The Mall in Washington is about to receive the city’s first unapologetically classical monument since the Jefferson Memorial was completed in 1943. After a controversial competition, the American Battle Monuments Commission has approved a World War II Memorial for construction by the end of the century, before the passing of the generation that fought the war. Remarkably, in this age of architectural irony and wit, the commission has opted for a scrupulously traditional design. It is clearly good classicism. But is it a good monument?
The competition presented a puzzle: A memorial was to be placed between the Lincoln and Washington monuments, deferential enough not to disrupt the axis between them but heroic enough to invoke the magnitude of the war. Something epic was needed, but also something transparent. The winner, Friedrich St. Florian, an Austrian-born architect practicing in Rhode Island, took for his model another great monument that marks a space but also leads to a monument beyond it: the great oval piazza that Bernini placed before St. Peter’s.
The focus of the design is the Rainbow Pool, an existing feature that St. Florian surrounds with a paved plaza for memorial gatherings and ceremonies. To the north and south he places semicircular colonnades, each with 25 fluted- stone columns (one for each state), with no capitals and no architrave. These hemicycles establish a cross-axis on the Mall that fits happily into Pierre L’Enfant’s original plan for the city. They are especially handsome. Such is the traditional part of the design.
Less traditional is what lies beyond: raised earthen berms, planted with roses, beneath which is concealed a subterranean array of “special rooms or halls of honor and remembrance, multimedia interactive education facilities,” and the inevitable “visitor information center.” Here the World War II Memorial falls short.
In architecture as in romance, one cannot truly be serious until one thinks of making things permanent. In the late 20th century we have difficulties with both, and for the same reasons. It takes a certain amount of confidence to pledge something permanent, a confidence of which the last century had rather too much and we rather too little. This is why there have been few successful monuments in the second half of the century and, with the possible exception of the Vietnam Memorial, none that can be called sublime. For us, the monumental impulse seems fatuous and simplistic, which is why we tend to hedge our bets, adding a visitors’ center in case the monument itself is not quite enough.
The World War II Memorial, for all its homage to the war dead, pays just as much homage to modern pedagogy, the idea that complex events or ideas must be “interpreted” to the visitor. (St. Florian cannot be blamed for this; the competition brief demanded it.) Anyone who has dropped in to a well-managed historic site recently will recall moving through an itinerary of lessons and messages presented with the cheery efficiency of a ride at Disneyland. Where visitors were once presumed to bring a store of common knowledge, they are now presumed to be both ignorant and impatient. The approach is frankly schoolmarmish.
Explanation and commemoration are at cross-purposes, and the didactic impulse undercuts the commemorative. The most affecting war memorials — the sublime British monuments built on the battlefields of World War I by Edward Lutyens, or our own Tomb of the Unknown Soldier — are tragic, and serve as a kind of national altar. If you attach explanations and qualifications to an altar, at some point it is no longer an altar. Monuments are not obliged to give equal time.
The monuments that have been enduring and successful have been those that presented a single clear idea, such as grief, triumph, or sacrifice — stated boldly and emphatically. They tend not to be prosy, but rather lapidary (a word, by the way, that referred originally to the terse style needed when carving in stone). The old Civil War monuments did this quite well, simply recording where the local regiment fought, and it is difficult to imagine a more moving inscription than the simple roll call of Antietam or Chancellorsburg or Gettysburg.
But when explanations and exhibits are laid out as guides, the monument feels not like a cemetery but like a classroom, and this is a loss. A young child who sees words like Midway, D-Day, or Arnhem carved above him will need to know what those words mean. But he will learn a lot more about them if he sees someone else reading them and weeping than he will from all the exhibition panels in Washington.
Michael J. Lewis is assistant professor of art history at Williams College.
