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June 9, 2011
It Won’t Be Pretty: Stopping The Eisenhower National Memorial
Blog of the Courtier
by William Newton
Speaking of everyone's favorite "do-gooder, liberal"...
On Monday evening the National Civic Art Society (“NCAS”) announced the winners of their competition to design an alternative to the Eisenhower National Memorial, a monstrosity by architect Frank Gehry which will be built in part with your tax dollars, across the street from the Air and Space Museum here in Washington. You can read more about the winning entry here, and you can also follow this link to view the talk given at the event by Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of President Eisenhower. The winning entries presented various schemes for the Eisenhower Memorial that make use of traditional monumental design elements – such as the memorial arch, colonnade, and plinth – all surrounded by landscaping.
Regular readers are already aware of what I think about Mr. Gehry’s design. From the beginning, the selection of Gehry as the architect for this memorial was a curious one. He has made his career out of building things that are quite spectacularly ugly, and while there were many ugly things built during the Eisenhower Administration, Gehry’s vision of a monument to Ike does not fit well either with the rather conservative Eisenhower era, or the Nation’s Capital.
...And in Brooklyn, the Atlantic Yards project, featuring a monstrous collapsing tower by Gehry, went back to the drawing board following years of protest from the public. Ironically, given Gehry’s above-quoted views on city planning, the project was described as a “corrupt land grab”, a “taxpayer ripoff”, and a “complete failure of democracy” by one of the leaders of a group opposed to the project.
NoLandGrab: The full post is worth a read, especially for the French translation of Gehry's "picketing Henri Ford" comment.
Posted by eric at June 9, 2011 10:29 AM