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Capitol Ideas
A Monstrosity, Not a Monument
Frank Gehry’s design for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington is an insult to all concerned.
You may have heard that an Eisenhower Memorial is on the drawing boards. Or maybe you haven’t — there has been little publicity. It will occupy a four-acre site just off the Mall and within sight of the Capitol. Perhaps the powers that be saw its unpopularity coming a mile off. The executive director of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission acknowledged that they were “moving quickly,” and according to Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post, that “may be rattling a town that likes to take decades considering additions to its monumental core.” Milton Grenfell, vice chairman of the National Civic Art Society—an organization highly critical of the planned memorial—said the idea now seems to be to “move quickly to construction before anyone can voice objections.”
Ground-breaking is (or was) scheduled for the late fall of 2012, less than a year from now. But word of the planned abomination is spreading. And when I called the Eisenhower Memorial Commission’s executive architect, Daniel Feil, he told me that they would not be meeting their end-of-October deadline for submitting a revised design for the National Capital Planning Commission meeting in December.
The architect chosen to design the memorial is Frank Gehry and you surely have heard of him. He’s the one whose undulating metallic structures draw attention to themselves. Germaine Greer called them “scrunched-up brown bags.”
How was Gehry chosen to memorialize Eisenhower? I have been trying to find out, without much success. Oh, there was a “competition”— but it was a choice “strictly confined to modernists,” I was told by someone in the know. Perhaps it was rigged. Apparently an influential figure in the choice of Gehry was Rocco Siciliano, a businessman from Beverly Hills who is also chairman of the Commission. A big fundraiser for Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and a person who sits on the L.A. Philharmonic board with Gehry, Siciliano was an assistant secretary of labor in the first Eisenhower administration. Gehry also brought along avant-garde theater director Robert Wilson, who would help Gehry put Eisenhower in his proper place.
“It made me very tearful to realize that this great man was not recognized,” Gehry said last year. But don’t trust those crocodile tears. He’s interested in aesthetic issues only to disparage them. “I’m confused as to what’s ugly and what’s pretty,” the Los Angeles Times quoted him as saying in a particular moment of clarity.
The current design for the Eisenhower Memorial is a monstrosity. Two views are published here. One shows 60-foot concrete posts, symbolizing precisely nothing, arrayed in front of the Department of Education building. The other shows the “memorial” in its full 540-foot width, with a chain-link fence (called a “tapestry”) suspended from those monster posts. The Department of Education is almost entirely concealed behind it. Cars in the foreground (on Independence Avenue) show the massive scale.
The chain-link “tapestry” depicts what seem to be dead trees in Abilene, Kansas. “These chain-link trees do not have leaves, and depict a permanent winter,” said Eric Wind, secretary of the National Civic Arts Society. That society, which earlier this year held an Eisenhower Memorial counterproposal competition, stated:
Gehry’s proposed basketball-court sized metal mesh screens hung between massive concrete posts over 60 feet tall would be an uncivil, brutal insult to the classical city envisioned by Pierre L’Enfant and our nation’s founders.
That could be music to the ears of Frank Gehry, however. Kennicott, the Washington Post’s culture critic, has put his finger on what Gehry really wants: “To break with centuries of tradition in the aesthetics of memorialization.” But when a tradition lasts for centuries, maybe there’s a reason for it. Wanting to break with it is the familiar goal of revolutionaries masquerading as artists.
In a 1995 interview, Gehry said: “What got me excited in the beginning were the social issues. I come from a very lefty liberal family in Canada and architecture looked like it was the panacea. You could make housing for the poor.”
In the case of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project in St. Louis (completed in 1956; demolished in 1972), social issues—crime above all—were indeed central but the high-rise architecture was part of the problem rather than a panacea. The sad fate of Pruitt-Igoe, designed by a mid-century mainstream modernist Japanese architect, was the first (but not the last) demolition of modernist architecture. Since then the Cabrini-Green high-rise projects in Chicago have also been knocked down, as have others all over the country.
The Gehry monstrosity on the Mall will cost U.S. taxpayers more than $100 million, so, while acting as our aesthetic tutors, our avant-guardians also feast off our taxes. The proposed Eisenhower Memorial is not at all comparable to the one recently dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr., also on the Mall. That ponderous chunk of granite at least was paid for with private funds. It was also a sincere attempt to represent King as, precisely, a monumental figure. (The King quotation on it misrepresented what King said, however, leading Maya Angelou and the Washington Post to recommend that it be chiseled off and reengraved.)
Kennicott wasn’t entirely wrong when he called Gehry the world’s most famous architect. But famous is an inch away from infamous, and that’s what could lie ahead for Gehry.
CONSIDER WASHINGTON’S best-known monuments. The Lincoln Memorial (1912–22) tells visitors: “Here is a man who was a great president!” You are expected to admire him. You probably don’t know who designed the memorial, but that’s because the architect, Henry Bacon, wasn’t trying to draw attention to himself. At a public talk at the National Archives in October, Gehry was nonetheless condescending about the Lincoln Memorial. It’s “in the form of a Greek temple,” he said. “What’s that got to do with Lincoln?” Maybe they should have built him a log cabin.
The Jefferson Memorial was also built as a classical temple. (Architect: John Russell Pope. Construction: 1939–43.) By then modernists were already sensing that our cultural borders were undefended and that aesthetic standards could be subverted and then reenlisted in a war against bourgeois taste. So the Jefferson Memorial was criticized as retrograde even as it was being built. Dressing up 20th-century buildings in “styles that are safely dead,” Gehry’s forerunners complained, was a “tired architectural lie.” But the people liked what they saw, FDR was solidly behind it, and the memorial was not changed. It is popular today.
About the Author
Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator and author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science, The Noblest Triumph: Property and Prosperity Through the Ages, and most recently Questioning Einstein: Is Relativity Necessary? (2009).
Letter to the Editor View all comments (52) | Leave a comment
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Occam's Tool| 1.28.12 @ 5:00PM
A sculpture of the man in an Eisenhower jacket gazing at the Capital would be nice and appropriate, in an appropriate Greek Temple.
Pinatta| 2.8.12 @ 5:19PM
Enough monuments already. Something on a much smaller scale, please.
Mike Hawk| 1.28.12 @ 6:12PM
Unlike Gehry, Ike was not a self adoring egoist. Having one design a memorial to him is insulting and perverse.
alex parkhurst| 1.28.12 @ 6:28PM
Tom,
I just went on the Eisenhower Commission's website. It's far worse than you describe. It made me laugh and cry simultaneously. King's New Clothes and all that.
I should have been a sensitive, caring, avant garde designer then it would be $50 mil for me $50 mil for the nutty memorial and maybe many more commissioned pieces of "artwork".
Isn't the 21st century just a hoot?
oldfart| 2.8.12 @ 7:00AM
Alex - I checked out the site you mentioned.
I think the design is pretty - pretty ugly.
As mentioned - it is not in character with the man. Eisenhower was not as 'low key' as Bradly, but certainly he was no Patton for showing off.
His memorial needs to reflect that.
This concept is way way off the mark.
http://eisenhowermemorial.org/menu.php?mid=19
JFGalt| 2.8.12 @ 12:56PM
$100 million for that? It looks like the material shouldn't cost more than $50,000 and the labor maybe $200,000 for a total of $250,000 beyond that where is the rest of the money going? I don't know if the design is all that ugly but it does seem pretty stupid and way overpriced. I think it dishonors Ike. I think a better one would be a giant statue of him in his WWII General's uniform facing the Pentagon and with his right arm in the air, there should be a wagging pointer finger saying no-no to the Pentagon and the Military Industrial Complex that he so skillfully warned us against. This junk is going to be built - have no doubt about that. Eisenhower's family should publicly call for a boycott of the opening ceremony.
Rurik| 2.8.12 @ 7:32PM
Eventually, this memorial will be known as "Rommel's Revenge".
Petronius| 1.28.12 @ 6:51PM
The memories I have of Eisenhower are of an ineffective president beset by populist idiots until his true self showed up over the incident in Little Rock, after which he was quoted as saying, "we're all liberals now." He was more than content to add his weight to the Supreme Court desegregation order not just as an elitist, but the soldier he was first. He also spoke of "turning this country into one big camp." Freedom for the lower orders was anathema to him and he was really just a New Dealer in weasels clothing along with West Point hauteur. A lot more G.I. s died in the Bulge than was necessary because he and Bedel Smith would not allow Patton to cut off the salient and trap the Germans even after he saved Ike's bacon at Bastogne. The records of all the line medical units in northern France were destroyed later on Eisenhower's order to Allen Dulles. The history and records of my Father's unit, the 344th Medical Dispensary are nowhere to be found and Dad wrote all the reports. Army politics and the atrocity spawned thereby are bad enough. But destroying history to preserve a myth and certain back sides is despicable. A more fitting monument would be a WWII soldiers helmet atop a 6' tall letter P, of which this memorial is brought to you by. It stands for Pretense. That is all.
Occam's Tool| 1.28.12 @ 9:23PM
You mean, Petronius, like not getting proper winter clothes, winter camouflauge, or cold weather footwear to the troops in time to save countless casualties, especially as he let a grandiose incompetent moron, Jesus Christ Himself Lee, run Logistics?
Or do you mean not OKing the installation of the 17 pounder gun as routine on American Shermans, thus denying American troops the most effective anti-armor weapon the Western allies developed in WWII?
Or was it not ensuring proper supplies for the American artillery, so that chronic shell shortages were epidemic among the Americans?
Matt Ridgeway should have been promoted faster, in much the same way Marshall was---would have saved a LOT of American lives.
Petronius| 1.29.12 @ 12:18AM
Our worst performances and decisions result from following our predispositions when only the correct response will prevent disaster. Can you say Pearl Harbor? Oh ship of State, thy name is Perfidia.
Al Adab| 1.29.12 @ 3:29PM
That the French speak French today- ungrateful though they are- is memorial enough for any man. However a Davis boat with "Ike" in his trademark jacket at the helm near the WWII Memorial surely reflects the accomplishments of the man if not his Presidency. His stewardship of the nation, calmly through those dangerous times, deserves our gratitude. Mistakes? Of course. But overall, perhaps our last Constitutional President.
oldfart| 2.8.12 @ 7:30AM
Frankly Eisenhower was not selected for the position because of his knowledge of military hardware or tactics but because he was a politician. He was able to get the British and French to work together for a common goal. The British and French hated each other, especially after British attack on the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir on July 3rd, 1940 which resulted in the death of of almost 1,300 French military personnel. There was not, and never was, a declaration of war between them. The French were not ready, nor capable of fighting another war, after the massive blood letting of WWI and felt pushed into another conflict with German.
Ike succeeded because, of course, at that time neither the Limeys or the Frogs had a choice. Hoover's book – Freedom Betrayed – has an analysis on this.
But back to the article – no matter what your perspective of Ike is, this proposed monument is an abomination.
John - TMF| 2.8.12 @ 8:33AM
A few of things:
1. The Firefly Sherman was not pursued or pushed because A) the gun was a British Naval Rifle and presented both manufacturing and logistics problems in its mass deployment. B) Was a fine main gun on a not so fine chassis and armor kit. The Sherman, even with a main gun with enough punch to kill Panzer IV and V's from the front, and Tigers from the side, still was a "Ronson lighter". The M4A3E8 (Easy Eight) with the HVSS, wide track, and up armor kit wasn't ready until close to the end of the war. It's High Velocity 76mm (3 inch anti-aircraft gun) was roughly equal to the Firefly but not available in numbers by the end of 1944. Also, the US was just completing the T-26/M-26 Pershing. It had a 90mm main gun, a torsion bar suspension, and much improved armor protection. It was in the field in small numbers by March 1945, but the war ended before it was fielded in enough numbers to supplant the Sherman.
(I grew up the son of a tanker, tank designer...I could write a book. -maybe I should. Humm.)
2. US Army Tank Doctrine during WWII was more about mobility and infantry support/protection than it was about tank to tank warfare. We had more than a few high velocity main guns in the field as "Tank Destroyers" -M-10 Wolverine (76mm), M-18 Hellcat (76mm eventually on the E8), and M-36 Jackson (90mm). The Tank/Tank Destroyer doctrine is what the US came to the war with, and what it was equipped to deal with. We would not have a "main battle tank" until the M-26 Pershing/M-46 Patton series of tanks was finalized and fielded in greater numbers by Korea.
Blaming Eisenhower for a military doctrine might feel good but as we have heard but it is mostly unjustified. You go to war with the Army that you have. Changes to tactics are much easier than changes to logistics.
On "Generalship" and tactical field command verses Strategic long range planning and goals:
1. Patton was a very good friend of Eisenhower's and though erratic (I am a great fan of Georgie's - my old man worked for his son.), Ike was responsible for saving Patton's career, and giving him 3rd Army when most of the General staff wanted Georgie gone. BTW Patton loved the Sherman.
2. Though I agree that Patton's plan for rectifying the mistake with the Falaise Pocket in August that let the Germans slip away, I understand why Ike and Tedder decided to punch the Germans back across the Rhine on a broad front. The problem was Montgomery, not Eisenhower. Monty was reluctant to press the attack from the north. (Getting in touch with his inner McClellan I presume.) From various accounts over the years that I have read and can't get my fingers on; Eisenhower was all for Patton's move. Bradley's backers were not willing to make such a bold tactical move. Though Bradley and Monty hated each other and Bradley wanted him fired, Bradley had lost his friendship for Patton, and seems to have resented him greatly by late 1944.
Gee, who'd have thought that Generals had egoes and attitudes when a war was to be won, eh?
There were also strategic reasons for the slow push having to do with Russia, the eventual fall of Berlin, and the logistics of getting enough supplies and equipment ready to cross the Rhine in the Spring. None of those issues are currently "straight forward" and we might not even know exactly why those decisions were taken for a decade or more (most of that stuff is still classified.)
Finally... The Eisenhower Memorial as planned is ugly and not indicative of the great service that this great man did for his country and the free world.
His memorial should be "traditional" just like Ike was. His men loved him. He was respected by the British to the point where they backed him over British generals.
I can think of nothing better than a bronze statue of him on D-Day surrounded by his Paratroopers just before the world changed.
Some things are just "Traditional" and must stay that way.
r/TMF
Mike Hawk| 2.8.12 @ 11:15AM
Nice to have somebody who knows what he's talking about nuke the baloney that comes from the ignorant. You know your stuff John. Please do write a book.
cruiser| 2.8.12 @ 2:11PM
As a son of a tank destroyer gun commander, I can only agree. The tank destroyer soldiers have almost been totally ignored, but when you look at films and photos they are easy to spot. Unfortunately, they are captioned as a tank or artillery piece.
My father went from a 3" towed gun to a M36 which was self propelled with a 90mm gun, and he fought with the Third Army from Sept. to May.
The American concept of tank destroyers was a muddle from the get go, but the men who made up all of the Tank Destroyer Battalions deserve more recognition than they are given.
Look up their websites, and you will be amazed at what they were asked to do.
Konnie| 1.28.12 @ 8:10PM
Well, Petronius, I don't know about all that, but as a child in the fifties, wow, what a great time to be alive. I liked Ike. I lived in Gettyburg, and if you visit Eisenhower's farm you will not for a second imagine that Eisenhower would like his memory preserved in this manner proposed by Gehry. What a weirdo Gehry is.
Richard Baker| 1.28.12 @ 9:12PM
Looks like a junkyard.
Stan redmond| 1.28.12 @ 9:59PM
Gehry's work is unfuntional, ugly, and terribly ugly. He gets away with his "architecture" because there is a huge group of people who "love" his work because other people say they should love his work because other people say they should love his work, and on and on... It's like a terrible movie that gets many awards because some "other" person said it's great. And rather then appear stupid questioning the abomination, people go along with the scam.
Why Eisenhower needs a monument is beyond me. Hello interstate highway system. Is that not enough?
electric moped sell in china | 1.28.12 @ 10:03PM
electric moped sell in china
0x0000008e | 1.29.12 @ 5:01AM
Once again, this proves what exactly stands behinds allocating funds to specific projects (not just monuments), and it's not usability, great performance or quality. I guess you figured out what I mean.
Appleby| 1.29.12 @ 8:34AM
Ike was my Daddy's favourite general (he thought Patton, to whose 8th Army he was attached in the Weather Corps, which was of course right up front at all times) was a lunatic, and that Bradly and Ike were "guys like us". As said "guys" would have preferred statues in their memories, not "sculptures", being down-to-earth men concerned with their troops and winning wars, and not blabbering sound bites to the Press, why not? I took my two nephews to DC when they each turned 7, and they enjoyed playing Can You Stump Nonnie by pointing and asking "Who is that?" Fortunately in most cases I could answer the question. They learned American history among the statues, and it did them good. (Okay, for some reason one of them came away convinced that all First Ladies were named Hilary, including the wife of George Washington.)
Woody| 1.29.12 @ 8:49AM
One thing Ghery shares with Frank Lloyd Wright is his buildings leak (Google Ghery, leaks and see how often). Ike was a form follows function sort of guy, not function follows ego.
SF_Exile| 2.8.12 @ 4:00PM
I've seen it first hand. The Stata Building, a multipurpose building at MIT, has this issue. Because most of the windows were placed at odd angles, they were constantly leaking and drafty. The place was never warm enough in the winter or cool enough in the summer. Not to mention that the interior is ugly as sin. Partitions and false walls have to be used on the main floor both to channel the drafts and to create usable common space.
I find it interesting that so many of these so-called visionary architects seem to forget that these buildings are not intended to be looked at and interacted with from the outside only. People will be on the inside actually doing work. These foolish design ideas make it more difficult for people to go about their business each day and get things done.
I.M. Pei was the lead architect for the original MIT Media Lab building in the mid eighties. From the outside it appears streamlined and clean, with an updated take on the Streamline Moderne style. But inside? It's a miserable mess. In the beginning there had been no provision for things like interior walls. Heating and cooling again seemed to be an afterthought not to mention little things like electrical outlets and drops for phones. Of course given the era, desktop computers weren't even on the radar. As a result, computer cables have been strung from the rafters above or run in bundles along the interior walls, strapped together with zip-ties. Kind of ironic for a building that was supposed to be the home of great minds developing cutting edge technology.
stan redmond| 2.8.12 @ 7:16PM
In defense of Wright, in his heyday energyy was so cheap it didn't matter.
albert constantine jr.| 1.29.12 @ 9:40AM
Eisenhower is oft quoted as saying that you can get a lot of good done if you don't care who gets the credit ( though this quote is often attributed to others, as well). How ironic that a memorial to him would be a lot of bad done primarily to get the credit.
Buck Ofama| 1.29.12 @ 12:24PM
>can get a lot of good done if you don't care who gets the credit
Now look how far the concept of honor has fallen: they have awarded Nobel to a clown for doing absofuckinglutely NOTHING.
Bill Hussein O'Stalin| 1.29.12 @ 9:48AM
Although the design will lend itself to future Occupy Parks movement, I personally think it could be "healed" by having two Sherman tanks dropped into the midst of it just off center each side.
Buck Ofama| 1.29.12 @ 12:23PM
I hope that crybaby finishes his single term nice and safe.
Otherwise, we'd be stuck with endless gaudy overblown memorials, countless renamed streets and libraries, and new holidays for the gullible and weak-minded to honor the worthless pile of camel shit.
AhiaGuy| 1.29.12 @ 2:43PM
"The Department of Education is almost entirely concealed behind it."
Well, at least one good thing might come of it.
Too bad it doesn't say "The Department of Education is almost entirely eliminated behind it."
oldfart| 2.8.12 @ 6:53AM
Perhaps they are trying to hide the Department of Public Education (DOPE)?
The design is pretty bad.
c. j. acworth| 2.8.12 @ 7:37AM
At least it doesn't have a statue of Ike made of elephant manure, or immersed in a tank of urine. Then it would really be art!
oldfart| 2.8.12 @ 7:53AM
That is a visual I did not need with my morning coffee. :(
POST American| 2.8.12 @ 7:55AM
SO muchg of Gehry's work strikes us
as just the gilded product of an over-funded,
self-infatuated pot smoker ----
Visited his Bilbao extravaganza.
Sort of cool from a distance, but once
inside the collection was boring, and
the layout was just more computer
graphics diarreha.
The plastic door knob even fell off
in our hand in the restroom.
---Let's get the EUGENISTS out of the
architechture domain. Bring back graceful
rooftops, appealing windows, plaster walls
on which one can hang paintings.
Let's STOP patronizing the temple of
B F Skinner 'funk--shun--all--ism'.
"Remember Skinner put his own
daughter in a cage to study her
----AND GOT AWAY WITH IT."
TRUE
Anyway, Gehry should give up pot,
and the patronage of TAX FREE EUGENICS
foundations -----and grow up
------------------------------------------or is it 'in'?
Bob Grant| 2.8.12 @ 1:23PM
Post,
You seem to blame EUGENICS for everything. Although not a fan of the activity myself, I am hard pressed to blame EVERY societal ill on it.
In the future, A little more meat behind the accusations perhaps?
Bob Grant| 2.8.12 @ 1:23PM
Post,
You seem to blame EUGENICS for everything. Although not a fan of the activity myself, I am hard pressed to blame EVERY societal ill on it.
In the future, A little more meat behind the accusations perhaps?
Darcy| 2.8.12 @ 8:43AM
Wow, sounds like somebody woke up on the wrong side of the satiricon. Eisenhower is my favorite 20th century President. Doubt he even would have wanted a monument built to him.
That aside, the story shows the strange stranglehold Modernism still has over high culture. How is it possible, for example, that only Modernists, with their sneering contempt for melody, harmony and ryhthm, are still the only contemporary composers allowed in the concert halls when nobody likes their "music"?
Musicians know the only way to get people in the hall is to play Mozart and Beethoven, music they actually like. And STILL nihilism reigns supreme in composition circlesand in the schools. It's almost quaint.
We like to think that Modernism with all of its silliness about the superman-artist is dead, but it sure seems to be taking its sweet time about leaving.
cuban pete| 2.8.12 @ 8:50PM
Darcy,
You are on the money.
FDR wanted Ike to get a Congressional Medal of Honor after North Africa but he declined.
Truman Eyler| 2.8.12 @ 9:47AM
It looks like a shoebox diorama.
Derek Leaberry| 2.8.12 @ 10:48AM
Surprisingly, the whole Eisenhower clan is against the "art" of Mr. Gehry. The family has swung so far left over the years that they almost unanimously endorsed the current villain in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama. But for once, the Eisenhower family has stumbled into the truth.
Star Tripper| 2.8.12 @ 11:28AM
DL, I went to the commision website and the pictures of various commisioners getting the design explained to them says it all. Everyone looks like they are being presented with positive cancer test results. Especially this one: http://www.eisenhowermemorial......large.html
Bill| 2.8.12 @ 11:23AM
I wonder how Eisenhower would feel about:
1. Having a monument to him at all;
2. Having a monument that was designed by a "modernist."
Ike was a pretty pragmatic, down-to-earth Kansas boy.
And what is a guy who's confused about what's beautiful and what's ugly doing posing as an artist? I have some conceptual problems with a person claiming to be an artist who isn't committed to creating beauty. Maybe I'm not in touch with modern notions of art, but I haven't, to date, managed to think of art as the creating of ugliness. But maybe I'm out of touch.
Bob Grant| 2.8.12 @ 1:33PM
When obama gets his monument what are the odds the design will be more Greek and less post modern. After all, obama's too great for some piddly, junky post modern design.
My prediction is it will be 800 feet long - minimum- and at least several hundred feet in height. The structure will be made of pure Pentelic Marble shipped in from Greece and will take 30 years to complete.
Conservative Bob| 2.8.12 @ 7:12PM
I think the dimentions will be as you suggest but the building materials I am certain will be be more realistic in the portrail of the man... Picture a 800 X 200 pile of horse shit held together with a motar of pig manure.
Conservative Bob| 2.8.12 @ 7:22PM
dimensions portrayal mortar
Haste and I think it may be time to increase the font size just a bit… sorry.
SPARCH| 2.8.12 @ 2:13PM
I thought that architects learned their lesson of trying to engineer social change through the built environment in a ham handed way in the fifties and sixties. If he doesn't know the diffrence between beauty and ugly, he may not know the difference between form and function. Too many design professionals have felt that they could make a difference in the culture through their work, only to find themselves together in the do gooders boat. Try to do good for people and keep them enslaved. In this case, enslaved in a building fit for horses.
GraniteSentry | 2.8.12 @ 2:33PM
A plum of a campaign issue just waiting for some smart Republican to pick it. Imagine the laughter and applause at rallies. Print the images on fundraising mailers and watch the money roll in. Just the kind of symbolic issue that could carry somebody to the White House. Remember Ronald Reagan in front of the restored Statue of Liberty?
JR| 2.8.12 @ 3:39PM
How about we don't build anymore memorials on the Mall or even near it, PERIOD--make that EXCLAMATION POINT! L'Enfant must be rolling over in his grave at the over-population of monuments and memorials already there, some no doubt the afterthought of political correctness. It is doubtful that the Mall can ever be restored to its openness and pristine beauty, but let's not clutter it or the area around it with more edifices, statues, or museums regardless of whom they are to honor or memorialize.
reaper| 2.9.12 @ 7:56PM
JR, I agree. We need to get off this cult of leaders(ship). Most of these people were scum.
I appreciate displays like the Vietnam, Korean, and Marines at Iwo Jima.
But just wait, in 20 years someone will be erecting a phalanx there somewhere to Bubba Clinton.
And the nation's capitol public grounds will continued to be trashed as we "re-write" history, showering praises on people unworthy of even much more than footnote mention.
I'm with you; the time for monuments is done.
I'm dreading the day when we'll hear of the need, the absolute need for an Afghan/Iraq/War on Terror/Post 9-11/Homeland Security Sacrifices/TSA/Drones monument.
POST American| 2.8.12 @ 11:22PM
"Understand, virtually 100% of
the leaders of the scientific establishment
in 1900 ---were pure, capstone EUGENISTS."
-ALEX JONES
'ENDGAME'
(documentary online)
Further
"By 2000 EUGENISTS had shed much
of its NAZI baggage---"
ONLY to take up, with TAX FREE gusto,
its POST Soviet, Rockefeller and RED Chinese.
WITH WHAT'S happened to religion
------------------------------culture
--------------------------------gender
----------------------------------family
------------------------------------nation
--------------------------------------food itself
over a century of infiltration by the
TAX FREE EUGENICS CABAL foundations--
EUGENICS --------------IS---------------CENTRAL
IF you're NOT seeing this, and NOT
talking about it ---and DEMANDING
address ----whether you care to admit
it or not ----YOU'RE 'ON BOARD'.
DON'T believe us.
------------------------JUST KEEP A GOIN'
Russell Seitz| 2.9.12 @ 2:10AM
Tom may not like to admit it, but Ike presided over the golden age of American Modernism, and accordingly deserves s to be memorialized in the style of a contemporary like Mies van der Rohe- or Frank Lloyd Wright
A pavilion in the style of the Seagram Building , or a later work of Wright would fit the General well, and also fit into the architectural continuum of the Mall
You might make the case for a Bucky Fuller dome, but not for Gerry- let him wait for Clinton's apotheosis.
Objectivity| 2.9.12 @ 7:47PM
May I ask why we'll be offering up a monument to a man who was getting it on with his enlisted driver during WW II? While she was servicing Ike and Ike was servicing her, guys her age were scared, cold, lonely, going hungry, becoming POWs and dying. While enjoying her warm cunt, those guys her age wouldn't ever get to write a last letter home, receive a letter or go home -- to nice, warm homes.
Where did Ike learn those lessons at West Point?
Did he miss those leadership principals lectures? Oh, that's right, they did not apply to him.
Where were the UCMJ charges against him?
There are enough monuments to Eisenhower already in the nation, roads named after him, coins, stamps, schools, etc.
No need to put up another one.
Patrick Henry| 2.9.12 @ 11:46PM
Gehry said: What got me excited in the beginning were the social issues. I come from a very lefty liberal family in Canada and architecture looked like it was the panacea. You could make housing for the poor.
Architecture has always been a terrible social tool. When progressives and liberals become architects their egos make them think that their intellect can solve the world's problems, and in their case, through their "brilliant" designs.
Architecture is about buildings people live and work in. Great architecture is that which makes you feel better for living and working and experiencing it, not because it makes a social statement.