Over the past year, “starchitect” Frank Gehry's design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial on the National Mall, has been the subject of immense and growing criticism and controversy. Objections to the proposed design, more of an anti-memorial than a memorial, have come from all quarters including the entire Eisenhower family, the National Civic Art Society (on which we serve as Board members), numerous other civic organizations, journalists, politicians, and architects. The House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands even had a hearing to discuss the controversy on March 20.
Opposition to the proposed memorial spans across a number of issues including the closed, opaque, and undemocratic process that led to Gehry’s selection, the depiction of Eisenhower as a barefoot boy, the Memorial’s lack of conformity to the capital’s McMillan and L’Enfant plans that legally define the city’s layout, the 13 80-feet-tall veritable missile silos spread throughout the four-acre plaza, the unsustainable and ugly 80-feet-tall woven chain-link “tapestries” depicting trees without leaves enclosing the plaza, and the $120 million cost to American taxpayers for the design and construction plus the additional cost of maintaining it.
Gehry was selected through a de facto closed competition that solicited only 44 entries from architectural firms. For comparison, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial had an open competition with over 1,400 entries and the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial had an open competition with over 900 entries. Gehry’s scheme would occupy a territory adjacent to the National Mall between the National Air and Space Museum and the Department of Education building. The Gehry plan would take a few plots of land currently intersected by streets and join them into a signal four-acre plaza. Around the plaza will be 13 80-foot tall unornamented “columns”. Since the “columns” will not have a capital or base, they look like silos or the cylindrical centers of missiles.
Hung between these silos will be woven metal, perhaps partially coated in Teflon, very similar to Mr. Gehry’s beloved chain-link motif, which will depict the landscape surrounding the home in Abilene, Kansas where Dwight Eisenhower was raised. In the center of the plaza will be sycamore trees, two photographic “sculpture relief” blocks of Eisenhower, excerpts from three speeches (his Farewell Address, Homecoming Speech, and Guildhall Address), and on a large block would be Eisenhower depicted as a boy, perhaps barefoot, with his legs spread and hanging over a ledge.
Gehry stated at the National Archives in October, “I think there are people that think this is too big a space for Eisenhower. He wasn't as important as that space is. Why does he have a space that's bigger than somebody else? He doesn't. He's gonna have a little plank, for a little boy.” Alexis de Tocqueville’s words appear to be particularly appropriate to explain this lowering of Eisenhower from a man of great deeds to a tiny boy:
There is, in fact, a manly and lawful passion for equality that incites men to wish all to be powerful and honored. This passion tends to elevate the humble to the rank of the great; but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level . . .
Gehry opined at the same event, “The Lincoln Memorial is in the form of a Greek temple. What's that got to do with Lincoln?” We build monuments and memorials dedicated to the people whose ideals and virtues we seek to emulate. In the case of the Lincoln Memorial, he was honored not to make him into a god, but to emphasize that his virtues are worthy of immortality. Eisenhower himself offered reasons for why greatness is worthy of our contemplation, our memory, our honor, and our praise.
We are about to see, and are seeing, a renaissance . . . in American pride in the characteristics that have made America great—in the qualities that we so much admire in our leaders, from Benjamin Franklin through Washington, right down to our own times - where those people have been honest and straightforward and courageous—ready to do their duty—and are dedicated to you - all of you - instead of to themselves. I believe, as we contemplate their lives and all the things they did, our spirits go up . . . So, my prayer is merely this: That all of us will be inspired by the examples of those men long gone.
We like Ike. His memory deserves better and the American people deserve better than the proposed travesty, particularly for an investment of $120 million of congressionally allocated taxpayer money and 4 acres of precious land on the National Mall. It is not too late. There should be a new fair and open competition for a memorial that will allow visitors now and in the future to be inspired by President Eisenhower’s life, virtues, and greatness so that their “spirits go up.”
Erik Bootsma and Eric Wind serve on the Board of Directors of the National Civic Art Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the promotion of classical art and architecture. For more on the Society’s efforts, please see www.eisenhowermemorial.net and www.civicart.org.
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Comments:
And also, have you seen the tapestries and columns? They're just ugly.
Here on Earth, we honor adult men and women for their accomplishments and good deeds.
We don't honor children for simply being born in a certain town.
Wow, just wow.
Silos and chain-link fences were the heart of the Cold War. They are appropriate too.
This memorial is much more about Gehry, than it is about Eisenhower. If the people in charge of this had any sense, they would fire Frank Gehry.
"Whoever humbles himself" becomes first. While the arrogant, the hard-thinkers than condemn all others? They are last in the eyes of God.
I remember Eisenhauer well in fact; and this, the greatest of generals, was a very soft-spoken man.
But does the memorial really express humility, or humiliation? Is it correct to honor Eisenhower after his victories on our behalf by portraying him in this way? Let's say someone visited from a foreign country, not knowing much about the United States or World War II, and saw the proposed memorial. Do you think they would appreciate the humility of a great general, or would they wonder why there's a statue of a barefoot farm boy surrounded by weird metal fences and huge steel tubes?
Perhaps my sensibilities are not sufficiently avant-garde to appreciate the profound meaning in this seemingly rather odd memorial. Or maybe there just isn't any profound meaning, but just mediocrity dressed up in pretension and lacking in any noble feeling?
PS Check out the disaster this architect is responsible for in Toronto. The ROM museum was hacked to bits for a couple of hundred million and now looks more like a suburban movie-plex than a masterpiece.
Just a few days ago, the AP reported on the controversy: "'My detractors say that I have missed the point, and that I am trying to diminish the stature of this great man,' Gehry wrote. 'I assure you that my only intent is to celebrate and honor this world hero and visionary leader.'
If the memorial organizers and the family 'conclude that the sculpture of young Eisenhower is an inappropriate way to honor him, then I will be open to exploring other options with them,' Gehry wrote.
Gehry noted that he has met with Eisenhower's granddaughters, Susan and Anne Eisenhower, and is exploring other design ideas to respond to their concerns. Options include adding a list of accomplishments, more quotations from Eisenhower or additional images in stone to show his achievements, he said."
So why this portrayal of Gehry here as inflexible and ideologically hostile to Eisenhower? I think it's rather simple and has little to do with Gehry's alleged hostility to Eisenhower. The National Civic Art Society wants triumphalist art and architecture, and Gehry is not interested in that.
Philip Kennicott has defended Gehry's memorial with some striking reasoning: "Eisenhower was a great man, but there were other Eisenhowers right behind him, other men who could have done what he did, who would have risen to the occasion if they had been tapped. To deny that does Eisenhower no honor and great injustice to the surfeit of American talent." Eisenhower commanded many great soldiers, but I'm not sure that any of them could have been Eisenhowers. If they were, it raises the whole point of why we are memorializing Ike in the first place. If we're just honoring the millions of veterans who liberated Europe, we already have a memorial for that down by the Washington Monument.
If in fact Ike really was a great man worthy of a memorial on the Mall, he's the one that ought to be comprehensibly honored, rather than nameless "Eisenhowers right behind him." Perhaps not necessarily with another Palladian temple or statue (although these have a long successful track record to date), but probably not with giant steel sheets and silos that reduce the honoree to an Everyman and an abstraction, either.
I agree with the authors. Ike deserves better.
Most of the Art world today notes, that though the first, common idea of art is that it must be "pretty," a more advanced asthetic demands instead, that it be informative, complex, rather than pretty.
Often in fact, a very ugly picture tells us far more, than a pretty one.
Do you want a pretty picture of war? Would that be best?
The sacrifices made are beautiful, even if the war as a whole is not. You seem to suggest that we spread and continue the demoralizing and dehumanizing aspects of war by enshrining them in "art." While that is "informative" in some sense, is it morally any better than the war it depicts? Why do you want to reproduce war?
Some complexity is needed, yes. We're not fascists and don't need to copy the triumphalist style of Imperial Rome. But I think we do need to communicate the virtues of those who sacrificed on our behalf in a way that inspires and uplifts. You seem to think that memorials should dehumanize and alienate, as war itself does.
No, that is not what civic art is about. "Noble", "profound", "inspiring", "beautiful", or "sublime" seem to be more apt descriptors of successful civic art.
The language here seems to betray the real intent -- to cast the intent of the authors as wanting something as banal as "pretty" or to imply that they are motivated by a sense of misplaced superiority misses the higher aspirations and virtues to which we are called both personally and as a nation -- and which the architect ought to strive to express.
If Eisenhower deserves any national recognition with a Federal monument it ought to be for such values, and the language of the monument ought to encode such values. How that might happen is a different question -- although the virtually universal language of classical formalism (axiality, hierarchy, order, symmetry, monumental scale, permanent, durable and fine materials, encoded iconography, etc) is certainly apt and readily understood as a conveyor of such meaning.
The architectural question is "what do you want to say"? From that one should then ask what sort of language best communicates the message to the intended audience. The authors seem to have a legitimate concern that both the message and the architecture language fail to convey what virtues we should valorize in the person of President Eisenhower. It should not be trivialized to tendentious polemics about what is "pretty" or triumphalistic.
John Keegan wrote that the crowning mercy of World War II was that Hitler didn't get the bomb. Part of the reason for that was Ike; he and the armies he commanded drove back the V1 and V2 until Hitler created his own twin memorials, the dead city of Berlin and a burnt stash of bones in Moscow. Ike stood firm for his 2 years as Allied Supreme Commander and 8 years as Commander in Chief, facing down first Hitler and then Stalin, so the national mall could be preserved for Gehry's at once childish and Hitlerite "piss Eisenhower" gotterdammerung.
If this $120 million monstrosity ever gets built by the America haters, perhaps someone--many someones--could return the favor by desecrating Gehry and his creation when dark falls on DC.
And it is good to remember, too, those many barefoot children in the villages of France and finally even Germany - and finally, in the American south - that Eisenhower liberated.
In fact, this would be very suitable memorial. For a good Christian general, and a moderate Republican, after all. Who knew that unless we are as humble as a child, we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.