Gateway Arch

The Gateway Arch is a 630-foot stainless-steel monument in St. Louis, Missouri. Designed by Eero Saarinen and completed in 1965, it commemorates westward expansion of the United States.

Catenary: A curve traced by a freely hanging chain under its own weight, with fixed ends. The Arch’s profile approximates an inverted catenary, shaping its iconic outline.
Eero Saarinen: A Finnish-American architect known for expressive modern buildings and furniture. Saarinen’s winning design established the Arch’s shape and monumental scale.
Gateway Arch National Park: A United States national park in downtown St. Louis that includes the Gateway Arch and the Old Courthouse. The monument is the park’s defining structure and centerpiece.
Westward expansion: The movement of United States settlement, commerce, and political control westward across North America. The Arch commemorates this historical process, while its symbolism can obscure its costs.
Inverted catenary: An upside-down catenary curve, often used to describe arch forms under particular loading conditions. This is the mathematical curve Saarinen used to develop the Arch’s profile.
Jefferson National Expansion Memorial: A national memorial in St. Louis honoring westward expansion and the history of the Old Courthouse. The Arch was the central monument in the memorial originally named for Thomas Jefferson.
Gateway Arch tram ride: A system of small enclosed capsules that transports visitors through the Arch’s legs to its crown. The tram turns the monument’s hollow structure into a route to its observation area.
Manifest Destiny: A nineteenth-century belief that United States expansion across North America was destined and justified. The monument’s celebratory imagery is often read through the ideology of continental expansion.
Stainless steel: An iron-based alloy containing chromium that resists corrosion through a protective surface layer. Stainless-steel cladding gives the monument its reflective exterior and corrosion resistance.
Gateway Arch design competition: The 1947–1948 competition that selected a design for a monument on St. Louis’s riverfront. Its jury chose Saarinen’s proposal from hundreds of submitted designs.

Linked from 3 pages