Crowding the Mall: On the National Memorial Dilemma

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Among its various legacies to the national capital, Pierre L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for Washington created many opportunities for the placement of memorializing art and architecture in its generous circles, wide boulevards, and, especially, along the Mall. But L’Enfant’s achievement was modest compared to the grand vision overlaid upon it a century later by the McMillan Plan. Created by Daniel Burnham, Charles McKim, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Augustus Saint Gaudens, this 1901 design transformed a small Southern city into the federal capital we know today. It increased the length of the Mall by one-third (creating a site for the Lincoln Memorial) and lined it with monumental Beaux Arts buildings; it called for the construction of parks and parkways that, among other things, provided sites for the Jefferson Memorial and for a bridge across the Potomac River that extended an axis from the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

As a result, Washington has become a city of monuments and memorials on a scale unequaled by any other capital. But in recent decades the city has witnessed a curious contradiction: as the pace of monument-making has accelerated, and the number of memorials has proliferated, their emotional and artistic power has, with a few key exceptions, waned. It is all too easy to conclude that commemorative architecture lacks emotional heft these days: traditional evocations of valor and triumph no longer stir the soul at the end of this blood-soaked and bellicose century. Indeed, the most successful commemorative design of recent times–the Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin–succeeds in large part because it does not attempt to dominate but instead defers to the Olmstedian landscape of the Mall. The mediocrity of many recent memorials in Washington can be understood as the result of two intertwined causes: the peculiar gestation by which memorials in D.C. come to be; and a larger dilemma, the difficulty of making a commemorative work that can “speak” to a broad population and remain evocative over time.

A stroll through several major memorials completed recently reveals something of what has gone wrong. The Lincoln Memorial forms the apex of a triangle whose other points are the Vietnam Veterans Memorial of 1983 and the Korean War Memorial of 1995. Lin’s design is that rare achievement–a popular and artistic success. Nonetheless, it has been demeaned by the additions scattered around its site: Frederick Hart’s bronze representation of “Three Soldiers” and Glenna Goodacre’s “Women’s Memorial,” another traditional bronze with three figures. Located across the Reflecting Pool from the Vietnam Memorial, the Korean Memorial is a bowdlerization by the architect of record, Cooper-Lecky Architects of Washington, of a competition-winning design by a team of architects from Pennsylvania State University (Don A. Leon, John Paul Lucas, Veronica Burns Lucas, and Eliza Pennypacker). A sad little fountain trickles; images of soldiers, photo-etched onto a polished stone wall, read as smudges. Eschewing Lin’s abstraction, this memorial features a representational statuary tableau of poncho-clad GIs stepping gingerly through a rice paddy. Sculpted by Frank C. Gaylord, II, each figure telegraphs a wartime emotion we know from the movies: one soldier is anxious, another stoic, another resigned. These mawkish images do not help visitors to unravel the ambiguities of this “police action”; they ask them to pity the combatants.1

A few minutes walk south, in West Potomac Park, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, by Lawrence Halprin, attempts a narrative form, telling the story of Roosevelt’s life in a sprawling landscape divided into four roomlike spaces–one for each term–formed by massive walls of rough granite. Most of the sculpture–by Leonard Baskin, Neil Estern, Robert Graham, Thomas Hardy, and George Segal–is figurative, depicting events like a Depression breadline and a Fireside Chat. Although the overall experience is beautiful, even contemplative, this memorial possesses little emotional power. It is heavy-handed and didactic: water gushes with “youthful” vigor out of the stone walls of the First Term Room, and flows in a quiet sheet to commemorate the President’s sudden death early in the Fourth Term. “I Hate War”–not among the famous phrases for which FDR is remembered–screams one inscription.

The Women in Military Service for America Memorial, located across the Potomac at Arlington National Cemetery, is tucked discreetly behind a Beaux-Arts hemicycle designed by McKim, Mead and White; so discreetly, in fact, that only the most dedicated monument-seeker will ever find it. The designers, Weiss/Manfredi Architects of New York, scooped out the hillside behind the hemicycle to create a handsome but neutral top-lit exhibition space (which, unfortunately, remains largely empty). The best thing about the memorial is that it connects the visitor to a more powerful commemorative experience: those who climb the stairs punched through the hemicycle wall are rewarded at roof level with an unexpected vista of the national cemetery. The serried ranks of nearly identical grave markers appear to extend endlessly over the rolling northern Virginia landscape that once comprised the estate of Robert E. Lee, palpably evoking the immensity of military sacrifice. Ghostly reflections of the markers hover behind quotations etched in the memorial’s skylighted roof; the texts poignantly capture the plight of service women caught between traditional roles and new challenges.

These memorials make up a mixed bag: mawkish at Korea, confusingly overbearing at the FDR, and neutral to the point of non-existence at the Women in Military Service. Is Maya Lin’s design to blame for the current plethora of memorials? Has the unexpected (and still unparalleled) success and undeniable emotional power of the memorial to the Vietnam War unleashed the current monument-building fervor in the nation? The design for the FDR Memorial was chosen in a competition held in 1974, but the monument was not built until the mid 1990s. The momentum to construct a memorial to those who fought in Korea in the early 1950s did not gather any strength until after the success of the Vietnam memorial. More recently, a similar momentum is building to construct a memorial commemorating the Second World War. Indeed, the sheer number of commemorative projects now being proposed or planned suggests that the memorializing urge has not abated. Approved by Congress and in some stage of design or review are memorials to Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas Paine, George Mason, Mohandas Gandhi, Benjamin Banneker (the African American who helped plan the nation’s capital), victims of Communism, black Revolutionary War patriots, the Army’s First World War 4th Division (approved in 1928 but never built), Japanese-American patriots, and the U.S. Air Force; also being planned–ironically, perhaps, given some of the honorees on this list–is a Peace Garden.2 Nearing completion is the monument to African Americans who fought with the Union in the Civil War. The nature of this list suggests that our Senators and Representatives regard the approval of memorial legislation as good politics–not the fulfillment of the nation’s highest aspirations but rather an easy expiation for past sins or a sop to special interests. “The black Revolutionary patriots can go here,” one imagines some committee member saying, “and the Japanese-American patriots there–but maybe not too close to the World War II memorial.”

(Continued)

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