English professor Gerald Early was selected as a member of an eight-person jury charged with choosing a proposal to redesign the grounds surrounding the Gateway Arch. The facelift of the Arch grounds will be finished by 2015. (Matt Mitgang | Student Life)

The competition, “Framing A Modern Masterpiece: The City + The Arch + The River,” encompasses the idea of “connecting the city, the Arch grounds, and the river, maintaining the Arch as an icon, [and] portraying the entire place as an iconic place,” according to the competition manager, Don Stastny, a prominent architect and urban designer and the CEO of Portland’s StastnyBrun Architects Inc.

In January, eight jurors of various specialties were selected, one of whom was a Washington University faculty member: Gerald Early, the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters and the director of the Center for the Humanities.

Others include architecture critic Robert Campbell, former National Park Service Deputy Director Denis Galvin, urban strategist David Leland, curator Cara McCarty, landscape architects Laurie Olin and Carol Barney, and Harvard urban design professor Alex Krieger.

“We selected the jury [by looking at] the qualities that we want the designers to address within the competition,” Stastny said. “We look for people who aren’t just kind of singular but have multiple kinds of discipline. They also have to be the type of people who will collaborate…[and] have the highest personal integrity. Once they make a decision as a jury, that opinion will be respected and not turned over.”

Redesigning the Arch grounds had been an architectural project discussed for many years before becoming a reality.

“One of the things that had been talked about was redesigning the Arch grounds by 2004 [to commemorate the year 1904, when the World Fair had been held], but that never happened,” Early said. “This is a new initiative that’s being launched—[it has been] talked about probably for the last eight or nine years.”

The first step of the competition—a deadline for competition registration that included a letter of intent—has ended.

“In this first round, we will evaluate the qualifications; people have submitted their intention and their desire…The jury will look for teams who have shown prior work [that is] creative and viable,” said Alex Krieger, an urban designer who had been on the juries for a competition to redesign Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House as well as a Holocaust memorial in Boston.

According to Early, a winning team’s scheme will be selected this August.

To connect the city and the river is a unique project in and of itself and can be compared to a similar architectural design competition in Shanghai, Krieger said.

“In Shanghai, the competition was to take a three-mile area between the river and the historic part of the city…to bury the very wide road [separating] the city from the river, and then extend the park system to the river,” Krieger said. “The kind of impact of [the Arch competition] would be comparable to the transformation [in Shanghai].”

The jury will meet for the first time early next week and begin the selection process. According to Stastny, there has not been a budget for the competition in an effort to prevent limiting designs. But Krieger said the jury will make sure that “the winning scheme is viable to be realized and to continue to be realized in the near future.”

“It has to be somehow comparable to the Arch itself,” Krieger said. “It has to provide amenities to people using the park environment; it should diminish the barrier from downtown St. Louis and the river; [and] it should of course be beautiful when seen from the distance.”

Considered to be the largest environmental effort in history, the event took place last weekend in over 180 countries and on all continents. The goal of the event was to pressure political leaders attending the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference to take stronger stances on slowing global warming. Activists in the movement around the world, including those in St. Louis, photographed their rallies and intend to send the pictures to Copenhagen.

Green Action President Peter Murrey, a junior, said he believes the global response shows that people from all cultures “want climate legislation to happen.” Murrey said that “leaders have to realize that if they don’t recognize that, they will find themselves out of a job very quickly.”

The number 350 represents the maximum amount of carbon dioxide in parts per million (PPM) that, according to scientists, can be in the atmosphere without triggering the damaging consequences of climate change. Currently, carbon dioxide levels are at 387 PPM in the atmosphere.

Supporters of clean energy legislation want to see these carbon dioxide levels decline and insist that, as senior Guillaume Auffret put it, more work be done to promote sustainable energy.

“We are talking about wind energy, solar energy [and] geothermic energy,” Auffret said.

Auffret hopes that the U.S. government will adopt “a sense of urgency” regarding climate change and said he believes that European and Asian countries are surpassing the United States on this global issue.

“We need a strong U.S. presence there [in Copenhagen] if we are able to effect any change,” Murrey said. “We’re one of the leaders of the world, and for us to be lagging on this issue is disgusting.”

Some Third World countries are bringing innovative sustainability plans to Copenhagen. Indonesia, for example, plans to harness geothermic energy from the water vapor emitted by volcanoes.

Locally, Wash. U. students attended 350’s Action @ the Arch Rally with about 200 people. Mayor Francis Slay encouraged activists there, stating that he along with 60 other mayors urged the White House to complement economic stimulus funding with green initiatives.

Sophomore Adam Hasz was especially inspired by the mayor’s support, and he emphasized the “immediacy of this issue in terms of local action and how we can make a difference right now.”

Also a member of Green Action, Hasz hopes to see Missouri lawmakers take action to improve the state’s energy efficiency rating, which currently stands at 45th in the nation.

While sophomore Matthew Blum, treasurer of Green Action, also found the rally inspiring, he hopes that in the future, supporters will be less homogenous. Blum said he believes that although the movement is international, “here, in St. Louis, it needs to diversify.”

After Action @ the Arch, the University campus hosted a 350 Sustainability Fair, the last event for CS40’s Ecolympics, a weeklong challenge for residential colleges to prove how green they are. Held on the Swamp, the event invited students to participate in a clothing swap and hear the Nuclear Percussion Ensemble, which played with instruments made from recycled materials.

Junior Anna Li said she believes “the clothing swap will be an annual event in the future,” with more campus involvement.

Sophomore Brandon Lucius, CS40’s sustainability chair, said he’d like to see Ecolympics become more competitive in the future, with more student participation.

“By no means is Power Shift or the 350 campaign or any of these environmental movements regarding climate change coming to an end,” Hasz said. “At Wash. U., the movement will actually continue to grow in the coming months, up until Copenhagen, and will hopefully continue to grow as the years go by.”