Saarinen himself was a man of few, dry, words. The second to last piece of the Gateway Arch is inserted c.1965 Louis is near the New Madrid fault, the Arch is designed to be resistant to earthquakes and can sway up to nine inches in either direction or weather winds of 150 mph without sustaining damage. Each leg is set 60 feet into the ground (a third of which directly into bedrock). The base of each side at ground level has an engineering tolerance of 1/64” or the two legs of the Arch wouldn’t meet in the middle. Though it appears delicate in construction, it is anything but. The small windows at the top of the Arch boast an impressive panorama of Missouri and Illinois depending on the side of the observation deck. The Arch is hollow due to the tram system that takes visitors up to the observation deck at the zenith. The external steel sheets alone weigh nearly 900 tons. The structure features the most stainless steel used in any one project in history. The structural load is supported by a stressed-skin design made from stainless steel plates. Each of the Arch’s legs are equilateral triangles of 54 feet at the base, narrowing to 17 feet where they join at the top. In the inverse presentation, the catenary arch is supported entirely by compression from its own weight with no shear, or strain, on the structure.Īs such, the width and height are nearly identical at 630 feet (give or take a fraction). In a catenary curve, the dip is created by tension from each end. Mathematically speaking, it is a hyperbolic cosine (not the parabolic arch that many armchair architects assume). The Arch itself is a catenary curve, the idealized representation of a free-hanging chain bending under its own weight. Louis phone directory listed 82 businesses now beginning with “Arch” or “Gateway.” Just three years after the official opening, the St. Louisans fully embraced the new structure. Louis had a memorial and a national park. Because of budget constraints, Saarinen’s full design for the grounds was not realized. Upon its completion on October 28, 1965, the Gateway Arch cost $13 million. They broke ground for the Arch in 1959 and construction of the Gateway Arch began February 12, 1963. It took more than a decade to clear the Arch’s designs past state and federal governing bodies and to negotiate construction crews and costs. A few months later in February 1948, Eero Saarinen’s design was the unanimous selection of the judging panel. The judges noted Saarinen’s concept was “relevant, beautiful, perhaps inspired would be the right word” and “an abstract form peculiarly happy in its symbolism”. Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen’s design was among the finalists. Of the 172 submissions, the top five finalists were announced on September 27, 1947. The National Park Service called for a design competition for a memorial that would be “transcending in spiritual and aesthetic values,” best represented by “one central feature: a single shaft, a building, an arch, or something else that would symbolize American culture and civilization”. That small stroke of luck helped earn public support and got the project started.īy the 1940s, the permits had been cleared and the acreage along the Mississippi River had been acquired. The project also promised jobs, which were badly needed at the time. The public needed to remember their pride and hope. Civic leader Luther Ely Smith replied that the public also needed “spiritual things” like a public memorial to the frontier and the accomplishment of expansion. For a metropolitan city still stinging amid the uncertainty of the Great Depression, the idea seemed absolutely frivolous. Louis opposed the idea, instead supporting more practical uses for the funds. When the idea for a publicly funded riverfront memorial space was proposed in 1933, many in St. In the spirit of the Gateway Arch’s birthday, however, let’s take a look at one Eero Saarinen’s most well-known works of architecture.Įero Saarinen with a scale model of what would become the St. Our custom CMS is named after him and one of our conference rooms boasts a Saarinen-designed tulip table. A man committed to his artistic vision and design that served the project at hand, he’s a role model for some of team TOKY and you can feel his influence around the office. The Gateway Arch’s architect, Eero Saarinen took an abstract concept and created one of the most iconic monuments in the world. Louis celebrated the 49th birthday of the architectural icon that’s come to define our city: The Gateway Arch.Ĭompleted in 1965, the Arch is the tallest memorial in the United States and the tallest stainless steel monument in the world.
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