Posts about Eisenhower Memorial

The current site

Congress required that President Eisenhower's Memorial be located to maximize prominence, public access, and availability; ensure thematic appropriateness to Eisenhower's memory; and be feasible while avoiding undue controversy. The chosen site happens to satisfy each of these needs, but not particularly well.

The planned location, to be named Eisenhower Square, is not without symbolism. Placed between the Department of Education and the National Air and Space Museum, the site was designed to create a connection with two agencies that were established during his presidency, the Department of Education and NASA.

But the non-controversial location and symbolism may be illusory. First, the site's lack of controversy mostly reflects the fact that the site is currently an urban dead space with limited development options and a lack of a cohesive neighborhood to protest. This seems a poorly justified reason to choose a certain site.

Secondly, neither the Department of Education nor NASA serves as a key element of President Eisenhower's legacy or the reason for which he's being honored. Few would put the creation of the Department of Education or NASA at the top of Ike's list of achievements, which includes leading the Allied forces in Europe during WWII, ending the Korean War, creating the Interstate Highway System, laying the groundwork for the Civil Rights movement through desegregation of the government and two key Civil Rights laws, and articulating the "Domino System" that defined the Cold War as well as the threat of undue political influence by the "military-industrial complex."

Moreover, even this thematic justification for the location may not make sense in a few years. Departments and agencies frequently move, and while it is likely that the Air and Space Museum (which is not a part of NASA) is there to stay, the Department of Education could move or even consolidated with another agency.

Surely another consideration was proximity to the Mall and to a steady stream of visitors. But where is the value is having a lot of people visit an uninspiring memorial? The Theodore Roosevelt Memorial is far from the crowds and can only be accessed by foot from Virginia, but its sense of solitude is an enhancement to the memorial. Foot traffic should drive our decisions about where to put dry cleaners, not memorials.

The weak justification for the current site and its controversy leads to the inevitable question: Could we get a better design at a better location?

Where else could it go?

DC has plenty of sites to build new memorials. Through the Commemorative Works Acts, Congress created a Memorial Task Force that identified more than 100 locations in 2001 in the DC area suitable for a memorial. The proposed Eisenhower Memorial site made their list of 20 "prime locations." [See the list and map on pages 20-21 of the Task Force's report]

In light of the current controversy, it may be time to start looking at the remaining 19.

Other locations identified by the Task Force might be more appropriate than the current site. Perhaps the South Capitol Street terminus at the Anacostia River, just south of the baseball stadium or the 10th Street Overlook would be fitting. Both are near highways, for which Ike is well known, and the first is soon to be redeveloped and within a very short distance of a pair of military bases. The site on Columbia Island, near Arlington Cemetery and not far from Fort Myer where Eisenhower twice lived, would also be fitting.

Other sites not on the list would also be suitable. Since the Task Force report came out, the Awakening has moved from the southern tip of Hains Point. This site would be a beautiful location for a memorial and one that's within sight of the Army War College that Ike attended in the 1920s. The soon-to-be-redeveloped Southwest Waterfront also presents opportunities.

While historically we have chosen sites within the nation's capital as most worthy of our national attention, a location outside of DC might better honor President Eisenhower. Gettysburg was Eisenhower's home after World War II and where he chose to retire. Because of its prominence within American history, it is well visited and thus can easily meet the 3 requirements of the law authorizing the memorial.

Some might be concerned that a monument to a President in close proximity to the battlefield would detract from the significance of the battle and the address that followed it. But at the same time, Gettysburg would seem a particularly poignant location for a memorial to one of our country's most decorated soldiers.

Eisenhower was a great leader, and he is worthy of a great memorial. If this site constrains his memorial to the point of making it a failure, perhaps the smart thing to do is to start over with a new site.

Indeed, the best and most beautiful, the most serene and the most magnificent, become the backdrop for the most sacred traditions and the most meaningful displays of civic duty.

What American could imagine Martin Luther King's famous speech being given from any other place than from the grand steps of the Lincoln Memorial? Would the words, "I have a dream" have carried the same magnitude and awe to inspire generations had they been spoken before a bland glass box of a federal building?

It is in our best memorials that the loftiness of the architecture not only provides a fitting setting, but also serves to emphasize the greatest ideals to which we aspire as citizens.

The Eisenhower Memorial which Gehry has proposed, pictured below, emphasizes none of the ideals of one of our nation's great heroes, but reduces Eisenhower's accomplishment to the level of the mundane.

Massive unadorned pillars serve not to inspire wonder, but rather to make one feel miniscule and inconsequential. Sheets of metal, strung up like drive-in movie screens between the enormous pillars communicate not the universal ideals of unity, sacrifice and freedom, but rather random moments picked from the President's life.

In contrast, designs chosen by the NCAS and the ICA&A and created by architects and artisans were chosen because they express through meaningful sculpture, beautiful composition and a deference to the city, as well as the civic virtues that Eisenhower himself exemplified.

The first place winner, Daniel Cook, stated that his winning design, pictured at the top of this post, was designed not as an arch celebrating the victory of a conqueror, but rather an arch of peace. The transition Cook reflects of Eisenhower as a general to Eisenhower as president and citizen evokes memories of Washington as Cincinnatus, the revered leader who laid aside his power and returned to his farm when his work was complete.

Sylvester Bartos and Whitley Esteban's second place design, pictured right, presented an arch framing the axis of Maryland Avenue, with semicircular colonnades facing the dome of the Capitol, surrounding a figure of Eisenhower. In front of this design one might contemplate the weight of responsibility faced as he pondered the invasion the night before D-Day in 1944.

Each design awarded was classical by design, but each was unique. Some chose to place Eisenhower high atop a pedestal, others placed him in a temple. In each we can see the limitless expressive capability of architecture when the designers cast off the limits of the modernist idiom. What all of the designs had in common was that they created a fitting place to honor and remember a man who exemplifies the best of what America has to offer.

Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of the President, in her remarks at the award ceremony stated that she could we could imagine this becoming a setting that every year future generations would gather to remember, as we did on Monday, the sacrifice of so many brave men on D-Day. That more than just a memorial to one man, that this place could become as the Lincoln Memorial has become, a sacred place to honor the civic virtue which we all aspire.

Below are the winners of the counterproposal competition:

1st Place

2nd Place

3rd Place (a tie)

2 commendations

The cylinders do more than any other element to make the memorial visually striking from a distance, and so are indispensable to the design, but at 80 feet tall and lacking any details whatsoever they will be too bare up close. Like the lackluster inner plaza, the cylinders are a missed opportunity for sculpture. If I were the designer I might go classical, but Gehry could propose something like bareiss columns and that would be just as good.

I also have mixed feelings about the other major element of the memorial, the metal tapestries. I appreciate and agree with the desire to cover up the Education Department building, but to do so with oversized picture panels is a touch contrived, a little too easy. It's like we've taken the tarps that are supposed to hide the parking garages at Nationals Ballpark and turned them into a monument. It's a difficult problem, but is that *really* the best we can do?

Gehry deserves credit for restraining himself from retreading his own familiar shtick. Another mass of crumbled titanium would have been inappropriate; it would be memorial to Gehry himself more so than Eisenhower. But at the same time I have to say I'm disappointed that there's nothing daring in this proposal. Such rare opportunities for artful civic sculpture shouldn't be ignored. This memorial could be worse, but it could also be a lot better.

Cross-posted at BeyondDC.

The street condition is undefined, bounded by the tapestries except at three prominent areas. The axis of Maryland Avenue cuts through the memorial, with the stone ring in the center. Building the memorial without disrupting the viewshed of the Capitol or traffic flow were seen as the two big problems. The Memorial Commission selected a design that sidesteps the issue of sightlines by removing one of eight columns and two sections of the screens. This way, the design frames the primary view of the Capitol with the same structures that fit it into the grid.

The panel rejected other alternatives that maintained a vehicular Maryland Avenue road through the monument. Instead, they chose to create a pedestrian plaza. The site, adjacent to the Mall, tries to moves the monumental program off of the Mall and drawing visitors, most of whom tour on foot.

Gehry has tamed his own style for this project, although the ring of stones exemplifies the blockish forms he had been experimenting with since the opening of Walt Disney Hall. Mercifully, Gehry has also eschewed the dismal expressionism of a younger generation of memorial designers. The design team did not try to assign tremendous meaning to every little detail. Instead, it is a building that can be judged for its power and for its beauty, although people will disagree.

Last year, the Post's architecture critic Philip Kennicott called for a new "language" of memorialization. Gehry partly delivers, but the project also contains overt references to the neoclassical precedents around DC. The memorial succeeds because of them, even as it inverts some and adds a few new details.

The large screens are the most novel idea of the entire memorial. They expand the sculptural program to a gigantic scale, reaching eighty feet into the air. During the daytime, the might shade the interior space. At night the model shows them lit from the courtyard, more clearly revealing the content to Independence Avenue.

Gehry revisits some older ideas as well. Although the Mall hasn't seen memorial trees in a century, they once formed a good part of the commemorative landscape and this monument contains one as the centerpiece of the ring of rectangular monoliths.

On the faces of each block, reliefs will relate significant moments of in the career of the soldier and president. Relief sculpture has been less popular as part of DC's monumental landscape. In no other memorial is it the primary form of representation. The models show large images extending to the edges of each block, almost like a digital photograph or television image. We do not want to be trapped by our technology, but the gesture toward on-screen representation does seem fresh. However, fifteen years later, the once-exotic etchings on the Korean War Veterans Memorial feel thin and inexpressive. Now, the media are moving into 3-D for its effect, so this design follows the trend back into tradition.

If the sculptural style looks promising, the columns that support the screens already disappoint. In the model, they appear too much like the dowels used to represent the shafts, and not enough like real pieces of architecture. They are mute and unattractive. Compare them to the colonnade on the Lincoln Memorial, where Henry Bacon emphasized permanence and with the beauty and connotations of the Doric order. At the Eisenhower Memorial, little can be said about the columns because the columns say so little. Gehry may not have made a grand colonnade, but he did design a great rotunda.

The ensemble at the heart of the memorial evokes a humble country life—Mayberry, even. Eisenhower was never a fortunate son; rural life bookended his life and formed his character. Born in Abiline, Kansas, and retiring to a farm in Gettysburg, the great deeds and great words that surround the bucolic centerpiece suggest a practical man thrust into history. This particular relationship is the most powerful image presented by the monument. On another level, planting a landscape at the center of a circular memorial references Jefferson. Even as monuments crumble, the ensemble seems to suggest, the self-sustaining farm life continues Eisenhower's legacy.

The other images will come later, so we do not yet know the style or the artist, or even the content. How these artworks will convey complex achievements like the occupation of Europe or interstate highway system remains uncertain. The Civil Rights Movement, which grew more powerful and accomplished key victories had relatively little to to with Ike. Again, the metaphor of simplicity surrounded by greatness will guide visitors to examine what made the man rather than what the man made.

Before the collectible shovels even hit the ground, this design will come under review by the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission. More importantly, translating the model-driven architecture of Frank Gehry into physical designs will require substantial thought, such as how to humanize those columns. The sculptural program will be contentious as well. Recognizing a man who was a baseball coach, an officer, a college president, General Of the Armies, and President of the United States will be challenging. Gehry and the many agencies that oversee the mall must cooperate to produce the most affecting and communicative architecture possible.

The memorial is trying to be taken seriously. Gehry has said that his own military experience in 1955-1957 motivated him to work on this particular project, and that he holds particular respect for the man who was Commander-in-Chief during that time. Some people will never like Frank Gehry. His cavalier style can feel like an insult to care and effort. Although this is just a cultivated image, this memorial must transcend his style to be recognized as a monument to Eisenhower. Based on what was displayed yesterday, with a little hard work, the monument could be one of Washington's best.

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.