Crowding the Mall: On the National Memorial Dilemma

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That so many monuments in Washington are banal and emotionally toothless owes something to the very generosity with which the L’Enfant and McMillan Plans provided memorializing opportunities. National shrines are the tissue that girds the city’s grandeur. Washington’s columniated and entablatured spectacle was created largely by the well-connected gentlemen architects and planners of the Gilded Age, who catered to the contemporary political vision of the U.S. capital as a place of “grandeur, power, and dignified magnificence,” as the American Institute of Architects put it at the time.3

It is notable that this “designed magnificence” did not come about through any groundswell of public desire. For many Americans–emigrants from the autocracies of the Old World and ever skeptical of government ambition–grandness and pomp tends to stir not patriotism but ambivalence. The monumental pylons and equestrian statues and triumphal arches that ornament European capitals most often glorified the military triumphs of absolute monarchs, rarely acknowledging the sacrifice of those unwillingly conscripted to fight wasteful and futile military adventures. It is ironic, then, that not only was Washington constructed in the European triumphalist mode, but also that its scale is larger and more imperial than that of any European capital. Indeed, the Beaux Arts planners were so successful in transforming Washington into the ultimate City Beautiful that for decades now the capital has seemed almost complete, a finished design into which no new addition, especially one that departs from the prevailing style, would be fitting.

This vision of federal Washington has inspired a coterie of defenders–a taste police of historic preservationists and environmentalists who wish to guard that part of the city known as the “monumental core” from potentially compromising projects, including commemorative art that might be considered jarring. Little wonder, then, that the past few years have seen so much contention: on the one side are those who would preserve the integrity of traditional D.C., on the other are those who wish to see their cause honored by being memorialized on the National Mall.

The Commemorative Works Act of 1986 was intended to prevent bickering over the design and placement of memorials from becoming unseemly. Under this law, those who propose memorials must run a gauntlet of necessary approvals and mandated advice–first from Congress, which must authorize the project, then from the National Capital Planning Commission, the Commission on Fine Arts, the District of Columbia Historic Preservation Office, the National Park Service, and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation; if the project concerns the military, then the American Battle Monuments Commission becomes involved as well, as the sponsor. Even with such formidable procedures, the pace of memorial construction has become so hectic that capital planners have devised a new plan to guide the placement of monuments for the next fifty to one hundred years.4 Specifically, they wish to discourage additional projects being built within the monumental core (the Mall, the area around the White House, and the parklands south of the Washington Monument). This apparatus is supposed to ensure that passing fervors do not become permanently enshrined on hallowed federal ground (interest flickered briefly in a memorial to Desert Storm, for example) and that the aesthetic expression of approved projects will not compromise the architectural integrity of historic Washington.

These goals are laudable, but achieving them often proves complicated. The proponents of a memorial, who usually have powerful sponsors in Congress but rarely have significant experience or understanding of art and architecture, must work with the agencies and commissions. The agencies and commissions, however, because they are supposed to safeguard the monumental core, may find themselves at odds with the monument’s sponsor. And although the D.C. reviewers might agree with the criticisms of independent design, preservation, and environmental groups, they can’t push the sponsor too hard, because the National Capital Planning Commission, the Commission on Fine Arts, and all the rest serve at the pleasure of Congress. This freighted process typically drives the parties to compromise–a compromise that usually produces inoffensively contextualist work, rather than artistry.

Receiving a commission to design a national memorial should be, for an artist or architect, a signal honor; it can become instead a curse. The more important the site, the more fervent are the protests surrounding any memorial design, since the guardians of monumental Washington then see a larger threat. In the case of the proposed World War II Memorial, for instance, historic preservationists have fought so hard to get the design (by the architect Friedrich St. Florian of Providence, Rhode Island) to “fit into” its prominent site, near the Washington Monument, that it rather eerily evokes the neoclassicist bombast favored by the nation’s European foes in that conflict.5 Mystified by the vehement protests, veterans’ groups presume that antimilitary forces have simply garbed themselves in environmentalist and preservationist robes.

No better fate awaits the architect chosen to design a museum for a major D.C. site; too often the reward for unstinting commitment to such a commission is aesthetic compromise and professional disappointment. In his design for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, James Ingo Freed tried to make the Mall-facing facade of the building evoke something of the tragic history being remembered within; but all such efforts were spurned by the Commission on Fine Arts, which insisted upon an elevation that would suggest not suffering but redemption. The resulting exterior is a dignified but unrevealing pastiche.

Possibly portending even greater aesthetic disaster is the new Museum of the American Indian, which will occupy the last empty site on the Mall near the Capitol. Slowed by the firing of its initial design team (Douglas Cardinal Architects of Ottawa, Canada, and GBQC Architects of Philadelphia) and probably needing additional funds, the museum might not open in 2002 as scheduled. Those who would safeguard the stylistic consistency of official Washington did not require Native Americans to display their cultures within an architectural expression conforming to the culture of their subjugators. Still, Cardinal has supplied his design with a surprisingly Washingtonian bombast–which may be why the project has moved relatively smoothly through the D.C. regulatory maze. Capped by a dome reminiscent of the National Gallery, the building attempts to create urban architecture from wilderness geology: its exterior features overlapping curves meant to evoke the rock cliffs of places like Canyon de Chelly. Although not as gigantic as it appears in its context-free models, the building is assertive; intended as evidence of the vitality of contemporary Native American culture, this assertiveness instead appears more an homage to Paul Rudolph.6

The monumental center of Washington is unquestionably a work of urban-scale art that should be defended from insensitive incursions. Its idealized beauty, possessing elements of the pastoral and the monumental, might indeed be violated by an artistic statement powerful enough to convey the immensity of modern war, the deprivation of the Great Depression, or the long struggle of the Civil Rights Movement. This raises a curious question. If the contemporary monument cannot simply adopt the forms of the past–as is illustrated by the weakness of work like St. Florian’s, whose pallid design commemorates the approximately 508,000 Americans killed in the Second World War with an oval bracketed by two arches–then can the desire to commemorate important events and people be satisfied only at the cost of the Mall’s architectural integrity? This is a central dilemma for urban America, which possesses few assemblages that can be experienced as a total work of design. One way to answer this question is to recognize that Washington’s current understanding of “what belongs” on the Mall is far too cramped. An essential aspect of what makes the Mall so fine a work of civic art is its resilience; as the Vietnam memorial has shown, the monumental core can accommodate strong contemporary expressions. Unfortunately, there is little official recognition in Washington that a brilliant, possibly “difficult” design allied with a powerful message can dignify and enhance its setting. This sort of aesthetic understanding will require a more perceptive and deeply argued debate than that which typically occurs in the politically charged atmosphere of Washington.

Also needed in Washington is a richer and more public debate about the nature of memorial design itself. What design alchemy elicits a complex emotional response from the visitor? Monument building is risky, and it is hard to predict why some memorials remain evocative long after the generation that built them has passed on. Grant’s Tomb, on Morningside Heights in New York, once attracted millions of visitors every year; today it barely rates more than a pause from tour buses. Perhaps the most durable, even universal, answer to this dilemma is found in Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime–of an experience that can transport an individual from mundane routine to a more spiritual, contemplative realm. This idea is arguably even more meaningful today, when the noise and blandishments of commercial and popular culture are seemingly impossible to escape, than when promulgated in the 18th century.

Etienne-Louis Boullée interpreted Burke’s notion in his late 18th-century funerary monument proposals. These designs retain their power today. Boullée envisioned brooding pyramids presiding over smoky planes and immense windowless temples in which only cloud shadows passing across the interior surface of open domes would interrupt the contemplative silence. More than a century later, Edwin Lutyens built great yawning arches to commemorate the dead of the First World War, arches that opened onto parklike fields chillingly gridded by stark white gravestones. The visitor is drawn to a design such as Lutyens’s memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval by its strange scale and its ability to evoke vastness or infinity; the undercutting of the familiar and the expected seems in such work to gesture to the experience of loss–the ultimate absence of the familiar.

Some more recent, Modernist work has used different devices to evoke powerful responses in the visitor. Louis Kahn framed the travertine plaza at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies with buildings on two sides and divided the plaza with a slender rivulet of water. This channel of water draws the eye westward to where the plaza open up and drops away–to a sublime vista of the endless Pacific.

Although Salk was not intended as a site of memory, Kahn did design two important, unbuilt memorials. At the edge of Roosevelt Island in the East River, a proposed memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have consisted of a wedge-shaped plane of tree-lined space–a vision of the immensity of loss, open to the sky but cut off from the spectacular vistas of the city–culminating in a roomlike enclosure walled on two sides by thick stone blocks. This small room, which evokes ancient spaces and yet retains its sense of intimacy, would, it seems to me, have linked the American president with a long tradition of heroism and yet also recognized that the larger-than-life figure was just a man. For the southern tip of Manhattan, Kahn proposed a Memorial to the Six Million Jewish Martyrs; this project of 1966-72 would have placed a somber grouping of thick, solid glass piers in Battery Park. The available images suggest that the FDR Memorial would have been the more compelling monument, but in both Kahn skillfully combined traditional elements and Modernist abstraction.7

The late Aldo Rossi was inspired by the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, in which abstract, shadow-splashed planar spaces, containing perhaps a figurative statue or architectural fragment, seemed to suggest the triumph of emptiness. Rossi, whose architecture combined elements of Modernism and historicism, strove for similarly haunting if less embittered effects. In funerary projects such as the Modena Cemetery (1971) and a chapel in Guisano (1981), he applied the imagery of traditional structures, including temples and arcades, to surfaces and forms that were stripped down to bare essence.8 Like Lutyens, Rossi distorted the familiar. He punched tiny windows into thick walls and placed occuli that admitted mysterious beams of light. He distorted scale by putting giant altarlike constructions within constricted spaces. Rossi was obviously looking back at Boullée, but he was also recognizing the emotive power of the austere, prismatic forms used by Kahn and by Le Corbusier in his later work. While Rossi’s work is now seen as conservative, aligned to Postmodernism, it nonetheless helped to move contemporary architecture beyond mere abstraction and mere historicism to a more synthetic vision.

Sadly, an artist or architect who, like Rossi, Kahn, or Lutyens, attempts to transcend the traditional and to push beyond the boundaries of the familiar, stands almost no chance of working in contemporary Washington. To be sure, memorial projects will always incite controversy; they are too important to too many people. In the federal city today, however, bracing contention has given way to risk avoidance–to the acceptance of apparently safe, usually vacuous proposals. And this regrettable atmosphere is unlikely to change until those involved recognize that the critical goal of a memorial is not to please constituencies but to connect powerfully to those who visit it and to honor meaningfully whoever or whatever is being commemorated.

In coming to grips with this dilemma, Washington might look to Berlin. For the past decade, the new capital of the reunified Germany has been struggling to acknowledge and recognize some of the trauma of its past. Intense controversy has attended major projects such as Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, the Holocaust Memorial by Peter Eisenman (just approved this summer), and Norman Foster’s renovation of the Reichstag. What in Berlin has been so heartening, even moving, is the passionate response these works have inspired; a significant number of citizens care deeply about these designs and, while at times disagreeing about their message or form, embrace the ability of artists and architects to confront the difficult issues of history and memory.

From the decade-long debates have come some extraordinary results. Before it was completed, critics feared that Libeskind’s metal-clad structure, slashed by criss-cross openings, would prove mawkishly histrionic. Now open, it exerts a powerful pull, even though its displays will not be installed for another year or so. The Reichstag is arguably the most psychologically complex building ever to house a seat of government; its sleek new interior is encased within the original exterior walls, upon which have been left bullet holes and Soviet graffiti–chilling reminders of the fire of 1933 and the Battle of Berlin and their bitter aftermath. These projects are far more daring and powerful than anything contemplated recently in Washington. To achieve the memorial design worthy of a great capital will require that we have confidence in the ability of artists to use contemporary means and paradigms to create a memorializing language for today–and that we see the inevitably fractious process as an opportunity to sharpen and refine a design, not as a mandate to play it safe and dumb it down.

James S. Russell is an architect and editor at large for Architectural Record. He is a frequent contributor to publications including the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and teaches urban design at Columbia University.

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