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I should have been more clear. Classicism is safe in terms of aesthetics. If you build a neoclassical memorial, you won't hear any particularly vocal critics against the school of architecture chosen, or necessarily many complaints about it being "ugly."

Personally, I tend to agree. I take no particular offense to the style used to compose the MLK or WWII memorials. The individual components are very nice, and even the WWII monument is a very handsome structure as a whole.

However, when you add these pieces up, and then consider the conceptual purpose of the monument, the appropriateness of neoclassicism starts to fall apart, or in the case of the MLK memorial, the pieces don't add up to a completely satisfying whole.

However, "UGLY MEMORIAL DESIGN PROPOSED" makes a much more sensationalist headline than "Maybe we shouldn't built a triumphal monument to a conflict where 70 million people died?" I'm not entirely sure that it would have even been politically feasible to construct a more modest (or intentionally ugly) WWII memorial.

Criticizing the design of MLK memorial during the planning process would have been tough too, simply because it's hard to get a feel for these designs when they're on paper. Instead, everyone focused on the statue, which was really the only part of the memorial that anybody knew about before it was opened to the public.

Personally, I'm a big fan of the FDR memorial.

by andrew on Aug 29, 2011 12:38 pm • link • report