In addition, most buildings and land have been neglected or abandoned due to the region's decline in industry and population growth. The project explores the possibility of creating a new context for this neglected and isolated urban fragment by allowing the city to bring events and people back into these marginalized spaces. Grafting New Skins for the broken and fragmented urban context allows the site to revitalize by creating new spatial typologies that are interlaced and mixed with existing conditions.

The new skins are the bandage and healing strategy for regenerating the city. The first layer is woven with the existing context of the highway to create new iconic spaces. The first layer takes reference from the Gateway Arch and its monumental scale by defining a vertical canopy across the highway and the abandoned ground. The second layer is created to respond to the ground surface underneath the highway. To maximize the existing ground topography, new programs of Olympic standard BMX racing and freestyle arena is developed to bring events and people back into the city.

BMX facilities around the world are sited in suburban areas to bring hundreds of people of all ages and families to celebrate the most exciting sport in the world. The event space is programmed with cycling rental and repair centers, urgent care and infirmaries, changing rooms and bathrooms, snack bars and cafes. Grafting New Skins becomes a new urban model for reoccupying the city’s underutilized spaces and allowing opportunities for people living outside the city to come back into the St. Louis. This urban architecture is energized by the insignificant and peripheral spaces between the river, floodwalls, highways and railroads.

The converges of these infrastructural networks activates new events and situations that brings life back into these abandoned sites in the city.