big Top in Midtown. The Arch on the Horizon.

The Big Top requires roughly 17,100 SF. Two supporting tents — foyer and hospital — add 4,500 SF with buffer. The Counterpublic installation, designed with a lifted stage, mounded seating, decomposed granite circulation, and seat walls, occupies approximately 8,500 SF at the site's center. "Under the Sun," already in the ground at the northeast corner, covers around 3,000 SF of installed landscape and sculpture. The 15-foot alley dividing the city block had to be vacated and overhead utilities removed before the Big Top could occupy the east lot at all. Total available site: 1.77 acres.

Three schemes tested how these elements could fit.

Client

Kranzberg Arts Foundation

Size

1.77 Ac.

Scheme 1 — Full Art Installation with Planting
The Counterpublic installation anchors the center of the site at full scale, planter buffers intact. The west lot holds the two support tents and shipping containers, with a vertical element marking the sidewalk corner. A deliberate break in the planting border of Under the Sun opens a pedestrian connection from the Arbolope installation into the broader site. The Big Top occupies the east lot. At the scale of the aerial rendering, the full red tent cluster reads as a single destination from the surrounding neighborhood — the Big Top dominant on the east, the foyer and support tents arrayed to the west, the Counterpublic landscape holding the space between them.

Scheme 2 — Clear East-West Path
A continuous east-west thoroughfare connects both parking lots and extends to the Under the Sun installation. The Counterpublic design shifts to the sidewalk edge, framed by new walkways and the tent structures to the north. The west lot accommodates only shipping containers. This arrangement trades some of the Counterpublic installation's internal planting area for pedestrian legibility — a clearer arrival sequence from street to tent.

Scheme 3 — Axial Relationships
The sun patterns embedded in Arbolope's Under the Sun installation generate the organizing geometry. A diagonal axis runs from the northeast installation corner to the southwest site corner, bisecting the Counterpublic design and separating the mounded seating from the stage. Two radial paths flank the installation and guide movement toward the Big Top entry. Rather than routing around the existing art, this scheme builds from it.