SOM Mounds / Olympic Park Mounds

In advocating for a small greenway and park around Sugarloaf Mound in south St. Louis, this blog covered the burial mounds of Gyeongju, South Korea.  You can read that post by following this link.  Here are two of the images from that post.

In light of the designs proposed for the arch grounds competition, it might be best to turn our attention to Olympic Park north of Gyeongju in Seoul. 

Olympic Park has been on this blog before.  The greenway connecting it to the Han River was compared to the River Des Peres.  The art covered medians on the roads approaching it were compared to the animal sculptures around the zoo.  There is probably a bit that could be said about the integration of sports facilities, museums, park space, and subway stations.  Olympic Park is a complicated place.  For this blog post, we should concentrate on the mounds, water, and sculptures. 

In Gyeongju, the mounds are national treasures taken care of for many generations.  In Olympic Park, they are landscape features inspired by the traditional mounds throughout the country.

The mounds are not the centerpieces of the park like in Gyeongju, but integrated pieces of the larger picture.  Walking among them, you feel peaceful and alone, even though there are hundreds of people tramping around in them at any given time.  You turn a corner, and you see picnicing old people or parents trying to get their kids to stop torturing beetles.  It's a wonderful place. 

There's plenty of public art looming around in the landscape.

In addition to the greenway and stream connecting the park to the Han River, there is also a lake in the park that can be seen from the tops of many of the mounds.

Olympic Park successfully merges mounds (history), sculptures (art), and water (wetland ecology) into its center while still having plenty of room for museums, event halls, and large gateways.

With Olympic Park in mind, we should look at the design proposed by SOM for East St. Louis. 

PWP proposes one giant mound looming over everything.  MVVA proposes canopy walks for bird watchers.  Weiss/Manfredi proposes a new bike and pedestrian access point with a fantastic bridge across the river.  Behnisch proposes an 'Industrial Remnants Installation Art' area.  All the teams suggest some sort of soil clean up and wetland ecology.  SOM emerges as the winner in my mind with the synthesis of the ideas put forth by the other teams. 

Instead of one giant mound, SOM (whose team includes the Osage Nation) proposes a series of smaller, exploreable mounds with canopy walks looping through them and art sprinkled all around.

MVVA deserves credit for thinking about the Mississippi Flyway, but SOM takes the idea much further.

While the bridge proposed by Weiss/Manfredi is wonderful, the bridge SOM proposes not only merges park and city at Chouteau's Landing, but allows the mounds in Illinois to green more of the waterfront.

In just a part of their larger plan, SOM combines water, art, birds, bike and pedestrian access, stunning views, a nod to our mound building history, and the bypassing of train yards, interstates, and a river.

I was not initially a fan of the Easter Island heads, and I wasn't sure how the mounds would work.  Looking at all the plans, I now believe that SOM has the best idea for the southern portion of the East St. Louis park.  The concert venue could use a bit more thought, and the walkways should connect to the HOK handicap ramp like the MVVA and Weiss/Manfredi plans suggest, but the mounds are a good use of space with a lot of room for maturity over time.  The SOM mounds manage to combine some of the better aspects of the other four plans into something much more usable for a more diverse group of users.