The Gateway Arch in St. Louis is a rare case of a modern memorial that is as instantly recognizable as the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty. The 630-foot-tall stainless-steel arch is as grand as any Roman monument yet entirely modern in its pure abstraction. The architect, Eero Saarinen, was only 37 when he designed it, and if he had died right then he might be remembered as the F. Scott Fitzgerald of architecture. Instead, he went on to design more than 100 works, built and unbuilt, and was lionized during his lifetime but largely forgotten after his death (except as a regular clue in the New York Times crossword). Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, currently on display at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., aims to change that. This large show, accompanied by a weighty catalog, attempts to make sense of this creative, complex, and frustratingly mercurial individual. Not an easy task, since while Saarinen was firmly a man of postwar America, he dedicated himself to questioning the orthodoxy of his time.