Eero Saarinen and the Telegram Sent to His Father by Mistake

In nineteen forty-seven, the federal government announced a design competition for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial on the St. Louis riverfront. The brief was open: something monumental, something befitting the city that had been the gateway to the American West. One hundred seventy-two entries came in.

Eero Saarinen submitted a catenary arch in stainless steel. A catenary curve is the shape a chain makes when you hold both ends, the precise geometry of a hanging cable reversed into a standing form. At six hundred thirty feet, his proposed arch would be the tallest monument in the United States. The competition committee picked his design. The congratulatory telegram, according to accounts that have circulated in architectural circles since, was initially delivered to his father, Eliel Saarinen, who had also entered and placed second. Father and son had been trained together at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. The committee's confusion, whether a clerical error or a momentary misread of the name, became one of architecture's more famous anecdotes. The primary-source verification of the telegram story rests on accounts that have not been independently confirmed in the archival record, though the competition result itself is thoroughly documented.

Construction did not begin until nineteen sixty-three, fifteen years after the competition, delayed by funding and the complexity of the site. Eero Saarinen died in nineteen sixty-one and did not see the Arch completed. It was finished on October twenty-eighth, nineteen sixty-five. It remains the tallest monument in the United States.