Meeting Louis at the Fair

Louis Spiering was one of St. Louis' most intriguing, if not best known architects at the turn of the nineteenth century. In a life cut tragically short, Spiering, product of a prominent German-American St. Louis family, graduated from the famed Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, served as an architect for the 1904 World's Fair and designed the world-class Sheldon Concert Hall. One artifact Spiering left behind was his personal journal of photographs from the World's Fair. These snapshots, unseen for nearly a century, reveal the fair's grand undertaking through a young architect's eyes. More than a biography, Meeting Louis brings Spiering to life, as Carol Porter imagines the thoughts of this talented, romantic figure at the dawn of a new century and the exposition that brought the world to St. Louis.