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Where is Dred Scott buried? Which Frank Lloyd Wright home has the largest collection of original art glass and free-standing furniture? What is the "gardenesque" style of park design? The answers to these questions and so much more can found in the fourteen unique tours we are offering for the 2002 ARLIS/VRA joint conference in St. Louis. As we anticipate welcoming you to St. Louis in just two (!) short months, we want to share with you some of the exciting tours we have developed to take you out of our amazing conference hotel and out on the town.
We understand that many of you will be visiting St. Louis for the first time, and for you we offer a diverse range of tours that will introduce you to this historic and dynamic city. For returning visitors, we hope that our tours will provide you with a fresh glimpse of St. Louis, a city that is both the "gateway to the west." and so much more. To start with, a thorough and interesting overview of the city will be provided in the tour "St. Louis on Wheels." Just sit back in your seat, kick up your feet, and listen to our experienced guide show our city's stuff!
To appeal to architecture buffs we have tours highlighting both the Prairie and Usonian styles of Frank Lloyd Wright, the arts and crafts architecture of Bernard Maybeck, and adaptive reuse, a topic that corresponds with the conference session "Adaptive Reuse: The Cornerstone for Architectural Revitalization in St. Louis." In fact, St. Louis has really rolled out the red carpet for the ARLIS/NA-VRA conference, and several of our architecture tours are quite "exclusive" to members of our group. "Two Usonian Houses by Frank Lloyd Wright" will take you to a private Frank Lloyd Wright home still occupied by its original owners, and to the Krause House, which was recently purchased by a foundation and will allow participants a bird's-eye view into its renovation process before it is opened to the public in another year. "Principia College Historic District and the Architecture of Bernard Maybeck" will be held on the normally private (read: gated and locked) campus of Principia College and led by a noted Maybeck historian.
Those interested in art, and we know there are many of you, will enjoy the St. Louis Art Museum Tour, or less traditional art venues like the new (and private!) Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts or Laumeier Sculpture Park, in which monumental works by artists such as Donald Judd, Mary Miss, and Andy Goldsworthy are located within a 100 acre setting. For a synthesis of fantastic art and architecture try the Church Stained Glass tour, which highlights both the traditional and unusual stained glass found in our churches.
Enjoy digging in the dirt? We've got tours for the gardener, horticulture buff, and archaeologist in you in the visits we have planned to the world-renowned Missouri Botanical Garden, Cahokia Mounds World Heritage site (one of the most significant archaeological sites on prehistory of North America), and to the parks included in "Escape from the Urban Jungle: St. Louis Parks." For those of you with a "unique" sense of fun we would like to present "Speaking to the Dead," which explores St. Louis' history and personages through visits to two impressive and unusual cemeteries.
Finally, it seems any library conference would not be complete without a visit to--a library! We have a jewel in St. Louis Mercantile Library and Western Manuscripts collection, the oldest library west of the Mississippi. A major sponsor of our "Meet Me in St. Louis" welcome party, the Mercantile Library's vast holdings include 210,000 books on subjects related to Westward Expansion, Americana, world travel, and natural sciences, the "morgue" of the now defunct St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the Barringer Collection of America railroad history.
So you want to know more about our tours? For full descriptions augmented by images and links, we encourage you to visit our conference website http://library.wustl.edu/~beth/Conference.html. If you have any questions about our tours please contact the tour contacts we have provided on this site. We look forward exploring St. Louis with you!