NOMAS creates installation on Mill Creek Valley, shown at Missouri History Museum

Last fall, the WashU student chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects created “Light on the Lost: Mill Creek Valley,” an 8-by-3-foot model with projected visuals, supplemental plans, and elevation drawings that mapped the since-erased St. Louis neighborhood. The project was developed by co-leads Brandon Perez and Daylin Kennedy — co-president of NOMAS along with Sarah Monreal Aviles — and involved 20 student participants.

The idea for a student-led project came when Kennedy and Monreal Aviles began their second semester as co-presidents in 2025, seeking to initiate a different type of student engagement beyond a panel or lecture. “We wanted to find a new way of engaging students, where they could directly work with the content they’re interested in,” Kennedy said. They put out a call for applications to lead a project on erasure in St. Louis, and Perez came on board.

Perez had already gained some experience in the history of erasure in St. Louis — especially Mill Creek Valley and Kinloch — through classes and working as a research assistant with Professor Patty Heyda. “I’ve always been interested in connecting that experience and making it an active part of my time here in St. Louis,” Perez shared.

At first, they weren’t sure what form the project would take — only that they wanted to bring the story of Mill Creek Valley to life, to visualize it and bring it into larger conversation. They met with Senior Lecturers Jonathan Stitelman and Melisa Betts Sanders, went on an urban renewal bus tour, and met with Matthew Bernstine, director of the school’s Office for Socially Engaged Practice. Bernstine helped connect them with Gwen Moore, a historian at the Missouri History Museum, who further connected them to researchers at the Missouri Historical Society Library & Research Center. There, they were able to get a firsthand look at historical documents like fire insurance maps. “That’s when we realized we wanted to do a model,” Perez said.

Continuing to learn about the neighborhood and what shape their work would take, Perez and Kennedy met with a curator for the Missouri History Museum’s exhibition, “Mill Creek: Black Metropolis.” Later, during an event organized by Monreal Aviles, the team met Vivian Gibson, longtime resident of Mill Creek Valley and author of the 2020 memoir, “The Last Children of Mill Creek.” They heard Gibson describe her childhood home, which students later drafted into a floorplan that’s included in the museum’s exhibition. “It was important to meet with her to ground our research with lived experience from a former resident of Mill Creek Valley,” Perez said.

Students worked together in teams to create the 3D-printed model before pausing to have a group review and discussion. “About midway through, we realized it was just a blank, white model,” Perez said. “We wanted to tell the story of the neighborhood, to show some of the depth that Vivian Gibson had shared with us. That’s when we got the idea to create an animation to project onto the model.” Together, the model and projection show the story of neighborhood vibrancy, active business, different building types, and subsequent erasure by highways.

Perez noted that the complexity and narrative around Mill Creek Valley really impacted his own perspective on how we make a sense of place in cities. “It’s shocking to learn the often-forgotten magnitude of history a neighborhood can have,” he said. “In the case of Mill Creek, the neighborhood saw so many creatives and influential people who went on to have global impact,” including Josephine Baker and Scott Joplin.

Kennedy sees the project as an important way to develop contextual understanding of a site. “There have been many Black communities in St. Louis and across the nation that have been erased under the pretense of urban renewal. Mill Creek Valley is a case study that’s important to understand because it’s so recent — the 1960s,” he shared. “Losing a family home is more than displacement, it is a loss of cultural identity. It is crucial for us to contend with the history of erasure and to connect our present reality with the forgotten past.”

The group piloted the model in Givens Hall in fall 2025, then installed it at the Missouri History Museum as part of the “Black Metropolis” exhibition’s opening weekend. Kennedy and Perez recounted that several visitors approached the installation and quickly pointed to places they recognized on the model. “A few people pointed out where they used to live, that a relative used to own that corner store, or their mother attended that church,” Perez said. “It was especially interesting to see the connections that were beyond the model — some could point and say ‘oh, we lived just down the street from here.’ Even though that street wasn’t shown on the model, they still felt attached to the narrative of Mill Creek Valley.”

Kennedy and Perez agree that the project was one of programming, organizing, and much more communicating than they anticipated — skills that will prove useful in their professional careers. One of Perez’s biggest takeaways is “how malleable a city becomes, not in a way that’s scary or oppressive, but in the way that you can imagine futures and what could come up in a place.” For Kennedy, he hopes the project helps both students and viewers think about place and ask what used to be there as part of understanding the reality we live in today. “As designers and architects of the built environment,” Kennedy said, “we have an obligation to learn from the mistakes of the past and help create our future.”