On a recent trip to St. Louis, we had the opportunity to visit the Gateway Arch. Designed by Eero Saarinen in 1947, the Arch is situated in downtown St. Louis at the edge of the Mississippi River in Jefferson National Expansion Memorial Park.

The stainless steel-clad catenary arch is an imposing structure, reaching 630 feet at its highest point. Transforming such a primordial form into a machined object at a scale unparalleled at the time propels it into the pantheon of iconic images of America. It is a heroic gesture of man and technology denoting majestic endeavors and mythic tales of national history. Most would agree that the arch has become an essential symbol for the American experience since its completion.

Visiting the arch wasn’t a planned part of our trip to the city. We had converged on St Louis for a family wedding and this day trip was a break from the weekend’s planned activities. It was a welcomed opportunity to experience the city away from the banquet halls and hotel lobbies. It was a bright day, not too warm, though one could feel the mugginess increasing as the day advanced. It was the end of April and the summer weather wasn’t far off.

There were eight of us all together, piled into a rented SUV. We circled the downtown, trying to find a way into the Park. Our initial assumption was that the city grid would take us directly to the Park. Our expectation of easy access to the river was thwarted by a depressed Interstate Highway that separated downtown from the park. It was comical with everyone excitedly pointing at glimpses of the Arch as we searched for a way to cross the highway that separated us from our goal. In the end, we found our way across the chasm to a parking facility at the far end of the park.

The Interstate highway system transformed our country with a network of roads that continues to serve the economic vitality of the nation. Yet, its legacy sees many cities carved up and fractured, the consequences of which have lingered on through many generations. As time goes on, it is heartening to see these missteps rectified by new urban design initiatives, but much remains to be corrected. St. Louis continues to need attention.

With a great deal of expectation, we all filed out of the car and made our way through the park to the monument. The original Park design by Dan Kiley is a wonderful bit of landscape design. One moves effortlessly though the park with a keen sense of place that is centered in St. Louis while fully aware of the river’s edge – a river that travels for thousands of miles beyond. From a distance, the monument is recognizable, whole.

Approaching on foot, the arch is seen in bits and pieces, soaring up from the ground into the sky. The prism form in stainless steel cladding has a taut machine-made exactness that projects a powerful presence at close range. The hyper-scale of the Monument is from another place or time. When at its base, you can feel the power of that grandeur springing up from the earth.

Moving from the park into the monument, one actually goes underground. It is a bit disconcerting and exciting at the same time, not unlike entering a mineshaft. A primordial human experience, trepidation and curiosity are one.

The entry approach passes along the base of the arch onto a long ramp that takes you into the earth. The sequence is humbling. Passing through a narrow entrance, one enters the Great Hall which collects and distributes visitors to various exhibits and activities. Being part of a group, there is a strong sense of a shared experience. The process conjures up associations with what the Arch is meant to represent: the American expansion west.

For the young, it is indoctrination at its most potent with symbols and events merging into one stream of consciousness. It is the beginning of an un ending orientation of us. While having one’s own American experience, we begin at an early age to recognize the flow of national history as our own—a form of natural history.

As part of the Arch design, there is a gondola system that travels within the arch to an observation platform at the top. In itself, it is a remarkable bit of engineering, a favorite tourist attraction and one that everyone in our group was anxious to experience. At the time we visited, the Great Hall looked like it needed a redo. The finishes and lighting dated to several generations past and while there was a dignity and repose to the space, it looked tired.
Even though it was Saturday, the crowds were rather thin, and we made our way to the head of the gondola line rather quickly.

Its design is very much a part of its time with a rounded, egg-shaped cab and molded plastic seat designs. One steps into a time machine with Austin Powers back into the 1960’s. In fact, his favorite expression “yeah baby, yeah” was repeated often on the ride up and again on the way down.

It is a curious thing with these types of monuments: with the large scale nature of the form, there is always a crammed and circuitous nature to the interior fit out. In the Statue of Liberty, one climbs up through the interior of the massive sculpture to the observation deck that is in her headdress, a cramped and incommodious space.

In the Gateway arch the gondola is a very small and confined. It lurches up slowly, stopping and starting as it makes its way to the top of the arch. The observation deck, a small and banal space at the top has little windows looking out into the flat plane of the Midwest. It is not the heroic finale that one would expect from the majestic nature of the overall. It is hard to put the two together in one thought, and yet it seems perfectly natural to want to climb up into the guts of the monument. It is archetypical in nature, a possession of the massive symbol.

It was an important experience to visit the Arch, as a family event and as an architect. Certainly, such a monument’s impact to millions of people who will never visit it is an abstraction of achievement and destiny. The totem quality of the arch can’t be underestimated as to its power and importance as a symbol. So being there in person held a quasi-sacred quality and a sense of reverence that unfortunately was consistently affronted with the mundane aspects of herding hundreds if not thousands of visitors through the process of the Gateway experience. This realization brings us full circle to the motivation that brought us to the Arch: to touch a bit of history.