Art and Politics Vie In a Battle to Honor A Monumental War

New York Times, July 1999

In a bustling model shop below his offices in downtown Providence, R.I., the architect Friedrich St. Florian delicately lifts a clay study of a 2,000-year-old emblem of death. It is a cenotaph, and it represents the sacrifice of the 508,000 Americans who died in World War II. He sets the model into a tilted clay plane, jaggedly fissured to suggest the seismic upheaval of the war. Out of the middle of this plane will rise a beacon wrapped in a sculptured armature. The combination of cenotaph and light symbolizes, he says, ''triumph over darkness, democracy over tyranny.''

Mr. St. Florian is the architect of the World War II Memorial in Washington, which he hopes will emerge as a powerful and evocative summation of the conflict. But he has spent much of the last two years tailoring his design to please an assortment of Federal agencies and interest groups. Shelves in his model shop are filled with discarded or rejected ideas for archways, fences, shields and wreaths.

It may seem strange to build this commemoration of World War II more than 50 years after the war ended. The postwar generations, after all, had little use for memorial building. But interest was awakened by the success of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by Maya Lin and built in 1982. Comprising little more than the inscription in polished stone of the names of those whose lives were sacrificed in that divisive war, the memorial movingly helped inspire a national reconciliation.

The story of the World War II Memorial, however, is emblematic of why monuments with the appeal of Ms. Lin's are the exception. With the Korea and Vietnam wars both canonized prominently near the Lincoln Memorial, the agency that oversees war memorials, the American Battle Monuments Commission, reasoned that the magnitude of World War II could be suitably recognized only with a prime site on the Mall. The agency chose a spot west of 17th Street, close to the Washington Monument, and surrounding the Rainbow Pool, which is part of the Mall that extends to the Lincoln Memorial.

In beating hundreds of competitors to receive the commission, in January 1997, Mr. St. Florian thought he had found a design both powerful and respectful of the site. He proposed two semicircular ranges of 40-foot-high columns, which would embrace the plaza around the Rainbow Pool as if with monumental arms. The architect saw these roofless ranges of columns, one column for each state, as creating a roomlike space of indeterminate dimension, evoking the immensity of the war. Though he had kept the vista between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument clear, the guardians of the Mall's neo-classical patrimony said the columns, and the shrub-covered mounds of earth Mr. St. Florian proposed to pile up behind them, would violate the open, parklike environment and push too deeply into the trees ringing the pool. The monuments commission wanted something less assertive.

Mr. St. Florian then shrunk the scheme, keeping it within the historic line of trees around the pool, and replaced the columns with two open-topped 40-foot-high archways, installing fountains at their bases. Instead of columns representing the states, a series of shields on a low fence now fulfill that symbolic function.

The design is now so respectful of its surroundings that it has become little more than a tidy elaboration of the Rainbow Pool, an inoffensive exercise in thin-veneer neo-classicism. Since it is barely separated from the powerful vista of the Mall, it no longer seems a place apart, making it difficult for visitors to feel that they have embarked on an experience larger than themselves.

MR. ST. FLORIAN said a World War II veteran had told him that the revised design was too pastoral, that the war had been ''no walk in the park.'' Mr. St. Florian has taken heed of such criticisms. Working with the sculptor Raymond Kaskey, he is trying to re-establish the evocative experience he had envisioned, but through small-scale gestures, tending to how light will fall through the open tops of the arches, for example -- and through sculptural elements like the cenotaph to the fallen and the fence shields.

Even these gestures may be undercut by the array of commemorative messages the commission has asked Mr. St. Florian to accommodate. Inscriptions and allegorical sculptures must thank the Allies, the home front, each branch of the armed forces and so on. With this architectural equivalent of an Academy Awards acceptance speech, it will be difficult for the memorial to convey the immensity and deep significance of the event. Though the neo-classical language of Greco-Roman allegory in shields, wreaths and statuary might match the surroundings, this is imagery that has otherwise gone the way of the prewar empires it so often embellished. World War II was quintessentially a modern event, executed with modern means in a modern cultural and political context.

To elicit a meaningful statement from the maelstrom of war requires an architect of enormous skill and sensitivity in the best of circumstances, but even the most talented designer cannot succeed if straitjacketed by esthetic correctness.

Still, the monumental core of Washington deserves to be defended from incursions. Its pastoral, idealized beauty might indeed be violated by an artistic statement that vividly expressed the risk to democracy posed by fascism and the vast resources and sacrifice required to fight the war.

Perhaps such a statement should be made someplace other than the Mall. The commission, however, stands by its selection of the site, calling it the only place for ''the defining event of the 20th century.''

But is it?

It is certainly worth considering whether World War II changed the nature of America in so fundamental a way as the founding of the nation and the preservation of its unity, events symbolized by the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Had such a debate occurred, the Mall axis might well have been deemed the wrong place for a war memorial, however important the conflict.

But in fact today's dynamic of memorial building does not much trust debate about where these projects should sit, what they should say or the role of design in saying it. Few recent monuments attract anyone other than partisans of the cause, event or person commemorated. A mandated gantlet of review is supposed to weed out inappropriate design, but the process inadvertently empowers unreflective historic preservation and narrow special interests. Designs survive if they are inoffensive; Congress then feels that there can be no harm, or risk, in voting through another statue or fountain if it pleases partisans of a Revolutionary War figure, say, or a victimized group. (All memorials in the capital are subject to Congressional approval.)

SEVERAL other memorials have been approved by Congress and are in some stage of design or review. The honorees include the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., victims of Communism, Thomas Paine, George Mason, Mahatma Gandhi, black Revolutionary War patriots, Japanese-American patriots, the Air Force, the cause of peace and the Army's World War I Fourth Division (a commemoration approved in 1928 but never built). Nearing completion is a monument to African-Americans in Union forces.

This proliferation of shrines risks transforming the nation’s capital into a kind of necropolis of special pleading. And few of those dedicated in the last few years transcend their nominal subject to make a broadly cathartic, reconciling gesture.

One of them, the Korean War Memorial, which was designed by the Cooper-Lecky architectural firm of Washington and dedicated in 1995, intentionally avoided the abstraction of the Vietnam memorial. It focuses on a representational statuary tableau: a platoon stepping gingerly through a rice paddy. These poncho-wearing GI's, by Frank C. Gaylord 2d, each telegraphs a wartime emotion everyone knows from movies: one figure is anxious, one stoic, another resigned. Unfortunately, this theatrical specificity does not help visitors unravel the ambiguities of the event.

Just a few minutes’ walk away, in West Potomac Park, is the Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial. Advocates for the handicapped put its 1997 opening at risk, assailing the design for not showing the President in a wheelchair. (The memorial was unveiled as scheduled, but alterations are planned to address the protesters’ concerns.) Lawrence Halprin’s design, with waterfalls gushing from massive walls of rough-hewn Vermont granite, takes a narrative form, with four sprawling outdoor rooms, one for each of the President’s terms. It is difficult to tell a story symbolically, and the result here falls short. Instead of the emotional power the memorial aspires to, the visitor receives the designer’s heavy-handed message. “I Hate War” -- not among Roosevelt’s most famous words -- asserts one inscription.

Across the Potomac, the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, erected in 1997, is so discreet that it is hard to find. The architects Marion Gail Weiss and Michael Manfredi of New York scooped out a hillside behind a curving stone wall designed by McKim, Mead & White as part of the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery. There is little on display yet in the exhibition area, behind the stone wall. But those who scale stairs punched through the wall to the roof of the memorial are rewarded with an unexpected vista of the cemetery. The serried ranks of nearly identical grave markers appear to extend endlessly over the rolling Virginia landscape, palpably rendering the immensity of military sacrifice. Ghostly reflections of the markers hover behind quotations etched in the memorial’s skylight roof, which poignantly capture women caught between traditional domestic roles and new military ones.

When the Holocaust Memorial Museum was first proposed, critics said it would become a mawkish chamber of horrors on the Mall. Advocates hoped this imposing structure, designed by James Ingo Freed, and the story it told would help stimulate national vigilance against similar calamities. To consider bricks, steel and glass as having such metaphoric power is to recognize how a great design can help hallow a site.

It is not too late to apply these lessons to the World War II Memorial and to other contemplated monuments.

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	Art and Politics Vie In a Battle to Honor A Monumental War New York Times, July 1999 In a bustling model shop below his offices in downtown Providence, R.I., the architect Friedrich St. Florian delicately lifts a clay study of a 2,000-year-old emblem of death. It is a cenotaph, and it represents the sacrifice of the 508,000 Americans who died in World War II. He sets the model into a tilted clay plane, jaggedly fissured to suggest the seismic upheaval of the war. Out of the middle of this plane will rise a beacon wrapped in a sculptured armature. The combination of cenotaph and light symbolizes, he says, ''triumph over darkness, democracy over tyranny.'' Mr. St. Florian is the architect of the World War II Memorial in Washington, which he hopes will emerge as a powerful and evocative summation of the conflict. But he has spent much of the last two years tailoring his design to please an assortment of Federal agencies and interest groups. Shelves in his model shop are filled with discarded or rejected ideas for archways, fences, shields and wreaths. It may seem strange to build this commemoration of World War II more than 50 years after the war ended. The postwar generations, after all, had little use for memorial building. But interest was awakened by the success of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by Maya Lin and built in 1982. Comprising little more than the inscription in polished stone of the names of those whose lives were sacrificed in that divisive war, the memorial movingly helped inspire a national reconciliation. The story of the World War II Memorial, however, is emblematic of why monuments with the appeal of Ms. Lin's are the exception. With the Korea and Vietnam wars both canonized prominently near the Lincoln Memorial, the agency that oversees war memorials, the American Battle Monuments Commission, reasoned that the magnitude of World War II could be suitably recognized only with a prime site on the Mall. The agency chose a spot west of 17th Street, close to the Washington Monument, and surrounding the Rainbow Pool, which is part of the Mall that extends to the Lincoln Memorial. In beating hundreds of competitors to receive the commission, in January 1997, Mr. St. Florian thought he had found a design both powerful and respectful of the site. He proposed two semicircular ranges of 40-foot-high columns, which would embrace the plaza around the Rainbow Pool as if with monumental arms. The architect saw these roofless ranges of columns, one column for each state, as creating a roomlike space of indeterminate dimension, evoking the immensity of the war. Though he had kept the vista between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument clear, the guardians of the Mall's neo-classical patrimony said the columns, and the shrub-covered mounds of earth Mr. St. Florian proposed to pile up behind them, would violate the open, parklike environment and push too deeply into the trees ringing the pool. The monuments commission wanted something less assertive. Mr. St. Florian then shrunk the scheme, keeping it within the historic line of trees around the pool, and replaced the columns with two open-topped 40-foot-high archways, installing fountains at their bases. Instead of columns representing the states, a series of shields on a low fence now fulfill that symbolic function. The design is now so respectful of its surroundings that it has become little more than a tidy elaboration of the Rainbow Pool, an inoffensive exercise in thin-veneer neo-classicism. Since it is barely separated from the powerful vista of the Mall, it no longer seems a place apart, making it difficult for visitors to feel that they have embarked on an experience larger than themselves. MR. ST. FLORIAN said a World War II veteran had told him that the revised design was too pastoral, that the war had been ''no walk in the park.'' Mr. St. Florian has taken heed of such criticisms. Working with the sculptor Raymond Kaskey, he is trying to re-establish the evocative experience he had envisioned, but through small-scale gestures, tending to how light will fall through the open tops of the arches, for example -- and through sculptural elements like the cenotaph to the fallen and the fence shields. Even these gestures may be undercut by the array of commemorative messages the commission has asked Mr. St. Florian to accommodate. Inscriptions and allegorical sculptures must thank the Allies, the home front, each branch of the armed forces and so on. With this architectural equivalent of an Academy Awards acceptance speech, it will be difficult for the memorial to convey the immensity and deep significance of the event. Though the neo-classical language of Greco-Roman allegory in shields, wreaths and statuary might match the surroundings, this is imagery that has otherwise gone the way of the prewar empires it so often embellished. World War II was quintessentially a modern event, executed with modern means in a modern cultural and political context. To elicit a meaningful statement from the maelstrom of war requires an architect of enormous skill and sensitivity in the best of circumstances, but even the most talented designer cannot succeed if straitjacketed by esthetic correctness. Still, the monumental core of Washington deserves to be defended from incursions. Its pastoral, idealized beauty might indeed be violated by an artistic statement that vividly expressed the risk to democracy posed by fascism and the vast resources and sacrifice required to fight the war. Perhaps such a statement should be made someplace other than the Mall. The commission, however, stands by its selection of the site, calling it the only place for ''the defining event of the 20th century.'' But is it? It is certainly worth considering whether World War II changed the nature of America in so fundamental a way as the founding of the nation and the preservation of its unity, events symbolized by the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Had such a debate occurred, the Mall axis might well have been deemed the wrong place for a war memorial, however important the conflict. But in fact today's dynamic of memorial building does not much trust debate about where these projects should sit, what they should say or the role of design in saying it. Few recent monuments attract anyone other than partisans of the cause, event or person commemorated. A mandated gantlet of review is supposed to weed out inappropriate design, but the process inadvertently empowers unreflective historic preservation and narrow special interests. Designs survive if they are inoffensive; Congress then feels that there can be no harm, or risk, in voting through another statue or fountain if it pleases partisans of a Revolutionary War figure, say, or a victimized group. (All memorials in the capital are subject to Congressional approval.) SEVERAL other memorials have been approved by Congress and are in some stage of design or review. The honorees include the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., victims of Communism, Thomas Paine, George Mason, Mahatma Gandhi, black Revolutionary War patriots, Japanese-American patriots, the Air Force, the cause of peace and the Army's World War I Fourth Division (a commemoration approved in 1928 but never built). Nearing completion is a monument to African-Americans in Union forces. This proliferation of shrines risks transforming the nation’s capital into a kind of necropolis of special pleading. And few of those dedicated in the last few years transcend their nominal subject to make a broadly cathartic, reconciling gesture. One of them, the Korean War Memorial, which was designed by the Cooper-Lecky architectural firm of Washington and dedicated in 1995, intentionally avoided the abstraction of the Vietnam memorial. It focuses on a representational statuary tableau: a platoon stepping gingerly through a rice paddy. These poncho-wearing GI's, by Frank C. Gaylord 2d, each telegraphs a wartime emotion everyone knows from movies: one figure is anxious, one stoic, another resigned. Unfortunately, this theatrical specificity does not help visitors unravel the ambiguities of the event. Just a few minutes’ walk away, in West Potomac Park, is the Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial. Advocates for the handicapped put its 1997 opening at risk, assailing the design for not showing the President in a wheelchair. (The memorial was unveiled as scheduled, but alterations are planned to address the protesters’ concerns.) Lawrence Halprin’s design, with waterfalls gushing from massive walls of rough-hewn Vermont granite, takes a narrative form, with four sprawling outdoor rooms, one for each of the President’s terms. It is difficult to tell a story symbolically, and the result here falls short. Instead of the emotional power the memorial aspires to, the visitor receives the designer’s heavy-handed message. “I Hate War” -- not among Roosevelt’s most famous words -- asserts one inscription. Across the Potomac, the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, erected in 1997, is so discreet that it is hard to find. The architects Marion Gail Weiss and Michael Manfredi of New York scooped out a hillside behind a curving stone wall designed by McKim, Mead & White as part of the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery. There is little on display yet in the exhibition area, behind the stone wall. But those who scale stairs punched through the wall to the roof of the memorial are rewarded with an unexpected vista of the cemetery. The serried ranks of nearly identical grave markers appear to extend endlessly over the rolling Virginia landscape, palpably rendering the immensity of military sacrifice. Ghostly reflections of the markers hover behind quotations etched in the memorial’s skylight roof, which poignantly capture women caught between traditional domestic roles and new military ones. When the Holocaust Memorial Museum was first proposed, critics said it would become a mawkish chamber of horrors on the Mall. Advocates hoped this imposing structure, designed by James Ingo Freed, and the story it told would help stimulate national vigilance against similar calamities. To consider bricks, steel and glass as having such metaphoric power is to recognize how a great design can help hallow a site. It is not too late to apply these lessons to the World War II Memorial and to other contemplated monuments.
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