The Anti-Monument
The World War II Memorial: inappropriate site, off-key design.

By Catesby Leigh, a writer on architecture and fine art who lives in Washington, D.C.
May 26-28, 2001

century ago, U.S. senators and representatives had a vision for Washington as a great classical city to rival the capitals of Europe. "Remember," Sen. James McMillan of Michigan instructed a subordinate, "Washington is the capital of the United States. Nothing is too good for the United States capital." Nowadays, it seems, nothing is too mediocre, so far as memorials are concerned.

Hence the dismal episode of the site selection and design for the World War II Memorial, which is now certain to be built on the main axis of the Mall in Washington, thanks to legislation which President Bush will sign, possibly on Memorial Day. In this controversy, Congress was guided not by any architectural vision of the kind that inspired Sen. McMillan and his contemporaries, but by the political clout of veterans' groups. In the end, the veterans — led by the chief fundraiser for the $160-million memorial project, former Sen. Robert J. Dole — steamrolled a local coterie of opponents of the memorial scheme who filed suit against it on historic-preservation and due-process grounds last fall. The legislation nullifies the lawsuit, along with all outstanding regulatory issues.

But the memorial's real problems never had anything to do with the specious preservation issue raised by these opponents, grouped in the National Coalition to Save the Mall, who charged that the World War II Memorial's site--the oval-shaped Rainbow Pool, which lies at the east end of the much larger Reflecting Pool--is actually part of the Lincoln Memorial grounds. Nor were these problems related to the allegedly clandestine maneuvers employed by the Commission of Fine Arts and other review boards in approving the site, because due process was in fact observed. The exception here is essentially a technicality: votes cast by former National Capital Planning Commission chairman Harvey Gantt, who remained in his post for two years after his term expired, unaware that a provision allowing him to do so had mistakenly been omitted when the law governing the commission's activities was updated. However, Gantt cast votes in favor of the memorial's site and general architectural scheme before his term expired.

The real problem is that the site is inappropriate, and the design off-key. World War II deserves the grandest, most splendid, and imposing commemoration architecture can provide. J. Carter Brown, the longtime chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts who was the prime mover behind the Rainbow Pool site's selection, quite correctly observes that this rather barren locale cries out for improvement. But it demands a landscape-oriented scheme, because a major architectural mass between the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument would disrupt the grand symmetry created by those two monuments and the Capitol.

There probably isn't a first-rate site for the World War II Memorial anywhere on the Mall. But that is where the veterans want it. Indeed, the American Battle Monuments Commission, the memorial's sponsors, were originally willing to stash it away in the leafy confines of Constitution Gardens, a hopelessly awkward site a short distance north of the Rainbow Pool which lies off the Mall's major axes.

The two most appropriate sites would have accommodated triumphal arches. Washington, the late sculptor Frederick Hart observed, is the only major western capital without a great arch. Hart sensibly recommended locating a World War II arch on the rotary circle at the Virginia end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, which is now empty. The alternative would have been Freedom Plaza, Robert Venturi's curious raised piazza, extending between Thirteenth and Fourteenth Streets along Pennsylvania Avenue, which is now little more than a sun-blasted paradise for skateboarders.

The World War II Memorial's architectural design, in turn, falls far short of making the best of a difficult location. Friedrich St. Florian's original design was chosen by first- and second-round juries packed with modernist and post-modernist architects and critics — a crucial factor in the steady degeneration of the art and architecture of Washington's monumental core in recent decades. Classical architecture in the grand manner has defined the look of Washington, and there are plenty of competent classical architects practicing these days, but they don't seem to find their way onto the review boards or competition juries. And though there were fully classical submissions to the World War II Memorial competition — with at least one of them, by Michael Franck, far superior to St. Florian's — none of them made it to the second round.

The World War II Memorial jurors were sly, however. They knew you couldn't get away with calling the likes of Maya Lin in to design a memorial to a war we won. So they picked a modernist design whose architecture included superficial references to classicism in the form of a panoply of ridiculous free-standing, capital-less columns, as well as fully classical sculptural elements. St. Florian's winning scheme also involved sinking the Rainbow Pool no less than 15 feet below ground level in order to accommodate vast museum-like exhibition spaces the original program specified. The Fine Arts Commission and the Planning Commission sent him back to the drawing board, sensibly instructing him to forget about the exhibition spaces.

This led to the present design, which sinks a plaza larger than a football field — including a slightly shrunken Rainbow Pool — six feet below ground. The plaza is terminated at its north and south ends by so-called "triumphal arches." Symbols of victory in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, these graceless, boxy, minimally detailed structures, which rise to a height of 42 feet, are actually pavilions, and are aligned with the rows of elms ranging along the Reflecting Pool. Fifty-six freestanding pillars extend from the pavilions in semi-circular formations. Like the piers supporting the pavilions, these 17-foot-tall pillars boast unsightly rectilinear voids intended to convey a sense of openness at the site. When viewed from Seventeenth Street, which runs by the eastern approach to the memorial, the pillars will serve not only to clutter up the design, but to reduce visitors' perceptions of the pavilions' scale.

St. Florian has failed to solve a difficult site problem, which is not surprising given his modernist background. Properly designed classical pavilions are an appropriate element, but the pillars make the scheme far too architectural for its location. St. Florian accordingly provided a non-solution to this problem by carving slits in the pillars to make them less architectural. It is free-standing sculptures of fighting men that should ring the sunken plaza, not the silly pillars, whose symbolism of the states and territories is superfluous.

A curving wall at the west end of the sunken plaza will be flanked by waterfalls and adorned with a glittering minimalist multitude of more than 4,000 golden stars, each one standing for 100 American lives lost in the war. The stars, like the pillars, are gimmicks. On the other hand, the memorial's sculptural decoration has fortunately been entrusted to Raymond Kaskey, who first garnered national attention with his fine idealized and monumentally scaled female figure, Portlandia, which adorns Michael Graves' Portland Building in Oregon. Kaskey has produced an elaborate sculptural arrangement for the interiors of the sky-lit pavilions. This composition will be in bronze, and will include eagles perched on corner columns, with a great victory wreath suspended from ribbons the eagles clutch in their beaks. Kaskey also will produce 24 bronze relief panels depicting the war effort at home and abroad for the walls on each side of the grass terraces and stairways leading down into the plaza from Seventeenth Street.

The absence of human figures in the round from St. Florian's design, however, remains a serious defect. Indeed, the Rainbow Pool should be adorned with a horizontally oriented sculpture such as a rising horse-drawn chariot driven by a Victory figure. But in deference to tender preservationist sensibilities, which will brook no dramatic new element between the Washington Monument and Lincoln Memorial, the pool may well be blessed with nothing more than refurbished fountain spouts.

There you have it, folks, an anti-monument to American victory in the twentieth century's greatest conflict that, when unveiled in 2004, will amount to a second-rate picture frame for the Lincoln Memorial. Nothing succeeds in civic art these days, it seems, like mediocrity.