After a federal planning board rejected his unpopular design last spring, architect Frank Gehry downsized his proposed national memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower in Washington, D.C. In October, both the planning board and the federal Commission of Fine Arts unwisely approved the modified concept. Around the same time, however, Senators Jerry Moran (R., Kan.) and Jack Reed (D., R.I.) resigned from the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, quite possibly seeing no end, and no upside, to the controversy in which Gehry’s scheme is embroiled. The congressionally chartered EMC, which is responsible for building the memorial, joyfully predicts a 2015 groundbreaking, but such optimism appears unwarranted. And that is all to the good.
Gehry’s design, for a four-acre site across Independence Avenue from the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, previously entailed a gigantic stage set, with a memorial park enclosed on three sides by stainless-steel openwork screens depicting a rural landscape supposedly evocative of Ike’s native Abilene, Kan. The two smaller flanking screens have now been eliminated, but the rear 447-foot-wide screen remains. In front of it, a statue of a youthful Ike casually perches on a wall, looking out toward a central plaza enclosed by two figure groups featuring statues of his future self: Ike as D-Day commander and Ike as president. Instead of the eliminated flanking screens, Gehry now envisions a humongous cylindrical freestanding post — identical to those supporting the rear screen — at each of the memorial’s front corners. Complementing the landscape on the screen, much of the memorial site features Kansas-themed trees, grasses, and even roadside-like swales.
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