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News:
World War I Memorial Proposals Please Classicists and Anger Preservationists
August 7, 2015
Image via worldwar1centennial.org
A design proposal called Remembrance and Reflection.
The rules of an architecture competition can affect which design wins and even how it is received. That’s why opponents of the controversial Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial fault not just Frank Gehry’s design but the format of the competition that led to its selection. And it may help explain why proponents of a World War I memorial on the Mall have chosen to follow a very different set of rules.
The Eisenhower competition was open only to licensed architects, landscape architects, and engineers, who were invited to submit portfolios. By contrast, the World War I memorial competition, held this summer, was open to anyone over 18, and entrants were required to submit designs. The Eisenhower competition drew 44 entries, while the World War I Memorial competition garnered 350. “Certainly we were aware of what went on with Eisenhower, and we wanted to open the field as wide as possible,” said Edwin Fountain, the vice chairman of the World War I Centennial Commission, which was authorized by Congress last year to build a memorial on a 1.8-acre site on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House.
The Eisenhower competition was open only to licensed architects, landscape architects, and engineers, who were invited to submit portfolios. By contrast, the World War I memorial competition, held this summer, was open to anyone over 18, and entrants were required to submit designs. The Eisenhower competition drew 44 entries, while the World War I Memorial competition garnered 350. “Certainly we were aware of what went on with Eisenhower, and we wanted to open the field as wide as possible,” said Edwin Fountain, the vice chairman of the World War I Centennial Commission, which was authorized by Congress last year to build a memorial on a 1.8-acre site on Pennsylvania Avenue near the White House.
SLIDE SHOW |
Image © M. Paul Friedberg and Partners
Pershing Park, designed by M. Paul Friedberg and Partners, as it appeared when it opened in 1981. The park will be replaced by a new World War I memorial.
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However, the Commission may have stepped into another minefield. The site of the memorial is Pershing Park, which was designed by the modernist landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg (with plantings by the influential firm Oehme, van Sweden & Associates, subjects of an upcoming retrospective at the National Building Museum). Ironically, it is dedicated to John J. Pershing, the Army general who led the American Expeditionary Forces to victory over Germany in World War I.
The park opened in 1981 and has suffered from inadequate maintenance. It stands to be demolished so that the World War I memorial can take its place. Though the competitors were allowed to incorporate the existing park into their designs, a glance at the 350 entries suggests that almost none of them did so. Now preservationists, including Charles Birnbaum of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, are demanding that the National Park Service protect, rather than eliminate, the modernist landscape.
Friedberg, 83, was outraged when he learned that the park might be destroyed, which he termed “a dictatorial move by people who don’t understand the meaning of a public open space.” Calling it “one of my best works,” and a “living room on Pennsylvania Avenue,” he says Pershing Park was emblematic of a time when landscape architects were inventing new urban typologies, and needs to be preserved not only for the public but also for the profession. “You can't teach landscape architecture with just photos and words,” he says.
He adds, “The honorable thing would have been to come to me first.” He says he might have found a way to accommodate a memorial without destroying the existing park. After all, the park already “expresses what we fought for in World War I—which was the ability to use free and open space without fear. That’s what contemporary urban spaces seek to do.”
Fountain, of the World War I Centennial Commission, seemed perplexed when asked if the Friedberg-designed garden should be preserved. “I’m aware that some people hold that view. I don’t happen to share it. My view is that it’s a 35-year-old failed park that has significant drawbacks. We’ll go through all the necessary reviews. But Congress has authorized us to make alterations to the site, so that’s our starting premise.” He adds: “If we are advised to pay deference to the existing park, then we will.”
Fountain announced the memorial competition just last May. Seven jurors (including landscape preservationist Ethan Carr, architecture critic Benjamin Forgey, former architecture school dean Harry G. Robinson, and AECOM principal Allison Williams) have reviewed the entries, and Fountain expects three to five finalists to be announced by the end of next week. Each finalist will be given $25,000 for design development, with a final selection to be made in January. The plan, Fountain says, is for the memorial to be completed by November 11, 2018, the 100th anniversary of the armistice that ended World War I.
The procedures chosen by Fountain could increase likelihood of the World War I memorial taking a classical form, according to several observers. Justin Shubow, president of the Washington-based National Civic Art Society, says that, given what he believes is the public’s preference for traditional architecture, “A democratic competition that casts its net broadly and provides for public comments is more likely to result in a classical memorial” than is a competition limited to established architects.
Shubow’s support for a traditional monument is unsurprising, given his vocal opposition to the Eisenhower Memorial. “Fighting the Ike memorial has been one of my main passions,” says Shubow. He says the Eisenhower competition excluded professionals without significant portfolios, as well as painters and sculptors, who are more likely than architects to work in traditional veins. In addition, he says, the brief seemed to favor modernism, stating, “Eisenhower Square is an opportunity to explore new avenues in memorialization” and, “No language currently exists for a 21st century memorial.”
Fountain, who is the general counsel of the American Battle Monuments Commission, says he doesn’t favor one style of design over another. “If having an open competition makes it more likely that we get a classical design, that’s fine,” he says, “but that’s not why we did it.” Whatever the outcome of the competition, “by providing more visibility and opportunity for public engagement than may have been the case with the Eisenhower, people will at least understand how we got to the chosen design.”
All 350 entries to the World War I memorial competition have been posted online, and Fountain said the decision-making period has been adjusted to give the judges time to receive and consider public comments. Of the entries, about 25 could be considered classical, according to Shubow. Among his favorites, he wrote in Forbes, is Remembrance and Honor, featuring an empty sarcophagus set below a crown raised high on slender, unadorned columns. That design was also a favorite of critic John Massengale, who praised it for being “classical” and yet still “innovative and inventive.”
To lovers of classical design, the demise of a Friedberg park may be a bonus.
Our Capital, built after the plan by Pierre Charles L'Enfant, one of the most astonishing achievements of our national culture, has through the last century suffered the ravages inflicted by successive corrosive faddish waves. First came the bloated grandiosity, utterly bad scale and questionable urbanism that would flow from the influence of the lamentable Chicago Columbian Exposition of 1898, an influence that would transform into the so-called City Beautiful Movement.characterized by an enthusiasm for the gargantuan, a general disregard for the pedestrian and an obsession with spaces scaled to the demands of the automobile, as well as with the creation of gratuitous open space.
The Modern Movement followed right along with a different formal focus, to be sure, but in its own enthusiasms and obsessions inclined in precisely the same direction. Urban-hostile building ruled the day and the highway engineer held carte blanche.
These virulent influences came to slash through L'Enfant's prescribed dense urban fabric (which by the end of the 19c had begun to properly accrue to a semblance of a critical mass) and to distort and disfigure the clarity and integrity of his Axial Avenues and his well-shaped squares.
A prime victim of this urbanistic destruction was, of course, the all-important Pennsylvania Avenue -- the indicated ceremonial and symbolic connection between the Capitol and the Executive Mansion, which along with its formal twin, Maryland Avenue (which suffered a yet worse fate) was described by L'Enfant to further function as the radial enframent of the central National Mall -- the whole comprising the Monumental Core of the City.
Yes, the urban definition of Pennsylvania Avenue was eroded in numerous places along its course with ignorant abandon.
Its straight-as-an-arrow course would be distorted and disfigured, and the powerful diagrammatic clarity of the L'Enfant Plan would be sadly distorted virtually beyond recognition.
Among the greatest offending interventions was the mindless removal of an entire city block of established and necessary urban fabric located at the most formally-sensitive western terminus of Pennsylvania Avenue -- a lamentable removal which would come to be replaced by the Friedberg-designed park so breathlessly discussed in this 'article'.
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, before there was this nervous eclectic concoction (one part 'Barcelona Pavillion', three parts 'Italian Hillside Town', a touch of 'Deuxieme Empire') to worry about there indeed was a 'whole' and a balanced and well-defined Pennsylvania Avenue, an urban space of integrity and of the greatest significance to the experience and the history of our Capital.
Anyone purporting to preserve this debased, landmark-defacing status quo had better be prepared to be laughed out of the room. Period.
At this time that the formal function of this site is once again to be considered, this time within the framework of the current WWI Memorial Competition, a central question to be asked of each Competition proposal to be reviewed shall be this: What does this Design do to restore the critical lost urbanity and definition of urban space of the highest magnitude and axial its at this most critical western terminus of Pennsylvania Avenue? What does this Design do to support the clear intent of the L'Enfant Plan?
It is the proper answer to this question that should concern us, along with the obvious concern for the production of a fitting and culturally accessible Memorial.
Friedberg was also the subject of a video oral history produced by the foundation - here he talks about the park's creation: http://bit.ly/1HxskvE
"A picuture at the top pretty sums up the debate: A giant pin cushion cannibalizing a public space (or further a memorial!!) surrounded by the classical architecture by which a society thrives. This pompous public porcupine postures for praise while antagonizing its audience, giving back nothing and having zero claim on the world without this stage built by the classicists. This picture is a poetic metaphor for modernism!
So ironic the modernists, whose whole raison d'etre has been to destroy precedent, can now only justify sparing their wasted deeds in the name of "preservation." The modernists are suddenly the "preservationists"??? Hahaha!! Yes, let's now preserve that which opposes preservation!! HAHAHA!!...Release the wrecking ball!!"
In that particular case, it does not seem as if Classicism and the Friedberg park are necessarily incompatible or at odds.