One major hurdle was cleared last month when prototypes of the metal tapestry were displayed at the memorial site for several days. Feil, the memorial’s resident architect, said that some members of the Commission of Fine Arts expressed surprise and pleasure at how well they looked, sentiments repeated at Thursday’s NCPC meeting by commissioners who called the metal mesh “dazzling” and “delightful.” But several commission members were still wrestling with concern about the size of the memorial and the large stone columns that one member called “the biggest, baddest bollards around.”
In the two days of public events, it also became clear that Wilson’s distinct theatrical style will have a major impact on the design. Wilson specializes in visual and dramatic distillation, heightening the counterintuitive and the paradoxical elements of a narrative. He likes things spare and poetic, and he told audience members Wednesday that he didn’t want visitors to be overwhelmed with historical and biographical information they could find in books or on the Internet. With the new emphasis on Eisenhower’s humble origins, he is represented as a mythic everyman, a classic American archetype of the self-made hero. That rankles some opponents of the memorial.
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