Viva Cementland
Date Posted: June 17, 2025
Posted In: Discussion,
From NextSTL: Late last year I stumbled upon a photograph – a scale model of Cementland made by City Museum visionary Bob Cassilly as an in-progress representation of the core 40 acres of the then-56-acre Riverview Neighborhood/Riverview Municipality site. I had always heard that any plans for Cementland were entirely in Bob’s head, and thus any direction for the completion of the site died, tragically, with Bob in 2011. The existence of a scale model, or a photograph of such, donated to the Cementland Archive by Cassily’s friend Bill Christman, suggested another story. Here was an overarching plan– some incomplete vision to point to – even if it was no bigger than a pizza box.
Cementland Archive
Cementland Archive is the brainchild of Daniil Gerasimova and Liz Van Horn, two WashU alums who moved to the area in 2018 and became interested in the site’s tangled history. They received a grant from Luminary Arts in 2023 to create the web archive and compile interviews, art, photographs, and related media telling the story of Cementland from its inception to Cassilly’s tragic death and – crucially – beyond. The site now hosts over 150 entries, extensively tagged and catalogued by format, source, date, and topic.
In addition to the website, the archive’s creators are producing a zine, likely to be released later this year, curating some of the archive’s content and outlining approaches to engaging with works within the archive. I got in touch with the site’s creators and pitched creating a 3D model and color illustration (above) based on the scale model they’d featured. I wanted to create an image that might capture something of what Cementland could have been once completed. To create this I used the image of the scale model, satellite imagery of the site from 2012 after work appears to have stopped, and numerous photographs both from Cementland Archive and elsewhere across the web.
Through collecting reference images, I discovered that Cementland was further along than I’d previously imagined. Much of the major sculpting of the land had been completed, canals and waterways had been dug and connected between the site’s halves east to west, detailed stone buildings and brick paths were emerging near the site’s western end. The vision had quite literally begun to take shape.
Together, these references took me near to the point of completing the illustration. However, large portions of the site nearest Riverview Drive were being used to store materials when work stopped. These areas of the scale model were incomplete as well. Lacking further information, but determined not to simply leave these spaces empty, I attempted to infer and imagine what might have been in store here, noting Cassilly’s obsessions throughout – castles, pyramids, and ancient ruins connected by a network of catwalks, trails, tunnels, and waterways – even going so far as to incorporate large scale material resources I could see from the satellite imagery.