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.
The Eisenhower Memorial, like all of Gehry’s work, seems
designed to draw attention to Gehry himself. But its very
idiosyncrasy suggests that it won’t wear well. What may seem
fascinatingly “different” today soon becomes merely tiresome.
Gehry’s “twisted surfaces and exploded topology lessons,” as
Justin Shubow, chairman of the National Civic Art Society, calls
them, do express Gehry’s philosophy, which, he has said, is that
“life is chaotic, dangerous and surprising. Building should express
that.” But why, exactly, should buildings seem chaotic? Gehry’s
seem repetitive and, in the end, merely daft. His Center for Brain
Health in Las Vegas “appears to have been designed by an
Alzheimer’s patient,” said Shubow.
There was an interesting recent contretemps in Paris. Gehry’s
plan to build a 150,000-square-foot cultural center called “The
Cloud” was suspended by a court ruling in February. On the edge of
the Bois de Boulogne, it exceeded height limits, invaded forest
land, closed off a road, and so on. An outraged Gehry said his
project was a “magical cloud of glass” and that his critics were
“philistines.” Now, one hears, the project may be back on track.
It’s being paid for by the richest man in France, the owner of
Louis Vuitton, Dior, and Givenchy. But it resembles a half-deflated
dirigible, or a “squashed lampshade,” as someone said, adding that
it should be razed to the ground.
MILTON GRENFELL, the National Civic Art Society’s vice chairman,
told me that architecture students “have to be taught to love
ugliness. They’re indoctrinated into this alternative universe.”
(Grenfell designed the traditional Eisenhower statue and pedestal
shown at left; it is just one of the society’s counterproposals,
all of which, I’m told, are preferable to Gehry’s.) I’m hoping that
David Brussat of the Providence
Journal is right when he said that the public has grown
tired of being “the lab rats for modern architecture’s addiction to
experimentation.” It’s high time.
In his books The Painted
Word (1975) and From Bauhaus
to Our House (1981), Tom Wolfe turned the postwar
fashion of abstract expressionism and architecture into high
comedy. Frank Gehry’s proposed Eisenhower Memorial represents a far
greater cultural decline than abstract painting ever did. The
absurdities of Pollock and de Kooning can be ignored, and today
they are. You don’t have to have them on your walls, or look at
them in museums. If collectors view them as an investment game,
that’s their business. Gehry’s monumental invasions are a different
matter. He is in your face and intentionally so. And his proposed
memorial comes not just at the public’s expense but also at
President Eisenhower’s.
Grenfell told me that he believes the Gehry monstrosity can be
stopped. The Eisenhower family has been openly critical of the
planned memorial. Susan Eisenhower has told the press that the
entire family is “unified” in its concerns.
The proposed memorial should be stopped. Congress should not
fund this $100 million-plus scandal, $30 million of which has
already been allocated. The latest Gehry vanity, supposedly a
memorial to Eisenhower, is a deliberate assault on our sense of
what is appropriate and as such should never be built.
