Regardless, there are two paths forward. One is to scrap the project and start over with an open public competition, which would cost around $17 million, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The other is to push forward with the existing plan to finalize the memorial design and begin breaking ground.
We favor the latter. [...] And the current design is nowhere near a “monstrosity,” as some have called it; it is a novel take on memorialization [...].
— washingtonpost.com
28 Comments
Architects have lambasted the scheme of Frank Gehry ...Congress has jumped on this bandwagon.
No, architects haven't lambasted the design, at least not most of them. The design has been demonized by the blatantly conservative and biased National Civic Art Society, who thinks all memorials should be marble busts wearing leaf crowns.
Gehry's design is crap. Granted, this is the same political process that planted a representational sculpture at Lin's Vietnam Memorial, and the infighting is severe, but this is beyond awful. A bunch of statues with crude bas relief backdrops set in a haphazard composition of blocks? Give me a break.
Compare it to the other memorials to individuals: Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR and King. Jefferson is rooted in history, Lincoln's presence is imposing, FDR is humanized and King is symbolically emerging from bondage. Gehry's design can't hold a candle to any of them.
As usual, more lies than truth.
I wonder if there will be a representation of the more than one million german DEF deaths that Eisenhower was directly responsible for, as General and Chief of Army, through deliberate starvation. He was a war criminal who overwrote the Geneva conventions for these prisoners. Will these be respresented? How about the anti-communist émigré Russians and others who were found to be in were handed over to the Soviet Union and who got killed?
From Ike: Cold-Blooded Mass Murderer By Willis A. Carto
Certain individuals are planning to build a memorial in Washington to Dwight D. Eisenhower—a multimillion dollar project to be laid on the backs of American taxpayers. The project has gotten as far as it has because no one has had the guts to point out that Eisenhower is literally the last person in the world who should be honored by the American people because his record clearly shows him to be a mass murderer. In addition to his dismal record as a military commander whose appointment by Franklin Roosevelt was purely political and had nothing whatsoever to do with merit, the full facts about this person must be seen, acknowledged and weighed. The most outstanding fact about Eisenhower is his cold-blooded murder of some 2 million German soldiers who had honorably surrendered in 1945. Instead of treating these soldiers as prisoners of war, as he was bound to do under the Geneva Convention, Eisenhower invented a new category, designating them as “disarmed enemy personnel,” thus adopting the doubletalk of a pettifogging shyster lawyer and in his twisted mind justifying his crime. And then Eisenhower murdered these soldiers, penning them up behind barbed wire and letting them starve to death, subject to the heavy rainfall and the cold winter weather of 1945. He ordered anyone who tried to free them or even feed them to be shot by the armed American guards he stationed around the enclosure. Doubters must study this. It is truly a horror story. Thanks are owed to the Canadian, James Bacque, for exposing this in his book, Other Losses: An Investigation Into the Mass Deaths of German Prisoners, and to Herbert L. Brown in The Devil’s Handiwork: A Victim’s View of “Allied” War Crimes
..................................
OPERATION KEELHAUL : GENOCIDE BY THE 'ALLIES'
In 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower ordered that "Operation Keelhaul" be put into effect. This involved rounding up and shipping back to "their countries of origin" ALL the refugees from communism: men, women and children, soldier or civilian, male or female, even though many of them had been fighting on OUR side during the war. Since all of Eastern Europe was then under Communist domination, sending these people back was, quite literally, a sentence of death, some by immediate execution and the rest by slow extermination from overwork and malnutrition in the Soviet slave labor camps in Siberia.
These people were rounded up at bayonet point, forced into freight cars and shipped off to a terrible fate. There was no accurate count kept but the MINIMUM figure was 2,000,000 people and a maximum has been set at 5,000,000. The true numbers may never be known, NEVER! The elimination of all these anti-Communist people made the Communist domination of Eastern Europe MUCH easier. And the American people were kept blissfully unaware of this action which Eisenhower enforced rigidly, even though it violated international law, the laws of his own country and laws of humanity.
.......................................................
Are there not poor people in the US more worthy of getting this money, in whatever form (education bourse, financial assistance, food stamps..) than a statue to another imperial heartless bastard?
"The design has been demonized by the blatantly conservative and biased National Civic Art Society, who thinks all memorials should be marble busts wearing leaf crowns."
Sorry Donna, but your attempt to marginalize the critics of this design is missleading. Living in DC, I can assure you that most people have trashed it in local blogs. Mind you, the local art critic has done his best to put a good face on this one, Gehry being one of the cool kids and all, but it's kind of hard to paper over what a train wreck this design is, even for those trained to parrot the party line. This is what living in a cloister does to ones perspective, I guess.
Thayer the National Civic Art Society has the loudest voice with the most power, is what I meant. This article makes it sound like *the architecture profession* is leading the charge against the memorial, which is absolute bullshit (Miles' opinion notwithstanding).
I don't doubt that lots of people in DC don't like it. When they can explain logical objections beyond "I've never seen anything like this before! It's big!" then we might be able to have a decent conversation.
Yikes! Who knew Ike was a controversial figure?
After Tammuz' post I had to read up a bit on the whole Disarmed Enemy Forces episode, it was not known to me.
From what I can read, Ike is not without some blame. But as someone who has recently read more on the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities, I can kind of see where the Allies, who had just liberated what was left of the death camps, weren't exactly itching to give Red Cross food aid to the captured Wehrmacht.
Germany had progressively dismantled its agricultural infrastructure, and its slave labor forces had very inconveniently been recently freed! Someone had to do the calculus of who was fed and when. Did revenge enter into this? Perhaps it did. But even the most dubious (and generally refuted) estimates are less than a million.
<Warning: sarcasm ahead> The Allies probably just should have just created an equivalent to Germany's Einsatzgruppen to follow behind the invading army and liquidate everyone (soldier or civilian; man, woman, or child) they didn't like, shooting them over mass graves? That would have been much cleaner, don't you think?
Let's keep the debate to design, please.
Look up "bomber gap" and Ike's military industrial complex speech. He was probably the last (or maybe only?) president to intentionally tell the public the truth.
I don't know how you would symbolize that in a memorial, and I'm pretty sure none of the parties involved would want to, but it is an interesting design question. King's memorial borrowed from Michelangelo's prisoners and remains symbolically effective.
In any case the current design is an utter failure. Designs for national monuments should be confined to college competitions, not handed to starchitects.
Hi Donna-
There has been lots of cogent, intelligent criticism of the memorial design, from architects and non-architects alike. Certainly plenty of points about which we could have a decent conversation.
I'd be happy to have a conversation about, "I've never seen anything like this before! It's big!" I'd say these are actually two very reasonable criticisms of the Gehry design.
Yes, I bet you would be happy to have such a conversation. It's obviously excellent criticism. Though every time someone's said it to me, I took it as a compliment.
:D
Miles,
You're actually talking about national memorials. Not national monuments. There are 30 National Memorials and some of them are pretty terrible.
"...crude bas relief backdrops set in a haphazard composition of blocks?"
Have you been to the FDR memorial? At least Gehry isn't proposing a giant block that says "I HATE" on it.
I actually think Gehry's would be one of the best. Unless you have access to images or drawings that the rest of us have not seen, I don't see what the fuss is about. And keep in mind that most of the higher profile memorials have been controversial and that competitions do not guarantee success. The Vietnam Memorial was a major success (and quite controversial) but the WW2, Korean War and Flight 93 memorials are uninspired and unmoving.
No thank you, EKE. On all the previous threads about this memorial design I've explained why I think it's good and why I think the critics' objections are misplaced. I don't really have the energy to go into it yet again.
My main complaint with this article is the reporter's language that made it appear that architects, en masse, are against the design. Based on this thread (and the many other previous) that's obviously not true.
i can't believe the gehry office has stuck with this project this long. they should just quit and let the committee start over. it's just become the fodder for another conservative culture offensive and letting it drag on isn't helping the memorial, gehry's office, dc, or our national cultural discussion.
the fact is that gehry did what they were hired to do - for clients who wanted what gehry's office does. the CLIENT's agenda changed, not gehry's.
cut bait, let the national civic art society get their pet architect, build an overpriced triumphal arch or sarcophagus. most importantly, let's stop giving a podium for ad hominem attacks on modernism (and, by extension, anything progressive) in general.
emboldened by this argument, political taste-makers are now saying that crappy embassies with good security are much preferable to good and welcoming (and equally secure) embassies because good architecture may send the wrong message about our priorities.
Hear, hear, Steven. Exactly.
I still think a much more fitting and appropriate design for the Eisenhower Memorial would be to park 10,000 Soviet T-55 tanks on the National Mall surrounding the Washington Monument with turrets pointed inward, and leave them there to rust and leak oil into the lawn.
I'd rather they moved the Airplane Bone Yard at Davis Monthan Airforce Base to the Mall.
Donna,
"I don't doubt that lots of people in DC don't like it. When they can explain logical objections beyond "I've never seen anything like this before! It's big!" then we might be able to have a decent conversation."
Wow, your eliteism and lack of empathy seems to have no bounds. You're cutting off the possibility of a conversation becasue someone isn't able to explain their objections in a way you deem logical? I'm just spitballing here but how about trying to help someone articlulate their feelings with your "expertise"? I always thought that was the point of expertise, to be able to help others, silly me!
Steven,
"it's just become the fodder for another conservative culture offensive and letting it drag on isn't helping the memorial, gehry's office, dc, or our national cultural discussion."
Again, could you guys be any more cloistered? This controversy is exactly what a national cultural discussion looks like, except one that you don't hold all the cards. Trying to paint this as some kind of right wing political agenda betrays how embattled you seem to feel anytime someone disagrees with you.
Whether those 80 foot tall, 8' diameter pylons where dressed with classicism or bald concrete matters not. They''re inhumane and totally out of scale with both the surroundings. Call it a conspiracy and man the ramparts...here come the barbarians!
The opposition is highly ideological in favor of traditional architecture and it does seem to align pretty closely with the culture wars and the usual pro and anti-academia camps.
I think its time that Gehry got an "Average Joe" makeover.
davvid, you keep telling yourself that.
"I'm just spitballing here but how about trying to help someone articlulate their feelings with your "expertise"? I always thought that was the point of expertise, to be able to help others, silly me!"
Get your panties out of a wad, Thayer. This is what I've been doing in my practice and in thousands of hours of volunteer and teaching work. Take a look at my profile, google me, whatever. You can find what I do. Very easy for you to criticize me anonymously, though.
I post on Archinect because it's my safe place to vent.
the Pillars, if I may, are to be limestone, I've read.
they're the scale of the surrounding buildings
and it is, what do you called it.... a monument, which I guess is why its sorta on the monumental side.
and the damn thing is mostly air.
i'll drop my elitism when the naysayers own up to the fact that their dislike is mostly ideological and simply anti-modern.
Donna, I'm sure you'll have clocked thousands more hours volunteering than I will and that's a good thing, but I don't need to do an indepth analysis of your google profile. I'm going by what you post. You have many posts that put up a wall between you and the public if they don't see the world from your ideological perspective. Again, not a crime against humanity, but a little introspection wouldn't hurt. I'll try again since you and boy in a well seem to think this is some right wing cabal, despite the evidence (definition of ideological thinking)
"I don't doubt that lots of people in DC don't like it. When they can explain logical objections beyond "I've never seen anything like this before! It's big!" then we might be able to have a decent conversation."
Until you're able to have a "decent conversation"? Please tell us how to do that!
I'm just spitballing here but how about trying to help someone articlulate their feelings with your "expertise"?
are you saying you want someone to help articulate your feelings for you? is that how you know what 'the public' wants? because you're articulating their feelings for them instead of letting them decide for themselves how they 'feel?'
I think if one's well versed on the psychology of space, on the costs and ramifications of design choiced, etc, it shouldn't be that hard to tease out what people mean by may two dimensional expressions like "it's too big." I think it's asking too much to have someone articulate something at your level of understanding to engage them in a meaningful dialogue. If you conflate helping someone articulate their feelings with deciding for them how they feel, I feel sorry for you. Infact, when I look at the whole of your sentence structure...
Thayer-D: You have many posts that put up a wall between you and the public if they don't see the world from your ideological perspective.
The least endearing feature is being your own blind spot.
tammuz, I'll tell you what your least endearing feature is if you can tell me what's my ideological perspective.
I love Gehry. But this design just doesn't cut it. I would rather it be more like Gehry projects with beautiful sculptural form than a series of ridiculous oversized billboards surrounding an underwhelming stack of block statue reliefs and some trees that will take 30yrs to grow mature. Not to mention it blocks the view of the building behind it so they can have a great view of metal screen all day long. Oh joy. Quality of life on that side of the building will definitely drop. It's just a sad design and no one has the heart to tell Frank that it's a major fail.
Troll
Heckler
Antagonizing
Your
Ethical
Resolve
-
Disdainfully
Block this user
Are you sure you want to block this user and hide all related comments throughout the site?
Archinect
This is your first comment on Archinect. Your comment will be visible once approved.