Review: Frank Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial reinvigorates the genre

Over the past decade, with the opening of the World War II Memorial in 2004 and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial late this summer, it seemed as if a long tradition of civic architecture had finally reached a sad and vitiated end. The giant war memorial that ate up acres of the Mall hearkened back to the aesthetics of the very countries the United States defeated, an exercise in regurgitated totalitarian grandeur. The language of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial was more contemporary but caught up in the same design quandary that has bedevilled architects for almost three decades since the opening of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in 1982. Uncertain whether to embrace abstraction and conceptualism, or the traditional language of marble statues and heroic flourishes, the designers of the MLK Memorial tried a little of both, and failed like so many before them, producing a bland, often silly, and generally inert design calculated to offend no one.

But history isn’t over, and there are ideas left with which to reinvigorate the tradition of memorial architecture. While it might have seemed an odd mismatch to chose Frank Gehry , an architect of flamboyant gestures, to design a memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower, a military leader and president hallowed for his common touch, simplicity and humility, it was the right choice, and a daring one. Gehry’s design, which uses large-scale metal tapestries to memorialize the 34th president, is the first serious innovation in the history of memorial design since the bold and abstract geometries of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial (now gravely threatened by a bizarre plan to build an unnecessary visitors center nearby).

Gehry has produced a design that inverts several of the sacred hierarchies of the classical memorial, emphasizing ideas of domesticity and interiority rather than masculine power and external display. He has “re-gendered” the vocabulary of memorialization, giving it new life and vitality just at the moment when the old, exhausted “masculine” memorial threatened to make the entire project of remembering great people in the public square seem obsolete. If there are murmurings within the Eisenhower family and among Gehry skeptics and conservative critics, they probably have a lot to do with the basic feminization of the memorial language.

‘Dreams of a barefoot boy’

Gehry’s design, which may go to the National Capital Planning Commission for a critical approval hearing as early as February, is centered on three large metal tapestries. If there aren’t major changes to the plan, they will show scenes reminiscent of Eisenhower’s boyhood home, Abilene, using the wide-open Kansas sky and minimalist landscape to keep the texture transparent. Bas reliefs will represent Eisenhower’s success as a military leader and as president, and a statue of the young Eisenhower will be placed so as to appear to be reading the events of his life to come. Eisenhower the man of action will be complemented by a more contemplative figure, a reference to the dreaminess of youth and the traditionally feminine passivity of reading.