A powerful commission overseeing civic art and architecture in the nation’s capital voted Thursday to approve the general concept and layout of Frank Gehry’s design for a national memorial honoring Dwight D. Eisenhower.
The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts reviewed Gehry’s plans for stone or bronze statues of the 34th president, and members voted 3-1 to approve the major elements. One commissioner voted no, saying the memorial’s landscape design needed to be further developed.
The design has drawn criticism from Eisenhower’s family and others for its departure from more classical monument architecture and for the large scale of some elements.
Gehry has proposed a memorial park with statues and images of Ike as president, as World War II hero and as a young boy from Kansas. The park would be framed by large metal tapestries depicting the Kansas landscape of his boyhood home. The tapestries, in particular, would set this memorial apart from any other in Washington.
The commissioners suggested one significant change in the concept, however. They urged Gehry to remove two smaller side tapestries and instead use only one as a backdrop for the memorial park and statues.
Alex Krieger, an architect and Harvard professor, voiced support for the overall design as an urban park but asked Gehry to rethink the side tapestries because he said they defy Gehry’s attempt to convey Eisenhower’s Midwestern humility. From some angles, “the first impression is not of humility but of bigness,” he said.
Commission Vice Chairman Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk said Krieger’s suggestion would improve the overall design.
“In fact, it may be much stronger in sort of thinking of it as a park primarily with the renewed focus of the objects against the tapestries as a backdrop,” said Plater-Zyberk, an architect who is dean of the University of Miami’s School of Architecture.
Gehry said his team had considered 10 different scenarios for the tapestries and would look at them again. The idea, he said, was to relate to the buildings around the memorial, which include the U.S. Department of Education, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Air and Space Museum, which all relate to Eisenhower’s legacy.
The arts commission is one of two panels that must approve the design in order for the $142 million project to move forward. The 14-year-old memorial project has
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