As Stephanie Wang reported here at the Washington Free Beacon earlier this summer, basically no one likes Frank Gehry’s design for a memorial commemorating Dwight Eisenhower near the grounds of the U.S. Capitol. The Eisenhower family doesn’t like it, the U.S. Congress doesn’t like it, the National Capital Planning Commission doesn’t like it—nobody likes the design, it seems, except Gehry and the full-time staff of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission. It’s not hard to see why:
As Wang wrote, "Gehry’s design features 80-foot-high columns holding steel tapestries, the largest of which would be longer than the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. The tapestries will feature scenes of Kansas, where Eisenhower grew up. Several critics have taken issue with these scenes, which feature wintry trees that call to mind death and cold." In a welcome exercise of sane judgment, the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) sent that design back to the drawing board. On Thursday, the Eisenhower staff will submit Gehry’s effort to address the NCPC’s concerns. As you can see in this photo shared with the Free Beacon by sources close to the commission, the changes are dramatic:
See, those two side-panels have been removed, along with a handful of the columns. But not to worry: The Kansan tundra depicted on the main panel, along with all the other main elements of the design, have been retained! This picture, and the design behind it, are what 40 million dollars (!) will buy you in Washington, D.C., these days. The Eisenhower Commission staff appear willing to push forward with this nightmarish design until Congress finally cuts off their appropriation, which will have the sad result of leaving Washington, D.C., without any appropriately-scaled monument to Eisenhower at all. Their motivation appears to be a strange combination of bureaucratic inertia and a perverse sort of artistic integrity. After all, nothing says "Dwight D. Eisenhower" like the post-structuralist, impersonal metallic designs of starchitect Frank Gehry!