Today, 20 August, brings together two very different creative figures who were born on exactly the same date: rock singer Robert Plant, born in 1948, and Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, born in 1910.
Plant was born in West Bromwich, in England’s Black Country, and grew up nearby in Halesowen. He would go on to become the unmistakable voice of Led Zeppelin, one of the defining rock bands of the 1970s. Among their most enduring recordings is Stairway to Heaven, released on the untitled fourth Led Zeppelin album in 1971.
Thirty-eight years before Plant, Eero Saarinen was born in Kirkkonummi, Finland, into an extraordinary architectural family. His father, Eliel Saarinen, was already a major Finnish architect, responsible for landmarks including Helsinki Central Station. The family moved to the United States when Eero was young, and he subsequently developed his own distinctive architectural career.
Perhaps Eero Saarinen’s most immediately recognisable creation is the Gateway Arch in St Louis, Missouri. His design won the architectural competition for the monument in 1948, although Saarinen died in 1961 and never saw the completed structure. Finished in 1965, the stainless-steel arch rises 630 feet (192 metres) above the banks of the Mississippi River and commemorates St Louis’s historic role as the “Gateway to the West”.
And that gives us today’s connection.
Robert Plant gives us the Stairway. Eero Saarinen gives us the Gateway.
Both reach dramatically towards the sky, one through music and the other through architecture. And, rather wonderfully, the Gateway Arch really does contain a stairway: 1,076 steps run up each leg to the top, although they are reserved for maintenance and emergencies.
Two men. Two very different creative disciplines. One shared birthday.
Stairway and Gateway. 🔗