Latest version of proposal by Frank Gehry for an Eisenhower memorial on the National Mall
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By David Brussat
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
The National Civic Art Society, in Washington, D.C., is holding a competition for a counterproposal to Frank Gehry’s design for a memorial to President Eisenhower on the National Mass, in Washington. (Above is a rendering of the Gehry proposal.) Joining with the NCAS in hosting the competition is the mid-Atlantic chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America. Go here to learn how to enter the competition.
Members of the New England chapter of the ICA & CA should consider entering.
The NCAS site has some pithy words about Gehry’s proposed design:
Gehry’s proposed basketball court-sized metal mesh screens hung between massive concrete posts over sixty feel tall would be an uncivil, brutal insult to the classical city envisioned by Pierre L’Enfant and our nation’s Founders. Rather than being in harmony with Washington, the proposed monument would screen off and separate itself from the city, blocking views of the National Mall. This proposal fails Eisenhower, fails beauty, fails our capital city, and, in so doing, fails our nation.
oh, i don’t know. i think it personifies ike and the 50′s – kind of bland and featureless.
i may be wrong but i think i detect just a touch of enmity in the NCAS statement. and what did they expect from Gehry. i call this pretty restrained and in good taste compared to most of his architecture.
Dear Ms. Channing – Thanks for your comment. Perhaps the Gehry proposal does personify Eisenhower, but I think not. He may have been bland and he might have been progressive in some of his domestic policies (“We’re all Keynesians now” came a little later, but the idea gave rise to the quote, not vice versa). However, I doubt that he would have characterized himself as a modernist, and probably, if you could put it to him today, he’d prefer a more traditional sort of monument.
Either way, nobody would blame Gehry (except on general principles) for taking such a commission or designing it as he has. It is indeed more restrained and in better taste than most of his work. However, we classicists would blame the people in charge of hiring Gehry for such a commission. The NCAS is well within its rights – and its senses – to repudiate the design and the commission, and is to be applauded for seeking alternatives, however theoretical.
- David Brussat
DB –
I completely agree with you regarding the design — it’s intrusive and wildly inappropriate. What’s the schedule for making a decision on a design for the memorial?
(Although Ms Channing does remind me that even back in the Sixties there was a steady stream of rude jokes about “Eisenhower architecture.”)
One stray thought: After he was president, Eisenhower served on Gettysburg College’s Board of Trustees. While doing so, the question came up — Where to build walkways around an expanding campus? Eisenhower, ever practical, said, Why not wait to see where the students blaze pathways through the grass and then build walkways to follow the demand — which I’ve been told is just what the College did. And that leads me to the nature of a Mall memorial. The Mall is a big muddy mess, with no real coherence, no useful traffic flow, insufficient paved areas, etc. While I’d like to see a great “classical” memorial as much as you, the President who gave us the interstate highway system might equally be memorialized by a rationalization of the Mall’s pathways and greenspace — which is not necessarily an alternative to what you are seeking.
Ancient – If you click on the link in the original post to the NCAS, you should be able to locate a schedule for the competition. As for a decision on the design for the memorial itself, I believe that unless a Tahrir Square moment pops up in the Nation’s Capital, it’s pretty much a done deal, with the Gehry monstrosity largely set in cement, if not fixed in its bottom detail.
As I said in my post, I imagine that the former president, were he asked, would like to have a memorial that might be capable of confusion with a monument.
– David Brussat