Frank Gehry and Eisenhower Memorial Commission Chairman Rocco Siciliano

On March 20, 2012, the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands of the House Committee on Natural Resources held a historic hearing about Frank Gehry’s proposed design for the Eisenhower Memorial.  Howard Segermark, chairman emeritus of the National Civic Art Society, testified against the design and the process that selected it.  (His remarks can be found here.)

Also testifying against the design were Anne and Susan Eisenhower, granddaughters of President Eisenhower; Bruce Cole, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities; and Rodney Cook, president of the National Monuments Foundation. C-SPAN broadcast the event, which you can watch here.

In the follow-up to the hearing, Chairman Rob Bishop sent written questions to the Eisenhower Memorial Commission.  Below is the the Commission’s frequently evasive response (PDF available here).

QFRs Submitted by Chairman Bishop

Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands hearing on

“Proposed Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial”

March 20, 2012

 

Questions for Reddel

1. How has the commission attempted to reconcile the design concerns of the Eisenhower Family?

The Eisenhower Memorial Commission (EMC) has been making, and continues to make, a sincere effort to engage the Eisenhower family to discuss design concerns with the designer, Frank Gehry. In fact, as recently as April 16^th, 2012, Mr. Gehry has offered to meet with the family at their convenience. Frank Gehry has indicated that there are still opportunities for the family to provide counsel and input on the memorial design.

The Commission has worked with the Eisenhower family since it was created by Congress in 1999 and, for over a decade, very much benefitted from their input. David Eisenhower was appointed to the Commission by President Clinton and Commission staff and fellow Commissioners were united in their presumption that he represented the family on the Commission until his resignation in December 2011.

The Commission was consistently assured by David Eisenhower that he represented the family. In fact, in May 2011, Mr. Eisenhower along with his sister Anne, participated in a lengthy private meeting in New York with Frank Gehry. The design concept of the tapestries representing a Kansas landscape, a statue of young Eisenhower, and the bas reliefs representing the President and General, were portrayed in a large design model and in a variety of presentation materials that were viewed by the family during this meeting. The design concept was fully discussed, including extensive conversations at dinner later that evening.

At the conclusion of the July 2011 meeting of the Commission, David Eisenhower seconded the motion to direct Mr. Gehry to complete the design. Directly following the meeting, Commissioner Eisenhower spoke informally with a small group to express his full support of the evolving progress of the memorial’s design. He said that he had spoken with his father, John S.D. Eisenhower, and that they were both supportive of the Commission’s progress and its ongoing work with Frank Gehry. By that time, design preparation was at the completion of the development stage and had progressed into the construction document preparation phase.

However, in October 2011, Anne and Susan expressed concerns about Eisenhower’s memorialization and attempts were made to arrange a meeting for them with Frank Gehry. Due to schedule constraints on both sides, this meeting was set for December 1^st, 2011.

On December 1^st, 2011, Mr. Gehry came to New York, to meet with David, Susan, and Anne Eisenhower. Susan and Anne arrived and said that David would not be attending the meeting. Mr. Gehry reviewed the concept guiding his evolving design and addressed the concerns of the Susan and Anne Eisenhower, including maintenance issues. Several days later, Anne Eisenhower sent an email to Mr. Gehry stating that the family did not like elements of the design but that it was not up to them to make suggestions for adjusting the design to their liking. A week later, the Commission was surprised and disappointed when David Eisenhower resigned, stating in previous private communications that he would resign rather than be in public dispute with his sisters.

 

Following the meeting with Anne and Susan Eisenhower in December 2011, Mr. Gehry and his design team believed they had made significant progress in understanding the concerns of the Eisenhower family and were prepared for additional engagement on design elements. They were then confronted with Anne Eisenhower’s subsequent statements that the design was wholly unacceptable and that the family had no responsibility to propose changes.

Despite the sisters’ negative response, Mr. Gehry has consistently expressed his openness to working with the family and has repeatedly affirmed his availability to meet with the Eisenhower sisters. Alternative dates have been offered by Mr. Gehry to the family to travel to Mr. Gehry’s studio to see the working models and to listen to the family’s concerns.

Although no visits have been scheduled, Mr. Gehry has remained willing to meet with the sisters and has asked them to send him dates when they would like to come to his studio. Mr. Gehry has indicated that opportunities remain for the family to provide substantive input on the design. On April 9th, 2012, Anne Eisenhower responded to Mr. Gehry saying they would not be meeting with him to help develop the evolving design.

Anne Eisenhower’s letter in response to Mr. Gehry’s invitation for the sisters to meet with him greatly mischaracterizes several important points. Neither Mr. Siciliano nor any member of the Commission staff has stated that there will be “no significant changes in the design.” The Commission has supported the design concept, and Senators Inouye and Roberts have expressly solicited the views of the family. In fact, it is because of this willingness to work with the family that Mr. Gehry offered to make himself available at the sisters’ convenience and Senators Inouye and Roberts encouraged them to do so in a letter dated March 27^th.

Anne’s letter also implies that the family has raised concerns for a significant period of time and that the Chairman and the Commission staff have not been responsive to these concerns. As noted in this response, the major concerns raised by Susan and Anne are of a very recent origin. They began in late 2011, yet the Commission had been hard at work with David representing the family as a Commissioner since 1999.  The Commission has responded promptly and frequently with offers to meet and address these issues, including the aforementioned meeting in December 2011 and subsequent invitations from Mr. Gehry.

2. Has a meeting, since the hearing, been scheduled between Mr. Gehry and the Eisenhower Family?

The EMC and Frank Gehry’s staff have worked closely together to coordinate a visit for the Eisenhower family to Mr. Gehry’s studio in Los Angeles.  An open-ended invitation was issued by Frank Gehry to the sisters asking them to suggest dates compatible with their schedules. Mr. Gehry wants to be as accommodating as possible, to ensure that the family can travel to Los Angeles to view the refinements Frank Gehry has made in response to the December 2011 meeting and their recent comments, and to further provide insight, refinement, and advice within the framework of the design.

On March 27, 2012, Senators Roberts, Inouye and the Commission asked the family to make a trip to Los Angeles in the next sixty days, in an effort to enable the memorial to proceed on schedule and on budget. While the tapestry that surrounds the memorial and the centralization of the heroic depiction of Eisenhower as General and President remain as elements of the design, Mr. Gehry has indicated he wants the family to work with him on other elements of the memorial.

In addition to Frank Gehry and the Commission’s efforts, Senator Pat Roberts and his staff have been working on behalf of the Commission’s Executive Committee to encourage, arrange, and schedule Eisenhower family meetings at the Commission’s expense with Frank Gehry and other pertinent parties.

3. It says in the 2006 meeting minutes that Chairman Siciliano spoke with Frank Gehry about designing the Eisenhower Memorial a few years prior to that. Being that Gehry was ultimately selected (in 2009), it could leave the impression that he was preselected. Was Gehry the preferred candidate from the onset?  How can we know the competition was fair?

There was no pre-selection of a designer or preferred candidate. In fact, when the selection was approved by the Commission at a Commission meeting in March 2009, David Eisenhower stated “as a Commissioner and a member of the Eisenhower family he could vouch for the integrity and excellence of the selection process.”

The competition was fair and unbiased. It was conducted in accordance with established procedures of federal law and executed by the Central Office of GSA in coordination with the National Capital Region. Representatives from the Eisenhower Memorial Commission constituted less than one third of the voting members of the Evaluation Board. The other members were selected by GSA Central Office and no representatives from the Eisenhower Memorial Commission chaired any of the panels. The entire process was overseen by a GSA contracting officer. David Eisenhower was the only Commissioner to serve on both the non-voting Design Jury as well as the GSA Design Evaluation Board.

4. Why did you simply ask for qualifications and “design philosophy,” but not actual designs from architects?

The RFQ announcement identified a three-stage procurement process under the GSA Design Excellence Program.  It was a portfolio-based selection. The announcement offers the opportunity for interested parties to ask the Contracting Officer for a copy of Volume 1 of the Pre-Design Program by way of further introduction to the project. In this way, interested parties do not have to rely on “the word on the street” to learn about the project and they cannot contact EMC or any government entity concerned with the procurement once the RFQ is out for response. The Stage 1 submittal is mostly portfolio and resume information required of the proposed lead designer and her/his associated firm.

Evaluation Criteria

The FBO Announcement included the Stage 1 evaluation criteria which were as follows:

1.         Lead designer portfolio [55%]

2.         Philosophy and Design Intent [20%]

3.         Past Performance on Design [15%]

4.         Lead Designer Profile [10%]

Evaluation Criteria were similarly included in the announcement of each successive evaluation stage.

 

Selection Process

According to the Commission’s Executive Architect, the GSA Report details that GSA Central Office was in charge of the memorial designer selection process along with the Contracting Officer from GSA National Capital Region. An Evaluation Board of 12 members [the only Commission representatives on this board were two EMC Commissioners, Rocco Siciliano and David Eisenhower, and the EMC Executive Architect Dan Feil] reviewed the forty-four [44] proposed lead designer portfolios and the other components of the submittals. The Evaluation Board voted on a preliminary short list of seven [7] designers and associated firms for further consideration. All votes had equal weight. Stage 2 submittals by this short list of seven firms identified the full design team and provided a preliminary vision for the memorial. The preliminary vision is the lead designer’s interpretation of the Program in sketch form. They were presented at individual team interviews. The vision is not a design concept; that can only be developed once the actual designer and design team is selected and under contract. Stage 2 resulted in a final short list of four teams which continued to Stage 3. In Stage 3, firms received a stipend and were asked to further develop their vision. A Jury of eight [8] Professional Peers and Commissioner David Eisenhower reviewed and commented on the submitted Stage 3 visions to the Evaluation Board.  Interviews with the four [4] final short-listed firms were held. The Evaluation Board then fully evaluated the final short list and recommended the first and second place firms.

Only three [3] of the twelve [12] member Evaluation Board were EMC Commissioners or staff. Only one [1] Commissioner (David Eisenhower) was a member of the nine [9] member Jury. The Evaluation Board was chaired by GSA and the jury was chaired by an architect in private practice. Neither EMC Commissioners nor staff chaired the panels. GSA Central Office had to approve all panel members and invited all participants. Only David Eisenhower served on both panels, the Jury and Evaluation Board.  Professional Peers are routinely used by GSA on these evaluation boards and juries. Additionally, EMC Commissioners Alfred Geduldig and Susan Banes Harris were both observers for the evaluation process. This allowed them to attend the interviews and the panel deliberations, but not to ask questions of the Panels during deliberations. They were non-voting.

The recommendation of the Panel was also formally reviewed by GSA-National Capital Region (Office of Legal Counsel and the Contracting Officer) and a report prepared. The report with the decision of the Evaluation Board was signed by each member. The recommendation was then forwarded to the Commission, which held a Commission meeting on March 31, 2009 to decide whether or not to accept this recommendation.

This is the formal process for this type of federal procurement. It is inappropriate to ask for actualized designs for the memorial without providing an opportunity for the designer to meet with the appropriate federal review agencies the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC), Commission of Fine Arts (CFA), National Capital Memorial Advisory Commission (NCMAC)),  the Eisenhower family, and with the Eisenhower Memorial Commission. Federal laws including the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act require public input during the design process.

5. How did you publicize that Americans could apply to design the Eisenhower Memorial?

The competition was advertised on FedBizOpps. This is considered “required reading” for federal business opportunities and is considered normal procedure for federal design and building opportunities.

The memorial design contract was a public federal procurement and followed the Federal Acquisition Regulations. The overall process was administered by the General Services Administration/National Capital Region [GSA/NCR] with the management of the memorial designer selection process by the GSA Central Office. The design project was announced publicly in the Federal Business Opportunities [FBO] website. With the approval of the Contracting Officer, notice of the Request for Qualifications was also listed by the American Institute of Architects and the American Society of Landscape Architects on their respective websites after it was posted on FBO. The announcement was also listed prominently on the EMC website and on the GSA website once it was public information on FBO. See also answer #4.

6. Why did you choose to run the competition via the Design Excellence Program despite its difficulties in the case of the National World War II Memorial competition, including the public outcry against the initial competition? Were you aware of those difficulties?

The Eisenhower Memorial Commission has very limited direct contracting authority.  The National Capital Region of the General Services Administration is set up to provide design services contracting for federal commissions such as ours. The GSA Design Excellence Program is well-respected within the design community as signifying the desire for a high quality design effort. The nature of the GSA Design Excellence program was well expressed by William Guerin, Assistant Commissioner for the Office of Construction Programs, Public Building Service, U.S. General Services Administration, in the following testimony before the Subcommittee on March 20, 2012:

GSA’s Design Excellence process seeks to commission the nation’s most talented architects, and engineers to design projects of outstanding quality and value.  We use the Design Excellence process to select Architect/Engineer firms for our new constriction and major modernizations.  These projects aim to demonstrate the value of truly integrated design that balances aesthetics, function, cost, constructability, reliability, reduced energy consumption, and gives form and meaning to our democratic values.

The Design Excellence program provides a competitive and streamlined process for identifying qualified firms, and then asking a short list of highly qualified firms for design proposals that allow us to select the firm representing the best value to the government.  As part of this process, GSA utilizes the expertise of private sector peers to assist in evaluating the firms, ensuring that we benefit from the knowledge of a wide variety of individuals.

In March 2008, EMC conducted a survey of its Commissioners as to whether they preferred a portfolio-based competition, such as the one used when the World War II Memorial design competition was initiated, or whether they wanted to open the competitive process to a broader group, such as was eventually done for the World War II project. The pros and cons of both methodologies were discussed with the EMC commissioners prior to their polling and they ultimately chose to pursue a portfolio-based selection.

7. Do you think it was sufficient that the Eisenhower Memorial competition was advertised only at FedBizOpps.gov?  Did the Eisenhower Memorial Commission seek to maximize interest in the competition? If not, why? 

The memorial design contract was a public federal procurement and followed the Federal Acquisition Regulations. The overall process was administered by the General Services Administration/National Capital Region [GSA/NCR] with the management of the memorial designer selection process by the GSA Central Office. The design project was announced publicly in the Federal Business Opportunities [FBO] website. With the approval of the Contracting Officer, notice of the Request for Qualifications was also listed by the American Institute of Architects and the American Society of Landscape Architects on their respective websites after it was posted on FBO. The announcement was also listed prominently on the EMC website and on the GSA website once it was public information on FBO.

8. Of the 44 entries the competition received, how many and which ones were specifically solicited by the Eisenhower Memorial Commission and/or its agents?

After the RFQ was published in FedBizOpps and published on other sites as noted previously, with the approval of the GSA Contracting Officer, letters were sent by the Eisenhower Memorial Commission Executive Architect to thirty architects and landscape architects announcing the RFQ for design services for the Eisenhower Memorial. These were not a solicitation of any kind. This was another outreach effort to ensure the Commission received as broad a range of responses to the RFQ as possible.

GSA did not analyze the question of whether any of the recipients of the letters in fact responded to the RFQ.

9. Have you ever made the competition entries public?

GSA has control over the submissions by prospective designers and has allowed the individual designers to release their submissions at their discretion. The Eisenhower Memorial Commission has no authority in this area and we encourage the Committee to make this inquiry directly to GSA.

10. Would you provide the committee with Frank Gehry’s submission?

The submissions are under the control of GSA and we suggest you make this inquiry to GSA.

11. What official actions, including votes, did the Eisenhower Memorial Commission take between its 2007 and 2009 meetings?  If, as you stated in your testimony, there were no official meetings during that time period, on what authority were those actions taken?

When the Commission was first created by Congress in 1999, it faced multiple challenges of deciding where and what the memorial to General and President Eisenhower would be. After the memorial’s site was approved by Congress and the President in 2006, we knew the ‘where.’ The next step was to determine the ‘what.’ In order to do this, the Commission undertook the creation of a Pre-Design Program. EMC staff worked with the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) to develop this Program. Its purpose was to lay out the challenges of the memorial’s site and detail the historical legacy of the memorial’s subject to prepare the future design firm.

After the Pre-Design Program was completed, Commissioners would decide whether to accept it (which they did), and they needed to choose the process by which a designer would be selected. Commissioners and their staff were thoroughly briefed on the details and the ramifications of these decisions, both in-person and through written materials, and Commissioners agreed to clearly indicate their preferences via poll.

Commissioners were polled on the following matters: support or oppose the Pre-Design Program; select a Manager of Design and Construction among GSA, NPS, or Architect of the Capitol; to proceed with a portfolio-based Competition or an Open Competition; and whether the project should be open to international designers or national designers.

In March 2008, Commissioners indicated their preference to: 1) support the Pre-Design Program; 2) use GSA as the design and construction management services provider; 3) proceed with a portfolio-based competition; 4) restrict the project to national designers.

Once this decision was made, the procurement process was organized and announced publicly. Once the procurement process began, it was the major focus of the efforts of the Commission, and due to procurement rules, it was not a subject that could be publicly discussed by the Commission. It would have been inappropriate to hold a Commission meeting during this process to discuss the procurement.

The schedule for the entire process was as follows:

 

August 2008 – Announcement in FedBizOpps

October 2008 – Stage 1

Evaluation Board Meeting – 44 submittals to 7

December 2008 – Stage 2

Evaluation Board Meeting – 7 to 4

March 2009 – Stage 3

Jury Meeting – Pros and Cons of Vision Statements

Evaluation Board Meeting – Selection of Nos. 1 and 2.

March 31, 2009 – Commission Meeting

Selection was approved by Commissioners

Please note, intervals between Eisenhower Memorial Commission meetings have been the following between 2001 and 2011: 3, 7, 14, 5, 9, 9, 12, 3, 3, 6, 16, 20, 12, and 16 months.

12. What unofficial Eisenhower Memorial Commission meetings or assemblies were held between its 2007 and 2009 official meetings? What was the business of those meetings or assemblies, and were all Commissioners invited to them? Were those meetings or assemblies held off the record, and if so, why?

As stated above, there were no unofficial meetings or assemblies between 2007 and 2009.

13. How much will you pay the Washington, DC government for lost parking revenue?

The Commission has been working for the past several years with the District’s Department of Transportation (DDOT) to determine a fair market value rate to compensate for the permanent loss of revenue from 69 parking meters. We have worked through DDOT staff, staff from the Deputy Mayor’s office, and members of the D.C. Council, but have yet to determine a precise value. Councilman Tommy Wells’ staff has agreed to assist the Commission in determining this amount, but has advised that we not pursue this until the Commission attains design approval from the National Capital Planning Commission.

14. What do we know about the durability of the tapestry? How long could it be expected to last without replacement? On what are these estimates based? What will be the annual maintenance cost for the tapestry? 

Since the inception of the project, the Commission has worked with its sponsor, the National Park Service, which will operate and maintain the memorial after it is completed, to ensure that all elements of the memorial will be maintainable and lasting. It is mandated in the designer’s contract that all elements of the memorial shall last for a period of at least 100 years.

The design team has performed material testing for the stainless steel wire proposed to produce the tapestry. Those test results indicate no corrosion to the surface of the material when exposed to conditions simulating the environment. The testing represents accelerated age testing.

Further testing along with the National Park Service will be continuing, with a series of performance tests using final production of the tapestry itself. The performance tests will provide results for in-situ conditions. The tapestry and supporting elements have also been studied in a wind tunnel laboratory. Those results have helped the engineers with supporting information in the design of the structural integrity. Maintenance planning will be based upon the performance testing. Maintenance and accessibility plans are considered and incorporated into the planning of the memorial.

Gehry Partners has had many meetings regarding the maintenance of the tapestries, and the design team has created a strategy for accessing all surfaces of the tapestries for general cleaning and maintenance. This system will ensure that NPS staff can easily access and maintain the tapestries.

As designer Frank Gehry indicated in his statement to the Committee on March 19, 2012, EMC, NPS, and GSA have repeatedly “drilled” into the design team the importance of ensuring that the tapestries are cleanable, durable, and maintainable.

15. Typically, memorials under the Commemorative Works Act must have all funding in place before construction can proceed.  Is that the case with the Eisenhower Memorial?  If not, why was this accommodation made?

In its FY12 appropriations, Congress decided to fund memorial construction in increments as opposed to a lump sum. To accomplish this, Interior Appropriations staff included language in the Commission’s appropriations legislation that “the funds appropriated herein shall be deemed to satisfy the criteria for issuing a permit contained in 40 U.S.C. 8906(a)(4) and (b),” which allows the Commission to proceed with construction.

16. If the Eisenhower Memorial was cancelled tomorrow, what are the outstanding obligations of the commission and the status of the $33 million for the fiscal year 2012 appropriation?

These funds have been appropriated and are in our account. They are being used as is designated. Currently, there are approximately $9 million of obligations outstanding.

 17. Would you please submit the bylaws of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission?

The Commission is not a corporate body and does not operate under a set of by-laws. The Commission, which was established by Congress, operates under the authority of its enabling legislation, P.L. 106-79, as amended by P.L. 110-229.

18. In the letter you submitted by Frank Gehry, he stated that the artist Charles Ray “is not currently nor has he ever been formally connected with the project.” In what non-formal ways has Mr. Ray been connected with the project?  Did he receive compensation for any work he did for the Memorial? If so, how much?

Mr. Ray has never had a formal connection to the project. EMC staff have not had any formal, or non-formal, contact or communications with Mr. Ray, nor made any payments to Mr. Ray.

19. What is the status of private fundraising for the memorial? 

In the spring of 2011, through a competition overseen by GSA, the Commission awarded a private fundraising contract to Odell, Simms & Lynch (OSL), an accomplished and successful fundraising firm located in Falls Church, Virginia. OSL has developed a fundraising strategy which it is in the process of executing. Senator Roberts has sought to arrange a meeting of OSL with Anne and Susan Eisenhower to discuss the effort.

20. Did you ever do a feasibility study on the commission’s ability to conduct private fundraising?

The Commission was urged to undertake a feasibility study by House Interior Appropriations Subcommittee staff in 2008. Upon request, Senator Pat Roberts’ staff recently shared this study with the Eisenhower family. It was pointed out to the family that the information contained is outdated and does not reflect the current market conditions. The Commission’s fundraising strategy is based on the expertise of OSL and current market conditions.

21. When did the full commission vote to formally approve the concept design?

At a formal meeting of the Commission on March 25, 2010, the Commission voted to unanimously approve the preferred design concept. This concept was unanimously re-affirmed at a subsequent Commission meeting on July 12, 2011 and directed Mr. Gehry to complete the design as presented to the Commission at that meeting.

22. How many paid employees, including consultants does the Commission have? 

As indicated in the Commission’s FY13 Budget Justification, the Commission has seven full-time temporary federal employees, and four contract employees, including the Commission’s Executive Architect.  

23. Is there a retail component to the design?  If so, what are the plans? 

The Park Service will have a small bookstore/ranger station on-site, similar to the facilities at the FDR and the MLK memorials. The bookstore operations are conceived by NPS as an integral part of their education efforts. The NPS ranger station is co-located within the bookstore space to facilitate this goal.

How Should We Remember Ike?

by Christopher Snow Hopkins

Updated: April 20, 2012 | 4:10 p.m.
April 18, 2012 | 9:30 p.m.

A battle is under way over the legacy of the 34th president, and at the heart of it is Dwight D. Eisenhower’s granddaughter, Susan Eisenhower.

Since late last year—when architect Frank Gehry began finalizing his design for a national memorial to the late president opposite the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum on the National Mall—pundits, critics, and descendants of Ike have been in high dudgeon over the proposal’s focal point: a life-size sculpture of a teenage Eisenhower gazing dreamily at the horizon.

At a congressional hearing last month, Susan Eisenhower lambasted the design.

“One of the main flaws of the current proposal for the Eisenhower Memorial is that Eisenhower’s contribution to this nation is not the central theme of the design,” she testified before the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands.

“The narrative is muddled and never really gives us the ‘bottom line’ phrase that articulates his contribution to the nation…. Proponents of the [Gehry plan] believe that children will be inspired by seeing themselves in the design-element’s young Eisenhower. I wonder about this premise. Children are not impressed by children. They want to be superheroes.”

In fact, Gehry chose to emphasize the president’s modest beginnings—Ike was one of seven boys born to a creamery worker in Abilene, Kan.—after reading a speech that Gen. Eisenhower delivered toward the end of World War II.

“Because no man is really a man who has lost out of himself all of the boy, I want to speak first of the dreams of a barefoot boy,” said the liberator of Europe and future two-term president. “The proudest thing I can claim is that I am from Abilene.”

This pronouncement notwithstanding, Susan Eisenhower argues that Gehry has allowed Ike’s humility to eclipse his historic role in vanquishing fascism abroad and ushering in peace and plenty at home. (This is not her only objection to the design; she likens Gehry’s “tapestries,” or stainless-steel scrims suspended on 80-foot-high columns, to the “Iron Curtain.”)

The contest of wills between Susan Eisenhower and the congressionally chartered commission that selected Gehry’s design has only intensified in recent weeks. In a bid to quell the mounting controversy, the Eisenhower Memorial Commission issued a statement on March 27 expressing its “total and unqualified support” for the illustrious architect.

But the Eisenhower family has not relented, and Susan Eisenhower has hinted at a major announcement touching on the memorial in the near future.

One irony of the acrimonious affair is that Susan’s brother, David Eisenhower, sat on the Eisenhower Memorial Commission until his resignation last December to chair the Eisenhower Foundation’s board of directors. (Reportedly, David Eisenhower even recommended an excerpt from one of his grandfather’s speeches to be integrated into Gehry’s design.) The timing of his departure has led to speculation that he vacated his seat at the behest of his family—a rumor Susan Eisenhower vehemently denies. During her appearance on Capitol Hill, she disclosed a letter from her brother affirming his solidarity with the family.

“I am in full support of the family’s decision to share our concerns with the public,” he wrote, “and I endorse the family’s efforts to gain a thorough review of the currently proposed design, including a redesign.”

Given the current impasse, the future of the Eisenhower Memorial may well be decided in Congress. A presidential memorial in Washington has never proceeded without the endorsement of family members, and when relatives of Franklin D. Roosevelt objected to an early design—citing FDR’s famous remark that he wanted his memorial to be no bigger than his desk—the plan was scrubbed.

Underlying the escalating feud is a broader question: What role should family members play in shaping the legacy of a president? Susan Eisenhower, who was present at her grandfather’s deathbed, told National Journal Daily that she “understands and respects the fact that people think that family members shouldn’t have a big sway…. But our situation is a little different: My grandfather’s son and heir is still alive. That doesn’t mean that our vote is worth any more than any ordinary American’s vote, but it does mean that we have some sense of who he was.”

Susan’s father and the late president’s only heir is John S.D. Eisenhower, 89, a retired brigadier general in the Army Reserves who served as ambassador to Belgium during the Nixon administration.

A lifelong Republican, Susan Eisenhower, 60, surprised many in the GOP by endorsing Barack Obama for president in 2008 and speaking at his nominating convention in Denver. Today she is president of The Eisenhower Group, a Washington consulting firm, and is active in Gettysburg College’s Eisenhower Institute.

The Decline of American Monuments and Memorials

MICHAEL J. LEWIS, the Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor of Art at Williams College, has taught American art and architecture at Williams since 1993. After receiving his B.A. from Haverford College in 1980 and two years at the University of Hannover in Germany, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. He has also taught at Bryn Mawr College, McGill University in Montreal, and the University of Natal in South Africa. He has written for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Commentary, and The New Criterion, and his books include The Gothic Revival andAmerican Art and Architecture.

The following is adapted from a lecture delivered on March 2, 2012, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C. Photos of the monuments mentioned in this lecture can be viewed at hillsdale.edu/lewis.

THIS HAS BEEN an extraordinary year for American monuments. The memorial at Ground Zero opened last September in New York. One month later came the dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial here in Washington, and soon to come to Washington—or perhaps not—is the memorial to President Eisenhower, which is to be a collaboration between architect Frank Gehry and sculptor Charles Ray. Each of these has been the subject of furious controversy, especially those in Washington.

The King Memorial was criticized for engaging a sculptor from Communist China, who saw to it that Chinese rather than American granite was used for the structure—which accounts for its “Made in China” inscription. Even worse, the memorial managed to misquote the great man: Not only did he not say, “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness,” but his actual words were a hypothetical statement put in someone else’s mouth. Worse still is the demeanor and expression of the sculpture. King was above all an orator, and in photographs he is invariably open in stance, speaking, gesturing, demonstrating, with his energy directed outward. Yet in the monument he is depicted with arms folded, utterly detached. Instead of inspiring warmth, there is the infinite aloofness of an idol.

The proposed Eisenhower Monument has been criticized on opposite grounds. Instead of making its subject a 30-foot effigy, it turns him into a diminutive country boy. In an outdoor public space that is part formal civic plaza and part wooden urban park, columns in the background will support a wire mesh screen depicting images of the Kansas prairie of Eisenhower’s childhood. And at the center will be the sculpture of Eisenhower as a dreamy country boy “looking out onto his future achievements”—an unconventional depiction, given that there were millions of dreamy country boys and only one Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe in World War Two.

As different as the King and Eisenhower memorials are, the public’s dismay in each instance has the same cause: These aren’t the men we knew. It is not easy, of course, to make a succinct statement in sculptural form of the essence of a man’s life. It is something American art has always struggled with, especially in our chronic divided loyalty between realism and idealism. But this is the least of the problems with the Eisenhower and King memorials. They fail fundamentally as monuments, not because they misunderstand the nature of their subjects, but because they misunderstand what a monument is, or should be.

As traditionally understood, a monument is the expression of a single powerful idea in a single emphatic form, in colossal scale and in permanent materials, made to serve civic life. (Materials and size distinguish monuments from memorials, of which monuments are a subset.) But I suspect that if Frank Gehry were asked to define a monument, he would say something to the effect that a monument is not a thing but a process—an open-ended conversation in which various constituencies bring different interpretations to different forms. I have heard versions of this definition for decades. And it is simply not good enough.

* * *

The spontaneous roadside memorials that mark the site of fatal traffic accidents are a relatively new phenomenon. As physical objects they are ephemera, but as a mass cultural phenomenon they are quite extraordinary, and they testify to a deep human need for memorials. It is a new form of folk art, and it is extremely conventionalized in its expression. For one thing, its repertoire of forms and materials is very narrow: crosses, flowers, hand-painted signs, and heartbreakingly, in the case of a child, stuffed animals. There is very little else, and no striving for originality. Their creators look for widely understood symbols, and they yearn for resolution and closure; they certainly do not aspire to an open-ended process.

In a way, these anonymous roadside sculptors understand what many contemporary artists do not—that monuments, because they are public art forms, must be legible. And this requires a great degree of convention. Thus most traditional monuments are paraphrases of a few ancient types: the triumphal arch, the temple, the colossal column, and the obelisk. Since the 1930s, it has been fashionable to disparage this as architectural grave-robbing, and to argue that we should create our own forms. But these forms are timeless, not simply ancient. After all, the arch is nothing more than a space of passage, made monumental; an obelisk or column is the exclamation point raised above a sacred spot; and a temple is a tabernacle, the sacred tent raised over an altar. These ideas are permanent, and it is not surprising that the one successful work of contemporary public art, the Vietnam Memorial, took its form from one of the most ancient—the mural shrine, the wailing wall.

It is because of their ability to transcend time by connecting to primal human activities—passage, gathering, shelter—that the best monuments never look dated. John Russell Pope’s Jefferson Memorial does not make us think of 1940, but of Jefferson. It does this with its shape: To commemorate the author of the Declaration of Independence, Pope chose the most perfect of all forms—the sphere, a physical manifestation of the clarity of Jefferson’s mind. How different is the Lincoln Memorial, a foursquare citadel; here the theme is heroic fortitude—a cincture of closely spaced columns, huddled together about the windowless central shrine, expressing endurance. Different again is the monument to George Washington, a vehement founding gesture, a single bold mark against the sky. For this, the model was that greatest of architectural point-markers, the Egyptian obelisk.

Although Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial was roundly condemned for its radical innovations—the use of black granite rather than white marble, the stress on a void rather than a positive presence, the violent scar it seemed to make on the earth—it nonetheless presented the profoundly traditional image of a stone tablet inscribed with the names of the dead. Perhaps Lin’s most poetic gesture was how she solved the problem of how to list some 58,000 names. It was determined that they should appear in order of the date of death rather than alphabetically, but she did not simply start at one end in 1959 and continue on to 1975; instead she began and ended the timeline in the center, at the vertex, so that the name of the last to die would touch the name of the first. Here she gave the monument a point of resolution, the point where things begin and end, transforming the linear timeline into something cyclical and regenerative, thus making its central point a kind of altar.

Not long ago it was fashionable to sneer at these things. Frank Lloyd Wright found the Jefferson Memorial preposterous for its archaic expression. But true monumentality has little to do with style and everything to do with simplicity and grandeur of expression. Rodin, asked to define sculpture, supposedly said that it is what results when you roll a statue down the steps—that is, when everything extraneous breaks off. The word for a style of extremely laconic expression is “lapidary,” which comes from the Latin word lapis, or stone. This was the Roman term for the verbal compression necessary when one is carving an inscription in stone. And like the inscriptions they bear, the best of monuments are lapidary: They show a splendid economy of expression in saying one thing, and saying it monumentally.

A structure that offers a single great lesson is a monument; one that offers many facts and anecdotes is a school or museum. And when it offers too many, it becomes preachy, as happened with the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington. Designed by Lawrence Halprin, it provides a sequence of four outdoor rooms, representing FDR’s four terms. Each presents a visual tableau, lavishly outfitted with bronze statues, relief sculptures, and carved inscriptions. For example, the first term is dramatized with a vignette of a Depression-era breadline, and the second with a vignette of an American listening to one of Roosevelt’s fireside chats. Throughout the memorial runs an insistent literalism, with nothing rendered abstractly or symbolically. It is a kind of cross-pollination of a diorama with a Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. Even FDR’s dog Fala is pantingly immortalized in bronze.

During the design process, anti-smoking groups succeeded in eliminating Roosevelt’s ubiquitous cigarette holder. Evidently Halprin and his collaborators did not recognize that Roosevelt’s cigarette holder was not the sign of a lamentable addiction, but the president’s most effective visual prop. He clenched it in his teeth with his jaw thrust forward so that it pointed upwards jauntily, to create an image of buoyant and unshakeable optimism. At the same time, pressure from activist groups for the disabled ensured that FDR would be depicted as wheelchair-bound and handicapped with polio—a fact he carefully suppressed in all public appearances. So the element he flaunted was eliminated, the element he concealed was stressed, and the rakish and jaunty cavalier was transformed into a differently-abled and rather prim non-smoker. I can’t help but think that Roosevelt himself was much more gifted in creating inspiring visual imagery than the makers of his monument.

Monuments and memorials today are discursive, sentimental, addicted to narrative literalism, and asking to be judged on good intentions rather than visual coherence. This change began, ironically, with a critique of the overwrought memorials of the Victorian era. In reaction, the first generation of modern architects decided that we needed an entirely different vocabulary of monuments. So when modernism went about dislodging the structures of traditional society, culture, religion, and the political and social order, it also began dispensing with the arches and columns that paid tribute to that order. This was not easy, however, because modernism was concerned with the future and monuments are retrospective.

One possibility for those rejecting traditional monuments was to eschew technology and turn to the earth itself. The movement known as Earth Art came of age in the late 1960s, and the Vietnam Memorial arose from it, shaping the earth through mounds and embankments. But as great as that memorial was, it was to have a strange effect on the building of subsequent monuments—and not at all the effect one might have expected. Because of the furious reception of Maya Lin’s design, now forgotten because of the memorial’s ultimate success, a figural sculpture was added at the last minute—the sculpture known as “Fighting Men” by the late Frederick Hart. It depicts a trio of combat infantrymen returning from patrol, grim, weary, and drenched to the skin. If your taste is for realistic figural sculpture, Hart’s are the best.

But then something curious happened. Hart made a point of depicting a black, a white, and a Hispanic, but not a female soldier. So shortly thereafter, plans were made for yet a third memorial, this time to honor the women who died in Vietnam. The sculptor, Glenna Goodacre, skillfully paraphrased the Pieta—the wounded soldier reposes like the dead Christ on the nurse’s lap, and in place of the billowing skirts of Michelangelo’s Madonna there is a pyramid of sandbags. But there is a problem in the math: Hart’s three soldiers represent some 58,000 dead men, while Goodacre’s three soldiers represent the seven women who died. We are approaching the point, that is, where we are not dealing in symbolism but literalism—a straight one-to-one representation. And this, regrettably, is the ultimate lesson of the Vietnam Memorial. While America’s most progressive artists openly mocked Hart’s “Fighting Men” for its backward-looking realism, when it came time to propose their own monuments, fashionable designers preferred easygoing literalism to the sublime abstraction of Maya Lin.

Consider the Korean War Veterans Memorial, authorized by Congress in 1988 and designed by Frank Gaylord. Here too the subject is a platoon on patrol, in this case 19 bronze soldiers trudging heavily uphill. It was originally intended to depict not 19 but 38 soldiers—the reference being to the 38th Parallel along which the war pivoted. In the end the number was halved, presumably for budget reasons, with the explanation that it would be doubled by the reflecting mirror: 19 x 2 = 38. Here is an utter misunderstanding of the means and ends of allegory. Normally, allegory uses interlocking symbols to comment on the things we care about—truth, honor, sacrifice. Here it is inverted: Something that really matters, human lives, are being used to represent an accident of military geography, the 38th Parallel.

Why is it that the language of allegory, once generally understood by our culture as a whole, has been banished from our nation’s sacred sites so completely that one needs to spot naïve roadside memorials to find unambiguous statements of grief and love? I believe it has to do with the conviction that became widespread in the 1960s, that we do not need formal conventions, but rather authenticity and sincerity—that we do not need etiquette, but rather honesty. The mantra of that era, “Tell it like it is,” encouraged us to speak from the heart, to improvise. And if the improvisation faltered, as improvisations often do, then stumbling inarticulateness could be taken as a badge of sincerity.

The problem, as Emily Post knows, is that there are situations too serious to trust to improvisation. There are moments when a convention is required and cannot be improved on: the polite inquiry, “How are you?”, the statement of congratulation, “I wish you the best,” the statement of condolence, “I am sorry for your loss.” These are not trite platitudes, but social obligations that are ritual actions. Social interaction requires social conventions. People who do not use conventional sayings, such as “I am sorry for your loss,” run the danger of saying something inappropriate: “Well, at least he’s out of his misery,” or “My uncle had the same form of tumor,” or “Bummer.” If you trust to your own originality, all you can be sure of is that whatever inappropriate notion is bobbing along at the surface of your unconscious will be blurted out.

As it is with social etiquette, so it is with memorials. An artist who sweeps away the traditional conventions for dealing with the great truths of life, death, and sacrifice, can only shuffle about in the cupboard of his own store of mental images. Such was the fate of Eric Fischl, the first artist who tried to make monumental art out of 9/11—a colossal bronze that he called “Falling Woman.” On 9/11, the most agonizing images were those of the trapped workers in the towers, their backs to the inferno, who leapt to their deaths. But unlike the Vietnam Memorial—which succeeds because it says, in the simplest terms possible, “I am sorry for your loss”—“Falling Woman” trusted to improvisation. Rather than “I am sorry for your loss,” it says, “I cannot get this out of my mind.” Ultimately it is not public art at all, but private indulgence.

In the end, the Ground Zero Memorial was not as bad as that but not as good as it should have been. The key decision was to maintain the footprints of the vanished towers, which means that its dominant gesture is the collapse of the buildings and not the lives within. If it has something of the laconic restraint of the Vietnam Memorial, this is to be expected, as Maya Lin played a prominent role on the jury. An urban version of her landscape memorial, it has the same sense of void and absence, the same minimalism and austerity. In one respect, though, it fails to achieve the spatial resolution of the Vietnam Memorial. At the latter the names are in order of death, and have a kind of implacable sad rhythm. Obviously this could not be done at Ground Zero, so the names there are placed according to a random computer-generated sequence. Let me propose a rule—in a real monument, there must be nothing random or computer-generated.

* * *

Returning to the monuments that have been so controversial in Washington recently, the Eisenhower project is scarcely a memorial, let alone a monument. Its principal object, the sculpture of Eisenhower as a farm boy, is far smaller than the colossal backdrops that surround him. It will be these images, abstract depictions of the Kansas countryside and photographic images of Eisenhower’s life, which provide the dominant visual note. Lost and adrift somewhere in this theme park of billboards and fragmented colonnades is Eisenhower himself, diminished and bewildered. To ask one obvious question: What does this have to say about the guiding spirit of D-Day? Clearly Gehry was ill at ease with the martial subject matter, which is why his central image shows Eisenhower “looking out over his future achievements” and doesn’t spell out to future generations of Americans what those achievements were.

As for the King Memorial, the most common charge is that it recalls the despotic sculpture of Leninist-Maoist regimes, with their avuncular but stern “dear leaders.” The sculptor has spent his entire life in such a culture, and it is to be expected that his design would be accused of being a surrogate Chairman Mao image. And to be sure, there is something imperious and implacable about the face of King, a kind of lithic ruthlessness. It certainly seems fiercer than that of our other national martyr to civil rights, Abraham Lincoln. But I would propose that the difference is not so much between American and Chinese character and ideas, although those are at play, but between granite and marble. King is carved out of the former, a dense stone with a crystalline structure that is carved with the greatest of difficulty, forcing a language of sharp lines, flat planes, and generalized roundness. The marble from which Lincoln is carved is far more supple, permitting softer modeling. When one looks at King, with double lines delineating eyes, lips, and nose, one realizes this is the most primal sculptural language of all, that of ancient Egypt.

But there is a far greater problem with the King Memorial. Its overall conception was inspired by a line from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which promises that together we will build “out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope.” So we see depicted a Mountain of Despair and a Stone of Hope. The whole ensemble is a kind of visual diagram of King’s metaphor, with the Stone of Hope moved forward as neatly as a pawn advancing on a chessboard. In other words, just as the Korean War Veterans Memorial reduced its human figures to symbols of the 38th Parallel, here King is reduced to an illustration of his wordplay. A figure of speech is beautiful because it calls to mind a mental picture; but to build a scale model of a word picture is to do it violence, and to render laughable in reality what is beautiful in the imagination.

The King Memorial runs perilously close to being not a monument at all, but a book illustration—the visual diagram of ideas generated elsewhere. But it is a good index of where we stand today when it comes to the building of monuments. Allegory requires an imaginative act, and is literary, whereas our culture is uncomfortable with figurative language. This began around 1977, the moment the language censors began to attack phrases like “Man does not live on bread alone,” asking “What about women?” A painful literalism set in, which is hostile to figurative language in speech and to abstract allegory in art. Nowadays we tend to think literally rather than literarily, which explains why Frederick Hart had to portray the American military experience in Vietnam by means of three men of three distinct races—and why a women’s memorial was subsequently added. The fear of leaving someone or something out is hostile to the allegorical impulse, which seeks not to itemize but to generalize, and to speak not specific truths but great truths. It is not surprising that a culture ill at ease with the notion of absolute truth would find it very difficult to make monuments that show urgency and conviction.

What can we do about this? First, we can recognize that it is possible to make a convincing monument with the means of modern architecture. Eero Saarinen showed that it could be done with his Gateway Arch at St. Louis: an exquisite portal that opens to the west, it is our version of a Roman triumphal arch. It is abstract, but its visual logic is direct and persuasive, showing that modern materials and forms are not incapable of suggesting timeless ideas. Second, we can recognize that it is not too late. Just because a world-famous architect has submitted a design does not oblige us to build it. Third, we can remember that greatness is possible. For more than a century and a half, we built monuments with spectacular success. We have only been building them badly for a generation. I look at these recent designs, which are perhaps an honest reflection of our divided and uncertain culture, and can’t help but think we can do better once more.

GSA Role in Ike Memorial Scrutinized

By: Puja Murgai
April 17, 2012 11:20 PM EDT

As Congress’s inquiry into the General Services Administration’s conference spending heats up, critics of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial design are questioning whether there was fancy footwork in choosing the agency to have a hand in the plans.

The National Civic Art Society said in a statement last week that it “encourages an exploration of whether the Eisenhower Memorial Commission,” tasked with memorializing the 34th president, “followed all appropriate legal and ethical procedures in authorizing the use of the GSA Design Excellence Program to select an architect” for the memorial.

During a hearing last month of the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands that the Eisenhower Memorial Commission said was intended “to inform and fully brief … members of Congress and the Eisenhower family about all aspects of the Commission’s preferred design concept,” Bill Guerin, assistant commissioner for the Office of Construction Programs at GSA, explained that the agency had assisted the commission with “issues related to the acquisition of office space, human resources and payroll services,” but its role expanded when “the EMC asked GSA to assist in selecting both a design firm and a construction contractor for the memorial.”

GSA had also been involved in the design of the World War II Memorial. A commission created by Congress worked with GSA to select an architect. The rules for the competition originally called for a three-stage review of lead designers’ portfolios but were amended after critics said the process was too restrictive. The competition was instead made open to any U.S. citizen older than 18. Entrants were kept anonymous as a jury of private-sector individuals and government officials created a shortlist from which they selected the designer.

Competitions for the designs of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, on the other hand, were open right from the start, and judges — which included members of GSA, though the agency did not run the contests — were kept in the dark on the entrants’ names and backgrounds to preserve their anonymity.

NCAS, among the most vocal critics of the design and selection process for the Eisenhower memorial, said choosing GSA “created a de facto closed competition.”

The commission shot back, saying it’s “not going to dignify the Civic Arts club’s attack.” Chris Cimko, spokeswoman for the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, told POLITICO that NCAS “impugns the integrity of the commission, which includes four senators, four members of the House of Representatives and four Americans appointed by the president of the United States, including David Eisenhower, who served as a commissioner for over a decade.”

The Eisenhower Memorial Commission has publicly backed GSA’s choice of Frank Gehry, the PritzkerPrize-winning architect, saying in a statement last month, “We confirm our selection of him [and] confirm our enthusiastic endorsement of his design concept.”

At last month’s hearing, House subcommittee Chairman Rob Bishop said, after Guerin detailed the agency’s three-stage process for vetting design firms, “I certainly hope Congress does have some expertise in this area … otherwise, we’re all screwed.”

But Rep. Darrell Issa, who as chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee is an ex officio member of the National Capital Planning Commission, the federal agency responsible for approving the proposed plan, has been keeping an eye on GSA. Issa, who chaired a hearing Monday on the agency’s conference spending, asked the Memorial Commission in February to hand over “all architectural designs concerning [the] memorial submitted to the commission” and “a detailed description of the process leading to acceptance of the Frank Gehry submission.”

Issa also reached out to the NCPC, asking the commission to postpone “for a period of at least 120 days … any vote concerning the ‘Gehry’ design as proposed by the Eisenhower Memorial Commission.” Issa added, “This would allow NCPC commissioners more time to better understand the complexities of an issue that, up until now, were hidden from public view.”

Testimony at the March hearing included a letter from Gehry, which according to The Associated Press indicated that he is open to the idea of a redesign. But Susan Eisenhower, the president’s granddaughter who also testified at the hearing, told POLITICO, “If a redesign is undertaken, we would welcome an open process and competition.”

But when asked about objections to the design selection process, the NCPC and the Commission of Fine Arts, an advisory council that put its seal of approval on the design submitted by the National Park Service on behalf of EMC, wouldn’t touch the subject.

CFA simply said it “is supportive of the goals of the GSA’s Design Excellence Program,” according to secretary Thomas Luebke. And Julia Koster, director of NCPC’s Office of Public Outreach, told POLITICO the commission’s “involvement with the memorial is limited to review of the memorial’s site and design,” adding, “We were not involved with the design competition.”

If you can not attend, you can watch the event live on AEI’s website.

Details below:

Over the past year, the recently dedicated Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Memorial and the planned Eisenhower Memorial have renewed controversy about the meaning and purpose of public memorials. What do America’s memorials and monuments tell us about our nation and our identity as citizens? How should we memorialize past events and individuals? In this event, co-sponsored by the Program on American Citizenship and the National Civic Art Society, a distinguished panel will address these questions and comment on the MLK and Eisenhower memorials.

Agenda

9:45 AM
Registration

10:00 AM
Introduction:
Gary J. Schmitt, AEI

Panelists:
Bruce Cole, Hudson Institute
Michael J. Lewis, Williams College
Diana Schaub, Loyola University Maryland
Roger Scruton, AEI

Moderator:
Eric Wind, National Civic Art Society

11:30 AM
Adjournment

Location:

AEI, Twelfth Floor, 1150 Seventeenth Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036 (Two blocks from Farragut North Metro)

A Monumental Debate

April 16, 2012

Will the Frank Gehry-designed Ike Memorial ever get built?

By Ben Adler

For an architect, no commission is more troublesome than creating a national memorial. Frank Gehry is learning firsthand just how fraught the process can be, with his design for a President Dwight D. Eisenhower memorial in Washington, D.C., generating widespread debate.

The mammoth project—it will stretch the length of a city block and be twice the size of the Lincoln Memorial—has drawn fire from an array of critics. Most notably, Eisenhower’s grandchildren complain the design fails to pay proper homage to the career of the World War II general and 34th U.S. president.

Gehry has proposed creating a park with several sculptural elements. Eighty-foot-high metal tapestries, with imagery depicting Eisenhower’s childhood in Kansas, would frame the 4-acre, open-air site. The interior features a low-lying stone wall inscribed with excerpts of speeches delivered by Eisenhower; a statute of him as a boy; and two stone bas-reliefs—one depicting him as a military hero, the other showing him as president. The memorial is slated to be built near the National Mall, across from the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

“We’re losing a huge opportunity to tell the story of how Eisenhower served his country,” Susan Eisenhower, the president’s granddaughter, told Architectural Record. “You don’t earn a place in the memorial core of Washington based on your origins and your life’s journey. You’re there because the nation is grateful for your contribution. We don’t have Lincoln in a log cabin.”

Dissenters also argue that the design isn’t traditional enough. “The focus is Gehry, not Eisenhower,” says Justin Shubow, president of the National Civic Art Society, an organization that promotes classical design. “Gehry describes his work as representing chaos and danger. He has never done work representing someone else.”

So far, the 11-member Eisenhower Memorial Commission (EMC), which is overseeing the project, stands in full support of Gehry’s proposal. (Eisenhower’s grandson, David Eisenhower, sat on the commission until December 2011, when he stepped down). The olive branch the EMC has offered to opponents is that the Los Angeles–based architect hopes to meet with the Eisenhower family to address their concerns. Gehry declined to be interviewed for this story, although his firm did make public a letter the architect wrote to Congress stating that he would be willing to work with the family and modify the scheme.

The project is being condemned for reasons beyond design. Some complain that the EMC should have hosted an open competition rather than using the federal government’s standard approach to hiring an architect: The General Services Administration posts an online call for portfolios; a committee selects finalists who submit designs; the committee then chooses a winner. In the case of the Ike Memorial, Gehry beat out finalists Krueck + Sexton Architects, PWP Landscape Architecture, and Rogers Marvel Architects.

Defenders of the process say that an open competition wouldn’t draw top talent. “You’re basically saying to architects: ‘You’re skilled professionals and you’re going to go up against grade-school students,’” says Witold Rybczynski, an urbanism professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In March, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Times defending both the design and the selection process. Rybczynski sits on the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts, which ultimately must approve the memorial design.

Many hurdles await. Beyond getting the green light from the Arts Commission, the design must go before the National Capital Planning Commission for preliminary and final approval. Moreover, money must be raised. Congress has agreed to pay for only half of the estimated $112 million project. As observers have noted, the Eisenhower family’s endorsement could be helpful, even necessary, when it comes to fundraising—and getting this memorial built.

This story appears in the May 2012 issue of Architectural Record.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: April 11, 2012

CONTACT: info@civicart.org or (202) 670-1776

National Civic Art Society Calls Attention to Conspicuous Gap in the Eisenhower Memorial Commission’s Meeting Minutes

The National Civic Art Society, which has been leading the fight to stop the proposed design for the Eisenhower Memorial and seeks a new open, transparent, and democratic competition for the design of the Memorial, wishes to call attention to procedural irregularities in the Eisenhower Memorial Commission’s meeting minutes.

In light of the recent abuses of the public trust and taxpayer funds by the General Services Administration (GSA), the National Civic Art Society encourages an exploration of whether the Eisenhower Memorial Commission followed all appropriate legal and ethical procedures in authorizing the use the GSA Design Excellence Program to select an architect for the Eisenhower Memorial. The selection of the GSA Design Excellence Program for the Eisenhower Memorial created a de facto closed competition. This is despite the fact that the history of using the GSA Design Excellence Program shows it to be inappropriate for selecting a designer for a national memorial. When there was a nearly identical closed competition for the World War II Memorial in the 1990s, there was a public outcry and the competition was scrapped for an open one.

There is a concerning gap in the Eisenhower Memorial Commission’s minutes between its July 2007[1]  and March 2009[2]  meetings—an issue that Chairman Rob Bishop of the House of Representatives Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands raised in a hearing on March 20, 2012.[3]  According to the Eisenhower Memorial Commission’s 2009 meeting minutes, “Chairman Siciliano called for approval of the Commission’s meeting minutes of March 30, 2006 and July 26, 2007. The Chairman observed that while these minutes had been reviewed and discussed at previous meetings, there had not been a quorum of Commissioners present to approve them [emphasis added].” Thus, according to the Commission’s own records, it held at least two meetings between the July 2007 and March 2009 meetings. Where are those missing minutes? And what precisely occurred at those meetings?

Here is what occurred in 2008 according to the March 2009 meeting minutes:

“[Executive Architect] Feil states that one year ago, the Commission voted to move forward with the designer selection process by approving four items. First, the [GSA] Pre-Design Program was approved. Second, GSA’s Design Excellence Program was approved as the process to be used to procure the memorial design tem. Third, lead designers were restricted to citizens of the United States. Fourth, a portfolio-based competition was specified [emphasis added].”

Thus, in 2008, the Commission voted on the essential aspects of the “competition” that selected Frank Gehry. Moreover, it must have been in 2008 that the Commission made Daniel Feil, its executive architect, its designated agent to oversee the competition and to engage in contracts on the Commission’s behalf. On May 8, 2008, in Public Law 110-229, Congress authorized the Commission to appoint an architect as its agent, including to:

 (i) represent the Commission on various governmental source selection and planning boards on the selection of the firms that will design and construct the memorial; and

(ii) perform other duties as designated by the Chairperson of the Commission.

This fulfilled the Commission’s 2007 request to the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands to “empower the Commission’s Executive Architect” who “[a]s the Commission’s agent . . . will also be authorized to represent the Commission as a voting member on design and construction selection panels, thereby improving coordination, communication, and decision-making for our twelve Commissioners.”[4]

Since the selection process was announced in August 2008, the Commission must have made Feil its agent between May 8, 2008 and then.

At the above-mentioned hearing on the Eisenhower Memorial, Chairman Rob Bishop specifically asked the Eisenhower Memorial Commission about the missing minutes.

 Bishop: There are some missing minutes from I think July 2007 to March 2009. Where are those minutes and can we get a copy of them?

Retired General Carl Reddel (Executive Director of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission): There was not a meeting of the Commission at that time…

Bishop: In that two year time period? From July ’07 to March ’09 you had no meetings?

Reddel: I believe that’s correct, yes sir. In other words, the business of the Commission at that time did not include a full Commission meeting.

Bishop: That’s unusual.

If Reddel was being truthful, on what authority did the Commission take those crucial actions, including votes, regarding the competition? Not only are those meetings putatively unofficial (and apparently off the record), there was no quorum at them. Likewise, on what authority did the Commission make Feil its designated agent? Moreover, if those 2008 meetings were not official, why are they even mentioned in the 2009 minutes? What was the procedural status of those meetings under the Commission’s bylaws? Furthermore, was there due notice of those meetings? Were all Commissioners invited to attend them? The National Civic Art Society believes that these questions deserve careful scrutiny, particularly since the Eisenhower Memorial Commission and General Services Administration have already wasted millions of dollars of taxpayer money to get to this stage in the design process.

In light of this waste, appearance of irregularities, and the broad public outcry against the design of the proposed Eisenhower Memorial, the National Civic Art Society calls for a new open, transparent, and democratic competition for the Eisenhower Memorial that is overseen by members of Congress, art and architecture experts, stakeholders, and members of the public—not the General Services Administration (GSA). President Eisenhower and the American taxpayers deserve no less.

For more information on the National Civic Art Society and its efforts to stop the proposed design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, please see www.civicart.org and www.eisenhowermemorial.net.

Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial Design Needs to Be Rethought

The Eisenhower Memorial Commission recently decided to press forward with architect Frank Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial design, despite dissatisfaction with the design expressed by many, including the Eisenhower family. The design concept is indeed problematic. But will the commission and Gehry be willing to address the memorial design’s fundamental problems?

Among the most strident complainers have been those condemning the aesthetic style of the memorial. Generally disliking architectural modernism, they strongly prefer a classically inspired memorial design. These critics argue that civic structures employing a modernist or avant garde vocabulary just don’t belong in the nation’s capital, where so many classically derivative government edifices, museums and monuments have been built. To them, selecting Gehry was a colossal error.

But the real problems of Gehry’s memorial design have nothing to do with aesthetic style or the use of modern rather than neoclassical architectural languages and materials. Modernism is not a style but rather encompasses many styles and strategies of design that share one attribute: They don’t replicate or allude literally to historic architecture and antique motifs.

Therefore, arguments over style are irrelevant. Instead what matters is creating an Eisenhower Memorial design, whatever the specific style, that is compelling and appropriate in representing Eisenhower’s accomplishments and contributions to the nation. Occupying a significant civic space, the memorial also must play a proper role as an element within the evolving urban fabric of America’s capital city.

Many have criticized how the architect was chosen, believing the commission should have conducted an open design competition similar to how Maya Lin was chosen to design the Vietnam Memorial, and how designs for other high-visibility, civic projects have resulted from open competitions.

Gehry, in fact, was chosen through a competition, but a limited competition managed by the General Services Administration through its Design Excellence program. The GSA protocol entailed first compiling a list of possible designers based on qualifications and proven talent. However, at this stage, no memorial design was proposed or considered. Subsequently the list was shortened, short-listed designers were interviewed and finalists were selected. Only then did the commission jury review preliminary concepts, leading to Gehry’s selection.

The GSA method for selecting designers often has produced excellent results, and it can save time and expense. But it also means that a project sponsor sees only a few ideas, whereas an open competition produces hundreds of ideas.

At this point, the Eisenhower Commission could suspend work on the Gehry scheme, hit the reset button and start over by sponsoring an open, national competition to search for a new design concept. But this could prove unfeasible economically and politically.

The commission could take another approach familiar to practicing architects and their clients: Ask the designer to come up with scheme B to correct the flaws of scheme A. Exploring alternative design concepts occurs often in the real world of design and construction. Initial project conditions and parameters can change during the design process. Perceptions and understanding of the nature of the project likewise can change as designs take shape.

We architects create, fall in love with and get emotionally invested in our design concepts. Modifying or abandoning them is painful, both for us and our clients. Yet a beloved concept can keep us from contemplating better concepts.

Gehry as well as the Eisenhower Commission are undoubtedly fond of the current memorial design. But having seen much of Gehry’s work here and abroad, I believe he is capable of reconceptualizing his scheme to address and correct the fundamental urban design and interpretive flaws.

The designated four-acre memorial site, along Independence Avenue SW and opposite the National Air and Space Museum, is currently an unattractive, underutilized open space. While an appropriate location for the memorial, this space, the size of four football fields, is far too large to be dedicated just to Eisenhower. Indeed, the site’s area, coupled with the large-scale urban and architectural context of surrounding federal buildings, invited design of an immodest, oversized memorial scheme.

During site selection, before Gehry was chosen, federal agencies erred. They should have adopted a dual strategy: call for revitalizing the site through creation of an urban park or square, akin to Bryant Park in New York City, Copley Square in Boston or Union Square in San Francisco; and authorize placing the Eisenhower Memorial in a segment of the reanimated four-acre park.

To remediate this original error, the Eisenhower Commission should ask Gehry’s team to rethink the concept, especially its questionable urban design attributes and the 80-foot high, 11-foot diameter columns and metal scrims depicting Kansas landscape imagery and framing the site. Building a quasi-fenced precinct makes no sense.

The narrative theme relating to Eisenhower’s boyhood, so visually dominant in the present design, also makes no sense. Gehry instead could craft a less grandiose yet visually powerful memorial composition situated within, rather than encompassing, an activated urban park. Such a memorial should meaningfully symbolize and commemorate what really matters: Ike’s exceptional achievements and role in shaping American history, not his Kansas roots. [emphasis added]

Roger K. Lewis is a practicing architect and a professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Maryland.

In the American Spectator, Scruton argues that Frank Gehry’s design for the Eisenhower Memorial is intended to belittle the president so as not to outshine the architect’s colossal ego:

Monumental Egos

“Starchitects” like Frank Gehry do not build for people — they build to shock.

The controversy over Frank Gehry’s design for a “memorial park” to President Eisenhower—a vast array of hideous metal walls, covered with reflections on the President’s humble origins, and mutilating (should it be built) an important public area of the capital city—has alerted Americans to the difficulty, in modern conditions, of obtaining an appropriate monument. Simple gravestones commemorate private people, and are inscribed with words of love from the few who will seriously miss them. Monuments, however, do not only commemorate public figures who have deserved well of the nation. They commemorate the nation, raise it above the land on which it is planted, and express an idea of public duty and public achievement in which everyone can share. Their meaning is not “he” or “she” but “we.” And the successful monument does not stand out as a defiance of the surrounding order, but endorses it and adds to its grace and dignity.

Washington has many such monuments. But they belong (for the most part) to another era, when architects and sculptors were prepared humbly to retire behind their own creations, so as to respect the city and its meaning. In proposing Gehry as the architect of the Eisenhower memorial, however, Washington has opted for another and newer conception of the architect’s role, and it is important to understand this if we are to grasp the extent and seriousness of their mistake. The Eisenhower family has objected to the plans on the grounds that the resulting collection of screens and narratives seem designed to belittle the former president, to cut him down to size, to redesign him as the barefoot boy who looked in wonder on the high office that miraculously came his way. But this belittling of the subject is exactly what the monument intends. By belittling the President the memorial would exalt its architect. And the true subject of his memorial park, like the true subject of every building that Gehry has ever built, would be Gehry.

This, it seems to me, shows us the reason why monuments are these days so hard to commission, and so invariably disappointing. Architects, who once were servants of the people who employed them, and conscious contributors to a shared public space, have rebranded themselves as self-expressive artists, whose works are not designed to fit in to a prior urban fabric, but to stand out as tributes to the creative urge that gave rise to them. Their meaning is not “we” but “I,” and the “I” in question gets bigger with every new design.

Gehry belongs to a small and exclusive club of “starchitects,” who specialize in designing buildings that stand out from their surroundings, so as to shock the passerby and become causes célèbres. They thrive on controversy, since it enables them to posture as original artists in a world of ignorant philistines. And their contempt for ordinary opinion is amplified by all attempts to prevent them from achieving their primary purpose, which is to scatter our cities with blemishes that bear their unmistakable trademark. Most of these starchitects—Daniel Libeskind, Richard Rogers, Norman Foster, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas—have equipped themselves with a store of pretentious gobbledygook, with which to explain their genius to those who are otherwise unable to perceive it. And when people are spending public money they will be easily influenced by gobbledygook that flatters them into believing that they are spending it on some original and world-changing masterpiece.

The most important feature of a Gehry “masterpiece,” like the absurdly costly Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, is that it “challenges” the surrounding order. Gehry does not build for people, but sculpts a space for his own expressive ends. You see this clearly in his Stata Center at MIT, a building that takes the old ideas of wall and window and holds them up to ridicule, to create a kind of collapsed caricature of a building, which is already springing leaks and cracking at the joints. In a striking monograph, Architecture of the Absurd, John Silber, former president of Boston University, details all the faults of the building, including its enormous cost overrun, and the expense of maintaining it.

But by far the most telling criticism is one that can be leveled at all the starchitects, who adopt the same a priori approach to construction as Gehry, and also the same self-image of themselves as revolutionary geniuses. Gehry decided that, since the Stata building was to house the high-powered researchers that MIT collects, and bring them together in a single space, he should design an interior that encouraged them to interact, to share their ideas, to amplify each other’s creativity by throwing concepts like footballs from room to room. So he got rid of inner walls, made all boundaries transparent, opened everything out in spaces that are made stark and bleak by the childish supermarket colors that shout from the open corridors.

This kind of a priori thinking, by an architect who has never troubled to observe another member of his species, recalls Le Corbusier’s plan for a hospital in Venice, in which there would be no windows, and all doors would open inward, since this would further the utter tranquility from which (according to the architect) convalescence springs. In fact researchers need walls, privacy, solitude if they are ever to produce the ideas that they can then bounce off their colleagues, just as invalids need light, air, and a view of the life outside, if ever they are to be motivated to get better. The Stata Center therefore fulfils no function as well as its primary one, which is to draw attention to the person who created it.

Unfortunately, because we live in a celebrity culture, this habit of megalomania seems to pay off. City fathers and public bodies everywhere, faced with the need to commission a public monument, will turn to the starchitects, sure that in this way they will not be branded as philistines by the critics, and will be able to fall back on a host of “expert” opinions should the general public express dismay at their choice. And the more important the project, the more likely it is that it will be put in the hands of a starchitect, who will ensure that it stands out from its surroundings and, if possible, reduces them to absurdity, so as the better to draw attention to itself.

Recently I spent a few days in Budapest, a city that is full of monuments. In every park some bearded gentleman stands serenely on a plinth, testifying to the worth of Hungarian poetry, to the beauty of Hungarian music, to the sacrifices made in some great Hungarian cause. The monuments include bas-relief, incorporated into the corner of some building, showing soldiers advancing into war, or patriotic faces against a background flag. They include classical colonnades linking buildings across the edge of a park, and gateways lending dignity to a public street. None stands out, none is designed to draw attention to itself. On the contrary, all attention comes from the monuments, onto the city and the people who live and move within their sight. They are like the eyes of a father, resting on his children at play. They are full of the joy of belonging, and convey a serene acceptance of death in the national cause. Such monuments are the very opposite of the one proposed by Gehry. Their sculptors and architects are forgotten, their forms and materials are the forms and materials from which the city around them is built. And they retire into their corners as though in acknowledgement that their work has been done.

Now I firmly believe that there are architects and sculptors who share that conception of the monument. For it is natural to all patriotic people to wish for their past to be present in the city, but in the way that memories are—as a shared recognition that we owe gratitude to those who went before us, and must incorporate them into our lives while respecting their dignity and acknowledging their part in the national life. We must begin to look for those more modest architects and sculptors, and to reject the celebrity cult on which the great egos rely for their commissions. For monuments should be built by people who have no desire to draw attention to themselves, who are happy to hide behind their creations, and to build things that belong where they stand. It looks increasingly likely that the mistake made in Washington will be rectified by Congress. But let us hope that it will be the occasion to rectify a far greater mistake, which is that of treating architecture as the expression of the architect’s individual vision, rather than a contribution to our collective home.

Philip Kennicott, the Washington Post’s culture critic, has been one of only two critics to wholeheartedly defend Frank Gehry’s design for the Eisenhower Memorial (the other being Witold Rybczynski).

However, Kennicott appears to have forgotten what he wrote about the design in 2010, as was pointed out in this published letter to the editor by Justin Shubow, president and chairman of the National Civic Art Society:

In attacking the National Civic Art Society’s report on the Eisenhower Memorial (March 20), Philip Kennicott did not note that his own opinions are scrutinized therein. We severely criticize his recent defense of Frank Gehry’s design, and note that in 2010 Mr. Kennicottwrote the following in The Washington Post: “[T]he columns have a mute blankness that may read as Soviet, and their scale overwhelms even the Mall’s most overtly authoritarian structure, the National World War II Memorial. Their austerity may also feel like an extension of some of the worst dehumanizing elements of L’Enfant Plaza north, to the very edges of the Mall.” Does Mr. Kennicott now wish to back away from that interpretation, or does he find a Soviet, dehumanized memorial appropriate for President Dwight D. Eisenhower? [emphasis added]

Need we note that President Eisenhower was a staunch anti-communist?  Kennicott is not the only person to describe the Memorial as suggesting Soviet design.  Susan Eisenhower made a similar claim in her testimony to the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Public Lands, and Forest:

Modern Tapestries: The design team at Gehry and Associates and the Eisenhower Memorial Commission has made a habit of referring to the metal curtains as “tapestries,” referencing the tradition to place great people and events on woven material. This may be true of the Middle Ages, but noteworthy modern tapestries are those in the Communist world. Tapestries honoring Marx, Engels and Lenin used to hang in Red Square; Mao Zedong could be found in Tiananmen Square; and Ho Chi Minh’s tapestry hung from public buildings in Hanoi—to name a few.

Iron Curtain: Other critics have noted that we will be putting up an “Iron Curtain to Ike.” Given this symbolism, could the proposed cylindrical columns also be misconstrued as symbols of missile silos?

See also George Will’s devastating reply to Kennicott, who belittled Eisenhower while defending the design, which he wrote, “ inverts several of the sacred hierarchies of the classical memorial, emphasizing ideas of domesticity and interiority rather than masculine power and external display.”

Eisenhower at His Easel

Writing in the Washington Post, opinion columnist Richard Cohen criticizes the design for the Eisenhower Memorial, which he says depicts the president as “an eternal innocent”:

With Eisenhower, Art Does Not Imitate His Life

One day in 1967, Dwight D. Eisenhower came to New York for the opening of an exhibition of his paintings at the old Huntington Hartford Museum on Columbus Circle. Ike, like Churchill, was an amateur painter and, like Churchill, was more ambitious than talented. Ike’s paintings were simple farm scenes and the like, and you would think, therefore, that they supported the concept proposed for the Eisenhower memorial on the Mall: a statue of Ike as a barefoot farm boy. This is not the Ike I met that day.

I was a new reporter for United Press International, and the opening of the Ike exhibition had somehow been overlooked. At the last minute, though, someone noticed it listed on upcoming events, and with virtually no one in the office, the bureau chief turned to me and uttered words almost never heard at UPI: “Take a cab.”

Down the elevator I went and out onto East 42nd Street, and in no time I was at the museum. Too late. It was over. Everyone was gone. No Ike. But . . . wait! There, coming in the door, was the former president himself. He, too, was late. I approached and introduced myself. We shook hands. “Why don’t we walk around together, Cohen?” Ike offered. And so, amazingly, we did.

Ike’s paintings represented exactly what I thought of the man. I was the son of liberal Democrats, an Adlai Stevenson man (had I been old enough to vote in 1952 or 1956). Ike to me and my family was the dullard, the good-natured dolt who had failed to stand up to Sen. Joe McCarthy and was inexcusably tardy confronting Arkansas Gov. Orval Faubus, who was keeping some black children out of Central High School in Little Rock.

The New York Post was then the nation’s foremost liberal newspaper and carried the cartoons of the great Herblock (Herbert Block) of The Washington Post. Herb was tough on Ike and his meandering ways. Herb gave McCarthy a bucket of tar and a fat brush, and he gave Ike a golf club — the demagogue vs. the putterer who spoke in garbles. Ike was ineffective and, besides, a Republican. What’s to like?

So we walked around, Ike and I, touring the gallery. He told me he had more time to paint when he was president than he did as a private citizen because his day was better organized. He told me he used to paint in a small closet under the White House stairs. (I think it might be where Warren Harding used to take a mistress.) Ike was charming. I got to like him. Then we stopped before one of his paintings of his Gettysburg, Pa., farm — a barn, a field, maybe a cow or two. Still thinking him something of a yokel, I uttered a line so patronizing I hesitate to repeat it. “What’s the symbolism in this one, General?”

Ike knew what I was saying, but he did not take umbrage. In that plain, flat-as-Kansas accent of his, he turned to me and said, “Let’s get something straight here, Cohen. They would have burned this [expletive] a long time ago if I weren’t the president of the United States.”

Whoosh! I came right out of my shoes. This was not the naive farm boy miscast as president. This was the suffer-no-fools, down-to-earth warrior-cum-politician who knew many things, not the least of which was that a museum show did not make him a painter. He could not be flattered.

I wish I could remember how much time I spent with Ike that day. All I can remember is that incident and a general feeling of friendliness. I have told this story many times over the years. Those who knew Ike were not surprised by his reaction or by his language. (He was an accomplished curser.) I saw Ike one other time — bumped into him on the street — and watched as ordinary people, catching him out the corner of their eyes, went ramrod-straight and threw him a salute. He returned them and kept on walking.

Ike as the farm boy is not the Ike I met that day long ago. He had once been that person to me, but his image changed in front of a painting. He knew precisely who he was. That is more than can be said for the people who now want to depict him as the eternal innocent.

Witold Rybczynski’s recent New York Times op-ed piece, “Don’t Undermine the Eisenhower Memorial Design,” contains five incorrect assertions and two misleading ones. Thus, it not surprisingly comes to a flawed conclusion: that Frank Gehry’s proposed memorial in Washington to Dwight D. Eisenhower is acceptable.

First, Rybczynski attests that the “memorial would not sprawl over the entire site….” Yet images clearly show assorted ramps and steps, inscribed stone walls, scattered stone rectangular solids with people sitting on them (benches?), dozens of improbably gargantuan trees randomly strewn about, two massive cubes with overly blown-up, oppressively large photos carved into them, and of course, the controversial boy-sized statue of a seated boy (that’s Ike) idling on a ledge.

And let’s not forget the ten  80-foot-tall pylons, 11 feet in diameter, marching with their iron screens down three sides of this 4-acre theme park gone bad. If this higgledy-piggledy array of disparate objects spread over four football fields doesn’t resemble sprawl, it certainly doesn’t resemble good urbanism.

Which leads to Rybczynski’s second incorrect statement, namely his referring to this piece of land as a “public park.” In the accepted planning lexicon, it is in fact an urban square. This is not merely a matter of semantics. A place must be understood for what it is, and not for what it is not. A successful urban square must comport to the accepted design conventions for its type. Gehry’s proposal ignores and violates these conventions, and due to his apparent ignorance about typology, it will be unable to create the kind of urban square that L’Enfant planned for Washington.

Third, Rybczynski refers to a “colonnade” that the 80-foot pylons would create. Yet these featureless cylinders without bases, caps, or entasis are, by definition, not columns. Furthermore, their spacing, one-third of a football field apart, would leave an intercolumniation (if they were columns) in violation of all classical canons. No columns, no colonnade. And since there are no colonnades, no entablatures, no stylobates, and no ornament (and the so-called columns are on only three of the memorial’s four sides), it is patently incorrect to refer to this as a classical temple, or classical anything for that matter. Ergo, Rybczynski’s fourth incorrect statement.

Fifth, Rybczynski pronounces Gehry as “our finest living architect.” Really? Gehry’s litigation-plagued failed Stata Center for MIT gave it the dubious distinction of landing on the cover of John Silber’s book, Architecture of the Absurd: How ‘Genius’ Disfigured a Practical Art. His Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA also led to complaints due to the excessive heat radiating from its shiny metal skin into neighboring apartments. Even Gehry’s most acclaimed building, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, was exposed by Ethan Kent, of the internationally esteemed Project for Public Spaces, to be an abject urban failure, leaving a crime-ridden urban desert all around it.

As if this were not enough, there are two paragraphs in Rybczynski’s piece that could easily mislead a reader. First, Rybczynski states that he has “seen full size mock-ups of the screens on the site [and] I am convinced that their size will not be out of scale with the surroundings.” Yet in point of fact, he saw only a full-scale fragment of one of the steel mesh panels on site. Clearly the difference between a fragment and a full screen, each of the seven the size of two basketball courts, is a significant one.

Lastly, Rybczynski insinuates that the Eisenhower sisters’ dissatisfaction is the source and summit of the opposition to Gehry’s memorial. This is not true. The growing public dissatisfaction with the Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial began with the launch of the counterproposal competition hosted by the National Civic Art Society and Institute for Classical Architecture & Art’s Mid-Atlantic Chapter last March. The award ceremony in June in the Rayburn House Office Building revealed to the public the monstrosity of Gehry’s proposal and showed alternatives designs rooted in the aesthetic verities of the humanist tradition of monument-making. Since then, the groundswell in opposition to the “Eyesore Memorial” has grown into a tsunami.

The Eisenhower family neither started this opposition movement, nor do they lead it. They are merely the public face for tens of thousands of their fellow Americans who want a memorial that preserves the memory of the exemplary achievements of one of our best, and not so much for Ike and his family, or those of us old enough to remember Ike, but for the millions of Americans yet unborn.

The National Civic Art Society does agree with Rybczynski on his final point: that “compromise and consensus … are a poor way to design a monument.” We believe that the Gehry design is fundamentally flawed and that no amount of “compromise and consensus” will produce a monument even adequate, much less excellent.

We also believe the process should begin again with an open competition, and that the winning finalist should be voted on by Congress. Let the American people, through our elected representatives, decide on this monument. With all due respect to Rep. Raul Grijalva, who stated at a March 20 House subcommittee hearing that he thought a hearing on the Eisenhower Memorial was outside of the purview of Congress, we believe a monument for our nation should unequivocally be included in “the purview of Congress,” particularly since taxpayers are paying over $100 million to build it and will be paying millions more to maintain it annually. What’s more, it is our nation’s memory that is at stake.

It’s time we stopped relying on the increasingly strange and estranged art elite to tell us what things mean and what we should like. Americans of all ages and conditions appreciate the memorials to Lincoln, Jefferson, Grant, etc., without the help of art experts. Why should a memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower be any different?

Milton Grenfell is an architect in Washington, DC, and vice chairman of the National Civic Art Society. He was the winner of the Institute for Classical Architecture & Art’s Arthur Ross Award in 1997.

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.”

Do They Really Like Ike?

By Greg Crosby on April 5th, 2012

Also testifying against the design were Anne and Susan Eisenhower, granddaughters of President Eisenhower; Bruce Cole, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities; and Rodney Cook, president of the National Monuments Foundation. C-SPAN broadcast the event, which you can watch here.

Here are the National Civic Art Society’s prepared remarks:

Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Grijalva, members of the Subcommittee, ladies and gentlemen, my name is Howard Segermark, I’m not an architect or artist. I worked here on Capitol Hill as a staff members for both Republican and Democratic members of Congress and I’ve worked for a number of nonprofit organizations. I’ve read a bit about architecture and about what makes a city great, and I was drawn to classical architecture. I’m a founder and past Chairman of the National Civic Art Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to education about architecture and art – with a view to supporting classical and traditional architecture and art – those traditions that the founding fathers believed embodied the principles of a democratic republic. I want to thank the Board and members of the NCAS for help and advice for this testimony, and in particular, NCAS present Chairman, Justin Shubow and our Secretary, Eric Wind.

Mr. Chairman, our monuments are of central importance to our national identity and historical memory.
Controversy is nothing new in the history of our presidential memorials. Indeed, it has embroiled virtually every single one. To mention the most recent example, it took three separate competitions to settle on a final design for the FDR Memorial. The first two officially selected designs were rejected—in the first instance because the Roosevelt family objected to it.

Many people might be wondering why this particular Memorial controversy is occurring only now, relatively late in the planning process. The reason is simple: the entire process has flown under the radar with as little public—and as little congressional—knowledge as possible. To quote Edward Feiner, the former chief architect of GSA who was involved in the Eisenhower Memorial design guidelines, “It’s amazing what you can do when no one’s looking.

Well, we began to look, and the more we dug, the more we unearthed several disturbing findings. Given the limitations of time, I can mention today just a few, but I encourage the Subcommittee to follow-up on some of these questions.

First, designer selection process, including the so-called competition in 2008-2009. According to the minutes of the very first meeting of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, all the way back in 2001, Chairman Rocco Siciliano specifically mentioned Mr. Gehry as the sort of architect the Commission should have in mind. He mentioned Mr. Gehry again at the 2006 meeting, “Chairman Siciliano mentioned that he had a discussion several years ago with architect Frank Gehry, who indicated an interest in a possible design of the Eisenhower Memorial.”

Chairman Siciliano had had a previous professional relationship with Gehry on at least three prior occasions. Most prominently, when Chairman Siciliano was a leader of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Board of Directors, he served on the Building Committee that hired Mr. Gehry to design the symphony’s new concert hall.

It appears that in 2008, the Commission designated Daniel Feil, its executive architect, as its agent to oversee and direct the competition, which he chose to run by means of GSA’s Design Excellence Program. This was a very strange decision. That program was never intended to be used for the selection of designers for monuments, and memorials. Its fundamental purpose has been to select architects for federal office buildings, courthouses, and warehouses. It is important to understand that memorials are quite different from buildings—one does not need to be an architect to design a memorial. All it takes is an artist or amateur with a good idea, which an executive architect can later bring to fruition. Yet the Design Excellence Program is open only to architects—indeed, only architects with a substantial portfolio.
By contrast, the American way has been to choose designers for memorials not just according to actual design proposals but according to entries submitted blindly. But as just noted, the Design Excellence Program reverses this by making the designer’s identity and record of paramount importance. Furthermore, competitions for national memorials have tended to be open, not closed, competitions, unlike in the case here.

Thus, the use of the Design Excellence Program for the Eisenhower Memorial made it impossible to discover unknown and untested talent—such as Maya Lin for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and Henry Shrady for the Grant Memorial. Consider that Eisenhower’s own rise from small-town Kansas to West Point was made possible only because the cadet- nominating process was open and democratic.

Furthermore, as the Commission ought to have known, the history of using the Design Excellence Program for memorials does not bode well for it. In the 1990s, the initial competition for the World War II Memorial was run according to the program. Due to the undemocratic nature of the competition, there was a public outcry against it. As a result, the organizers of the competition backed down and made the competition open. Such an outcry did not occur for the Eisenhower Memorial because the competition received so little publicity.

Amazingly, the Eisenhower competition solicited only 44 entries. This is hundreds fewer than the number of entries in open competitions for previous national memorials. Forty-four submissions was a small number even for run-of-the-mill federal office buildings around the same time period.

The Eisenhower competition appears to have been advertised only in one obscure place: FedBizOpps.com. And why did Mr. Gehry bother to enter, when he has said on numerous occasions that he does not like entering competitions because he does not like losing?

Adding to our concers, when the Eisenhower Commission recently released the minutes from its meetings, it did not publish the minutes from meetings circa 2008 at which the competition was discussed. Stranger still, there does not appear to have been a quorum at those crucial meetings. What exactly is in those missing minutes? And why has the Commission never released the materials submitted by competition entrants?

The competition cost two million dollars and resulted in a colossal design that is now estimated to cost 119 million dollars. And that cost doesn’t include the unusually extensive maintenance that the tangled steel screen will require for all of perpetuity—assuming the tapestry lasts beyond 100 years. Indeed, projected maintenance costs have not been released, if they have been calculated.

In the spring of 2011, the NCAS, together with the Institute for Classical Architecture & Classical America Mid-Atlantic Chapter, held an Eisenhower Memorial Counter-competition to suggest what a traditional, dignified alterative might look like. With a budget of just $3,000, we received over 40 entries. We announced an astronomical prize of $1,000 to the winner and $500 for the runner-up. If I had time, I’d show that these proposals are not just superior in beauty and more comprehensible to the average citizen than Mr. Gehry’s confused design. They are harmonious with the plan of the city and blend into the tradition of our presidential memorials. And their estimated cost is far more reasonable and in line with previous memorials. NCAS does not advocate any specific design.

The General Services Administration has massive responsibilities and it almost always protects the taxpayer in its purchase of goods, services and buildings. The Park Service has a history of maintaining our natural heritage. But on occasion, circumstances can conspire to produce a real mess. This seems to be one of those instances, but Congress can act to clean it up. Eisenhower deserves it.

Our remedy is simple: a new competition, one that is as open to an unknown designer from Abilene as a “starchitect” from Los Angeles. I stand ready to answer any questions I can and the National Civic Art Society stands ready to undertake research or respond to requests for expert counsel from artists and architects.

Thank you.

With its 80-foot-high smokestack columns towering over a four-acre site whose only representation of its subject would be a statue showing him as a barefoot boy, the current design for the proposed Dwight D. Eisenhower memorial in Washington, D.C. manages to be both bombastic and silly. It’s easy to imagine tourists mistaking the memorial as a spectacularly misconceived tribute to Huckleberry Finn.

Which is why it’s entirely appropriate that a dispute has broken out over it. On one side has been Frank Gehry, the postmodernist “starchitect” who won the memorial competition, and his backers in government planning commissions and the artistic establishment. On the other, the Eisenhower family (David Eisenhower, the president’s grandson, resigned from the Eisenhower Memorial Commission in January) and defenders of public spaces such as the National Civic Art Society, who argue that Gehry’s design is an embarrassment to the man it was meant to honor.

Kabaservice concludes:

. . . Frank Gehry, and the blingy, egotistical, celebrity-worshipping culture he represents, never could claim any attachment to [Eisenhower] to begin with. Gehry’s aesthetic, which seeks freedom from the dead hand of tradition, is the very antithesis of the Eisenhower ethos. The Eisenhower memorial, if approved in its current form, would pay tribute to Gehry’s qualities rather than Ike’s . . . .

In a letter to the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, he requested a copy of all architecture designs submitted in the “competition,” and a detailed description of the “competition” process, including a breakdown of all votes.  In the letter to the National Capital Planning Commission, of which he is an ex officio member, Representative Issa requested that any vote on the Eisenhower Memorial be postponed at least 120 days.

Transcriptions of the letters are below. PDF scans care available here and here.

Mr. Rocco C. Siciliano
Chairman
Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission
1629 K Street NW
Suite 801
Washington, DC 20006

Dear Chairman Siciliano:

Our nation’s capital is home to dozens of monuments, memorials, and other symbols of remembrance where countless Americans and overseas visitors come to reflect on the past and look toward a brighter future. These structures have a profound impact, and their importance cannot be overstated.

In revisiting the historical and lasting significance of President Eisenhower, I am reminded of a 2007 speech given by French President Nicolas Sarkozy before a joint session of Congress in which his words speak both to the power of the man and the magnitude of memorials:

“Fathers took their sons to see the vast cemeteries where, under thousands of white crosses so far from home, thousands of young American soldiers lay who had fallen not to defend their own freedom but the freedom of all others, not to defend their own families, their own homeland, but to defend humanity as whole…Before they landed, Eisenhower told them: ‘The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you.’

President Eisenhower is an inspiration for American citizens and people the world over; I applaud your efforts to ensuring there is a fitting tribute to his legacy. It has come to my attention, however, that there are serious concerns with the current memorial design — including objections from Eisenhower family members. While this is not the first memorial to receive criticism from the relatives of the individual(s) honored, I believe that it is important that the views of relatives be taken seriously. I therefore request the below information no later than March 16, 2012.

1. A copy of all architectural designs concerning this memorial submitted to the Commission;

2. A detailed description of the process leading to acceptance of the Frank Gehry submission, including a breakdown of any and all votes taken pertaining to any submission.

In addition, I request that the Commission take all reasonable steps to preserve all documents related to the Gehry design.

The Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is the principal investigative committee in the U.S. House of Representatives. Pursuant to House Rule X, the committee has authority to investigate “any matter” at “any time.” This broad jurisdiction includes oversight of the municipal affairs of the District of Columbia in general.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. If you have any questions, please contact James Robertson at (202) 225-5074.

Sincerely,

Darrell Issa
Chairman

cc:  Elijah E. Cummings, Ranking Minority Member
Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

***

Mr. Preston Bryant, Jr.

Chairman

National Capital Planning Commission

401 9th Street, NW

Washington, DC 20004

Dear Mr. Chairman:

Our Nation’s capital is home to dozens of monuments, memorials, and other symbols of remembrance where countless Americans and overseas visitors come to reflect on the past and look toward a brighter future. These structures have a profound impact, and their importance cannot be overstated. It is my understanding that the April 5, 2012, NCPC meeting agenda may include a schedule vote on approval of the Gehry design for the Eisenhower Memorial.

It has come to my attention, however, that there are serious concerns with the current design, including objections voiced by Eisenhower family members. While this is not the first memorial to receive criticism from the relatives of the individual(s) honored, I believe my fellow Americans would agree with me that it is important for the views of relatives to receive serious consideration as this public-private partnership to honor the legacy of President Eisenhower moves forward. I therefore write in my capacity as an ex officio member of the Commission and respectively request postponement for a period of at least 120 days of any vote concerning the “Gehry” design as proposed by the Eisenhower Memorial Commission. This would allow NCPC Commissioners more time to better understand the complexities of an issue that, up until now, were hidden from public view.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. If you have any questions, please contact James Robertson at (202) 225-5074.

Sincerely,

Darrell Issa

Chairman

cc: Members of the National Capital Planning Commission

Aug. 2011 Mockup of Eisenhower Memorial Tapestry -- Source: U.S. Commission of Fine Arts

Aug. 2011 Mockup of Eisenhower Memorial Tapestry -- Source: U.S. Commission of Fine Arts

Aug. 2011 Mockup of Eisenhower Memorial Tapestry -- Source: U.S. Commission of Fine Arts

The National Civic Art Society today published shocking photos — full-size images available here — of mockups of the giant industrial steel “tapestries” planned for the Eisenhower Memorial.   (The main “tapestry” — a veritable “Eisen Curtain” — is so large it will dwarf the Hollywood Sign in Los Angeles.) The source of the photos is the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts (CFA). The images are of mockups displayed to the CFA in August 2011. We do not believe these photos have ever been seen by the public or media — for good reason. They prove that the screens are a rat’s nest of tangled steel, a true maintenance nightmare. By contrast, in renderings of the design, Frank Gehry and the Eisenhower Memorial Commission depict the “tapestries” as mere gauzy photographs.

We are reminded of some lines from Walter Scott:

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive!

Just imagine how difficult it will be to keep the “tapestries” clean and in good condition. They will deteriorate and are thus impermanent. Yet Congress has called for “an appropriate permanent memorial.” As we document in our report on the Memorial, Fine Arts Commissioner Michael McKinnell said the following about the impermanence of the “tapestries”:

[I]f I can be facetious, the tapestry, when you and I are long gone, will disintegrate and the columns will be left and it will be like [the Roman ruins of] Paestum and it will be marvelous. So I think that is wonderful. I seriously think that is wonderful.

Neither the Eisenhower Memorial Commission nor the National Park Service (who must care for the Memorial for all of perpetuity) has ever disclosed the estimated cost of maintaining the gnarled steel. That substantial cost is not included in the $120 million the Memorial is now estimated to cost. The extra cost will be passed on to the National Park Service, and thence to taxpayers. As Congressmen Dan Lungren and Aaron Schock said in their bold letter rejecting the design:

This proposed design . . . runs a high risk of perpetual cost-increases due to its inordinate technological dependency.

The “tapestry” will decay due to acid rain, caustic bird and other animal droppings, and road salt atomized in the air. Steel welds are particularly susceptible to corrosion and rouging (discoloration), and the Memorial will have hundreds of thousands if not millions of such welds. As anyone who has ever run a dishwasher knows, “stainless” steel is not actually stainless. Furthermore, since the “tapestries” are suspended via tension between the outermost pillars, the wire net can easily be damaged intentionally or accidentally. All a vandal or clumsy maintenance worker requires is a blowtorch or bolt cutter to do serious damage.

Also consider that steel is an industrial, cheap material that is entirely wrong for the Memorial. By tradition, and rightly so, our memorials have been constructed of noble materials such as marble and bronze. They are precious materials worthy of our greatest leaders. Steel is fit for chain-link fences (see Frank Gehry’s prior work with chain-link), not the Eisenhower Memorial.

Congressmen Dan Lungren and Aaron Schock

In a bold letter to the National Capital Planning Commission, Congressmen Dan Lungren (CA) and Aaron Schock (IL) have called for rejecting the Frank Gehry’s design for the Eisenhower Memorial.  In doing so, they join Representative Frank Wolf (VA), who also publicly opposes the terrible design.  They also join the entire Eisenhower family, who have been united in opposition to the design.

A transcription and image of the letter is below.  A full-size scan of the letter can be found here.

Chairman Preston Bryant
National Capital Planning Commission
401 9th St. NW
Washington, DC 20004

Dear Chairman Bryant,

As the Chairman and Member of the Committee on House Administration, the House committee charged with oversight of the Capitol Grounds, we write to express our concerns with the current plans for the President Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial to be built on the National Mall.  In both process and design, the proposed memorial does not adequately represent the life and achievements of Dwight Eisenhower.

The current design, which depicts him as a “barefoot boy” from Kansas rather than highlighting his influential roles and accomplishments as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces during World War II and as the 34th President of the United States, is a contemporary design contrary to memorial architecture already on the National Mall.  This proposed design also runs a high risk of perpetual cost-increases due to its inordinate technological dependency.

The Eisenhower family is united in their opposition to the current design.  In both public statements and personal conversations, they have expressed sincere concerns with the scope and scale of the project.  What they seek, and what we agree with, is a more traditional design that truly depicts President Eisenhower’s character and accomplishments.  It is our feeling that the concerns of the family, as well as many others, should be given due consideration, and that the project should not be pushed through simply for the sake of meeting arbitrary deadlines.

A memorial that is meant to last for the ages deserves ample time to be done correctly.  Unfortunately, the memorial, as currently envisioned, does not adequately commemorate his accomplishments nor does it enjoy the necessary level of support to be accepted as a national tribute to General and President Eisenhower.  As students of this great individual, and as concerned members of Congress trying to be faithful stewards of our hallowed National Mall, we respectfully ask members of the Commission to reopen discussion on the design of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial and gain broad support of the public and the Eisenhower family before moving ahead with the project.

Respectfully,

Daniel E. Lungren
Chairman, Committee on House Administration

Aaron Schock
Member, Committee on House Administration

Writing in the Washington Post, George F. Will joins the chorus opposing the design for the Eisenhower Memorial.  He also emphasizes why Eisenhower deserves a national memorial.  (For more on why Eisenhower has been underrated, see also Fred I. Greenstein’s excellent book The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader.):

Eisenhower Memorial Misses the Man

By George F. Will

Two coming developments, one dismal and one excellent, pertain to America’s memory of a great man. One of several oversight panels soon will consider a proposed memorial to Dwight Eisenhower. The proposal is an exhibitionistic triumph of theory over function — more a monument to its creator, Frank Gehry, practitioner of architectural flamboyance, than to the most underrated president. Fortunately, on Tuesday comes Jean Edward Smith’s biography “Eisenhower in War and Peace,” which demonstrates why the man’s achievements merit a memorial better than the proposed one.

Filling four acres across Independence Avenue from the National Mall, the memorial will have a colonnade of huge limestone-clad columns from which will hang 80-foot stainless-steel mesh “tapestries” depicting images evocative of Eisenhower’s Kansas youth. And almost as an afterthought, there will be a statue of Eisenhower — as a boy.

Philip Kennicott, The Post’s cultural critic, says that the statue suggests Eisenhower “both innocent of and yet pregnant with whatever failings history ultimately attributes to his career.”

Failings? A memorial is not an exhaustive assessment, it is a celebration of a preponderance of greatness.

Kennicott praises Gehry’s project because it allows visitors “space to form their own assessment of Eisenhower’s legacy.” But memorials are not seminars, they are reminders that a person esteemed by the nation lived and is worth learning more about.

Kennicott says that Gehry’s project acknowledges that “few great men are absolutely great, without flaws and failings.” Good grief. If Ike, with all his defects, was not great, cancel the memorial.

Kennicott celebrates the “relatively small representation of Eisenhower” because “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.” How sweetly democratic: Greatness can be tapped hither and yon. But if greatness is so abundant and assured, it is hardly greatness, so cancel all memorials.

So far, the best remembrance of Eisenhower is Smith’s superb biography of one of three Americans (with Washington and Grant) who were world figures before becoming president. Eisenhower entered the White House having dealt with such demanding military men as John Pershing, Douglas MacArthur and George Marshall, then FDR, Churchill, Stalin (Eisenhower was the only foreigner ever to stand alongside Stalin atop Lenin’s tomb), de Gaulle and others in the excruciatingly complex task of conducting coalition warfare with the largest multinational force ever assembled.

Intellectuals and journalists, who are often the last to learn things, regarded Eisenhower as amiable and mediocre. He was neither. He was cold (see Smith on Eisenhower’s dismissal of his wartime companion Kay Summersby). He was steely (a three-to-four-pack-a-day smoker, he quit when “I simply gave myself an order”). He was brutal (he used financial pressure to bring Britain to heel during the 1956 Suez crisis). He was subtle (he assisted de Gaulle’s seizure of power in France in 1944, contrary to FDR’s fervent wishes). He was audacious (he evaded Churchill by dealing directly with Stalin).

After Eisenhower quickly liquidated a stalemated war in Korea, no American died in combat during his presidency. Twice, concerning the French besieged at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam and during the Formosa Strait crisis, he resisted — a president with less military confidence might not have — his most senior advisers advocating the use of nuclear weapons.

Smith is most mind-opening regarding Eisenhower on race. In February 1953 — 15 months before Brown v. Board of Education — he vowed to use every power of his office to end segregation in the District of Columbia and the armed forces — two-thirds of Army units were still segregated five years after President Truman’s integration order. By October 1954, no more segregated units existed.

In 1957, he sent the 101st Airborne to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School. In 1958, he told the Red Cross to ignore a Louisiana law requiring that blood from black and white donors be segregated. This was in character: In 1942, when Australia desperately sought U.S. troops but said a law prohibited blacks from entering the country, Gen. Eisenhower said, “All right. No troops.” Australia quickly saw the light.

Smith, biographer of Lucius Clay, John Marshall, Grant and FDR, writes: “[Eisenhower] was buried in a government-issue, eighty-dollar pine coffin, wearing his famous Ike jacket with no medals or decorations other than his insignia of rank.” His memory should not be buried beneath a grandiose memorial that contributes only to the worsening clutter on and around the Mall. [emphasis added]