ABSTRACT
Around the time that Eero Saarinen’s Gateway Arch entered the public imaginary as the centerpiece for the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial (1948) in St. Louis, Eric Mendelsohn designed a parabolic roof for the city’s first modern synagogue. Two further iterations of parabolic form followed, one in the plan for a Catholic church designed by Murphy and Mackey, Architects and the other, designed by architect Gyo Obata of Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum for the Catholic Benedictines, featuring parabolic arches repeated around a centralized altar. This chapter analyzes these three extraordinary religious buildings in terms of their utility as sacred architecture including their modern representational potential while examining the diverse origins of parabolic form in their designs. It further argues that innovative uses of materials such as thin-shell concrete inspired secular parabolic structures that taken together under the umbrella of the Gateway Arch, created a modern architectural signature for St. Louis.
