Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Eero Saarinen
American, Finnish; 20th-century
St. Louis, MO: Gateway Arch National Park
90%
The Gateway Arch. 1967
The Arch is among the few modern monuments anywhere that is successful unequivocally on both artistic and symbolic-political terms. Artistically, it suffers some for its simplicity, which is somewhat limiting — that's it? — and somewhat haughty — how could art ever match geometry for grace? (It couldn't.) But it overcomes this by being much more variable as a physical object than it initially seems to be, and also by its sheer scale. The metal plates that form the sculpture's exterior are slightly variegated in their precise tones and in the way they catch the light, such that, from up close, the apparently monolithic curve is a landscape of hue and glinting intensities. From afar, the thing seems singular, but drive past it at night and then again in the day, during sunrise and at sunset, while it's raining or it's overcast or with snow coming down, and you'll realize that the structure's something like a barometer. The Arch registers different atmospheric conditions by transforming itself into a new artwork entirely depending on what the sky and the sun are up to. And then there's its size: a beacon, a burden, big enough to become more than the math problem it took to erect it, but not so big as to not seem dwarfed by the plains it points towards. (TFS, 2025)