We could do a lot worse than this. Photo by kimberlyfaye.

Today, Post architecture critic Philip Kennicott weighs in on the choice of Frank Gehry to design the Eisenhower Memorial. The commission document calls for a “plaza-type” memorial, including a canopy and a small building. It also asks Gehry to design “a new vision of memorialization: a new paradigm for memorials.”

Is that really what we need? Certainly, memorials needn’t all resemble earlier ones. Once, we built obelisks, like the Washington Monument. Later, memorials meant Greek-style temples and rotundas like the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials or the small but elegant DC War Memorial. The Vietnam Wall and the FDR Memorial each defined their own paradigms for memorials. But they also fit into their environments in a pleasing way. Little that Gehry has ever built does so, and if his idea of defining the “language … for a 21st century memorial” involves throwing out everything nice about the language of prior centuries for something jarring and unpleasant, it’d be best that we avoid speaking his language.

Kennicott agrees, warning against Gehry emulating a 2008 London design resembling “a jumble of wood and glass panels seemingly hung from a huge pair of parallel bars” or interactive devices that “overwhelm the place.” But he also tries to steer Gehry away from emulating the Navy Memorial, which he calls “not very interesting”:

It has a water element, some nice paving, a few benches and a little statue, “The Lone Sailor,” to suggest the human element of military service. The memorial’s best feature is its humility and its benign incorporation into the cityscape. Any number of second-tier landscape architecture firms could provide more of the same.

Can a memorial “reinvent” while also remaining humble and benign? Gehry is probably not the man to do that, though Kennicott feels he “deserves the freedom to try.” However, there’s a very fine line between interesting and garish. If our architecture critics keep criticizing good-but-not-spectacular memorials like the Navy memorial as “not very interesting,” architects won’t even try for humble.

Many architecture schools indoctrinate young architects with the notion that their designs must be bold, stand out, challenge orthodoxy, and make a statement, when in truth most buildings really just need to look nice, function well, relate to people on the human scale, and integrate well into the fabric of the city. But many architecture critics egg them on, pushing the warping of the craft of architecture into a modern art contest. Former New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable did it, Boston Globe critic Yvonne Abraham does it, and it sure sounds like Kennicott is doing it, even if in a small way.

The Eisenhower Memorial should function as a plaza and as a memorial. It might be time to reinvent the language of memorials, but we don’t need to reinvent plazas. Memorials have changed over the centuries, becoming different but not better or worse, while plazas have generally become worse. The classic European squares with fountains still work best, while plazas are modernism’s greatest failure among many.

If Gehry comes up with a visionary new vision for the Eisenhower Memorial that’s a lousy plaza, it’ll be a failure. No matter how much architecture critics appreciate its creativity, people have to appreciate sitting there and eating lunch as well. And interesting or not, the Navy Memorial succeeds admirably at the one goal while doing just fine at the other. Something like that from a “second-tier landscape architecture firm” could well do better for the city than what Gehry might devise. He deserves the freedom to try, but the citizens, NCPC, and CFA, which Kennicott calls the “District’s design watchdogs,” deserve the freedom to tell him to clip his boldness and make a good plaza.