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The world’s tallest man-made monument (they really like superlatives in America), the arch is America’s symbolic gateway to the West. Four million people visit it each year. They just want to touch it or gawp at it or be near it.

According to those who know about these things, it’s an inverted catenary curve – the kind of organic shape that forms naturally when you hang a piece of string between two points. The designer, Eero Saarinen, also designed the Tulip chair and the TWA Terminal at JFK Airport in New York (that’s the funky, space-age one). He came up with the design of the Gateway Arch by dangling a twenty-one-inch length of string between his fingers, held seven inches apart, and scaling it up from there. Saarinen said he chose the shape of a dangling necklace in tribute to the great explorers, hunters and trappers of the West. As most people know, those pioneers always wore a wee single-strand pearl necklace and a twinset underneath all their rawhide gear, just in case they were ever invited to a tea dance in the outback. (Okay, I made that up. But they did always make sure they had a wee black dress in their saddlebag in case of emergencies.)

A lot of people rave about Saarinen’s Tulip chair, but the Gateway Arch is surely his finest piece. I’d seen it maybe half a dozen times before, but always from a distance, between buildings. It’s a bit like Paris and the Eiffel Tower – you keep seeing it from unexpected angles. But when you get to see it properly, it’s a thing of amazing beauty. My only slight disappointment was that I’d always thought that it straddles the Missouri River, but in fact it stands alone, on the west bank of the Missouri. But that doesn’t detract from how magnificent it looks.

The 630-foot arch was gleaming in the sun when I arrived. There were nine hundred tons of stainless steel standing in front of me, the most used in any single project in history. It fascinated me that they did the surveying during construction overnight, when it was cooler, so that expansion of the metal would be minimised. They built the arch as two separate legs, and then joined them together at the top. And do you know what the margin of error was for the base of each leg at ground level? One sixty-fourth of an inch. One sixty-fourth of a bloody inch. Any more than that, and the two legs would not have met at the top. It made me imagine the builders finishing the two legs to find that they’d built them perfectly, but a foot apart. Can you picture it? ‘Excuse me, mate, you wouldn’t happen to have a twelve-inch piece of stainless steel on you? We’re a bit short up here.’

I descended into the basement to take a lift all the way to the top. When I say lift, I mean a strange little pillbox that goes sideways as well as up and down, which of course it has to do as the top of the Gateway Arch is not directly above the base. Designing it presented a unique challenge for some of civil engineering’s finest minds, who knew that no conventional lift would be able to carry passengers all the way to the planned observation deck at the pinnacle of the arch. They suggested that two or more lifts would be needed, with passengers hopping from one to the next on their journey to the top. Nobody wanted that – it had to be a single-lift design. But after a lot of scratching of heads, the Harvard-and Yale-educated engineers drew a blank. No one could work out how to put a single lift into a structure that didn’t rise in a pin-straight line.

Then a young man came forward. A lift repairman by trade, his only qualification was a high school diploma, but he reckoned he had designed a lift that could ascend the whole parabolic structure. When he’d finished explaining his idea to a room of architects and engineers, he asked if there were any questions.

‘Yes,’ said one of the audience. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m thirty-four,’ he said. And left it at that.

A few years later, the mysterious lift repairman’s design was adopted and installed in each leg of the arch.

It’s a very curious