Face the Monumental: Finding Inspiration from the World Around You.
April 22, 2025
Six hundred and thirty feet tall. Six hundred and thirty feet wide. A perfect stainless-steel arc rising out of St. Louis like the earth itself decided to flex. Eero Saarinen finished the thing in 1965, and six decades later it still stops people cold. Not because it's tall (plenty of things are tall), but because it's precise .
An inverted catenary curve, which is architect-speak for "the exact shape a chain makes when you let it hang and then flip it upside down." Nature already worked out the physics. Saarinen just had the nerve to build it 63 stories high.
That's the part that gets me every time. It's not decoration. It's not there to look impressive and then buckle in a stiff wind.
The curve is the strength.
Function and beauty aren't fighting each other. They're the same move.
Stand underneath it and the thing plays tricks on you. From a distance it looks almost delicate, like it might be sketched on. Get close and it swallows the sky. Ride the tram to the top (yes, there's a tram, wedged inside the legs like some Bond-villain contraption) and you're staring down at the Mississippi doing its slow brown grind past a city that used to be the edge of the known world.
Every pioneer who pushed west funneled through roughly this spot. The Arch isn't just a monument to that. It's shaped like the exact motion of going.
Here's the part I actually want to talk about.
We love to admire monuments after they're finished.
Nobody stands under the Arch thinking about the underfunded budget, the engineering fights, the fact that construction crews were pouring concrete into a shape nobody had ever built before and just... trusting the math.
We only see the postcard version: gleaming, symmetrical, inevitable. We conveniently forget it was a mess before it was a masterpiece.
Same deal with a year. Same deal with a company. Same deal with whatever version of yourself you're currently mid-construction on.
Gateway Arch | St. Louis, MO
This year isn't a gift that shows up gift-wrapped. It's 630 feet of "figure it out as you go."
The opportunities worth having rarely walk in the front door labeled OPPORTUNITY.
They show up dressed as problems, deadlines, uncomfortable conversations, the project nobody else wanted to own. That's not a design flaw. That's the whole design.
The chain has to hang before it can hold anything up.
So here's the deal I'm making with myself, and I'd invite you to steal it: stop waiting for the disguise to come off. Treat the mountain like the point, not the obstacle blocking the point. Build something people have to get close to before they understand why it works.
And when it's still ugly and unfinished and full of scaffolding, build it anyway, because nobody remembers the scaffolding. They remember the skyline.
Go make something worth standing under.
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