The prospect

Abstract

The Gateway Arch in St. Louis was meant to commemorate the "opening" of the west and the possibilities of the frontier. Instead, the Arch marks its closure. Sited on the west bank of the Mississippi River, this conspicuous monument has occupied a peripheral, if any, position within architectural discourse. However, by the fact that this object provides a view towards the surrounding landscape, it serves as a central component for considering how conceptualization of the land in the United States has changed over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or simply said, a vision of the landscape from a productive frontier to the consumptive domain. This thesis investigates the cognitive shifts in landscape visualization first as demonstrated by the national land survey, overland travel journals and pictorial depictions of the nineteenth century. These frontier images are then considered alongside those twentieth century representations that exhibited the completion of a systematized territory of an ideal future. The later representations found resonance in the regulation of actual views from the Gateway Arch. The analysis of these distinct forms of landscape visualization registers the larger changes in the characterization of capital in the United States. The Arch needs to be reconsidered in architectural discourse at large and more specifically through this thesis, as a productive insertion into the study of landscape to capital as it is manifest through visualization by the individual - be it the yeoman farmer or a major corporation. The intangibilities of history, landscape and capital are productively complicated when viewed from the Arch's observation deck. The view exhibited from the Gateway Arch exposes the closure of the landscape as a means to visualize potential and, as a result, closes the space of the frontier more successfully than prior attempts.