In Memoriam

It’s a bad sign when a memorial needs a big inscription to let you know that it is, in fact, a memorial. Uninformed visitors looking at the World War II Memorial from a distance might not realize what they are looking at. Standing on the grounds of the Washington Monument and looking west, you see a sunken plaza with a big pool and a pair of vertical water sprays, along with two semicircular arrangements of free-standing pillar-like blocks flanking pavilions at the north and south ends of the plaza. The words “Atlantic” and “Pacific” inscribed on the pavilions provide a clue. But the elms surrounding the memorial site dwarf the pillars, partially obscuring the pavilions and diminishing their scale. This anti-monumental camouflaging of the World War II Memorial will be even more accentuated when the elms at the east end of its site are mature.

We shouldn’t exaggerate the point. The World War II Memorial does look like some sort of ceremonial venue, even from a distance. Typically, however, memorials are objects, composed with architectural and sculptural elements that offer a legible subordination of parts to the whole. A memorial is usually endowed with an emotionally resonant focus. In traditional work, it is often sculptural: a statue or relief panel. But even Maya Lin’s minimalist Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall has such a focus: the vertex where her two wall sections meet.

Lacking all this, the World War II Memorial seems merely a memorial plaza, not a memorial. It is a place, not a monument, and it lacks anything resembling a focus. As a place, it’s not bad, particularly in a city that has had limited success creating good civic spaces in recent decades (Freedom Plaza and Pershing Park on Pennsylvania Avenue are two lamentable examples). No doubt the tens of thousands of World War II veterans who will flock to this venue for the official dedication on Memorial Day will find much to like.

THE MEMORIAL’S DEFECTS begin with the fact that the wrong site was chosen for it. It is located across Seventeenth Street from the Washington Monument grounds, on the great Mall axis extending from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. From the beginning, a cardinal restriction on its design was that it not intrude on this axis. And despite the exaggerated denunciations of preservationists, who attempted to mire the $175 million project in litigation, it does not intrude.

That’s precisely the problem. A memorial to World War II should be very intrusive. If a memorial to the great crusade against Germany and Japan can’t intrude–and it can’t, because that would disrupt the grand symmetry of the Capitol-Washington Monument-Lincoln Memorial ensemble–it should have gone elsewhere. It should have been built where visitors need not descend into a sunken plaza. It should have been built where an emphatically vertical mass could sit squarely on a major axis. Those sites exist: the spacious circle at the Virginia end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, or Scott Circle on the Sixteenth Street axis, six blocks north of the White House. (The equestrian of General Winfield Scott could surely be accommodated elsewhere.) What’s more, a great honorific arch–of which Washington presently has none, unlike any other major Western capital–would have been the appropriate form for such a monument.

AT THE WORLD WAR II MEMORIAL, we get most of the elements of an appropriately heroic visual display, but rather than being arrayed, as they ought to be, in a massive, imposing, unitary form, they are dispersed in a paved landscape extending over one third of the memorial’s seven-and-a-half acre site. Such memorial sprawl reaches absurd extremes at the nearby Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial. At the World War II site, it is thankfully more confined–but diffusion still reigns.

A great arch is broken down, as it were, into the memorial’s pair of granite pavilions overlooking a 337-foot-long plaza. The plaza, situated six feet below ground level to avoid any disruption of the Mall, harbors the reconstructed Rainbow Pool. The pavilions take the form of four-fronted arches and rise 43 feet above ground level. The dispersal of architectural elements at the memorial gets out of hand with the 28 granite pillars arranged in semicircular formations at each end of the plaza, with the pavilions in the middle of these formations. Wheat and oak wreaths of bronze are suspended from exposed armatures in the see-through pillars–the pavilions’ piers likewise have narrow vertical openings–and each pillar is inscribed with the name of a U.S. state or territory. The visitor is left to wonder why we need a roll call of the states and territories at this memorial. Indeed, the pillars, which are 17 feet above grade, are useless accretions that clutter up the design.

The World War II Memorial’s sculptural decoration is decidedly incomplete, but it is of a generally high order. Beneath the unglazed oculus in its roof, each pavilion contains a sculptural composition in bronze consisting of four eagles resting upon columns, with a great laurel wreath suspended from ribbons the eagles clutch in their beaks. In this compressed space, the eagles’ wingspreads nearly touch. The pavement inside each arch features a handsome circular bronze relief, an enlarged rendition of the Victory Medal bestowed upon every World War II vet. This beautiful composition features a Liberty figure, in drapery and with a leather cuirass over her shoulders, holding the hilt of a broken sword in one hand and its blade in the other. Her foot is perched gracefully on a helmet, and the rays of the new day’s sun radiate in the background. A guilloche motif has been added to the relief’s circumference. There is also a nice balustrade, with two entwined ropes in bronze substituting for balusters, that alternates with the pillars.

Twenty-four realist relief panels with scenes from the war and home fronts, based on extensive archival photograph research by the memorial’s sculptor, Raymond Kaskey, will adorn another balustrade–this one flanking the very broad and gradual descent into the plaza from Seventeenth Street. This descent, by the way, is quite effectively designed to ease the visitor’s sense of the plaza’s sunkenness. The eight balustrade panels in place when I visited the memorial were impressive.

ON THE OTHER HAND, the pair of flagpole bases flanking the Seventeenth Street entrance cheekblocks are poorly modeled even by comparison with the familiar Bacon double lampposts that stand nearby. And the pillars ineptly substitute for the crucial element in the monumental vocabulary lacking at the World War II Memorial: the human figure in the round. There are six huge granite cheekblocks at this memorial. They mark the beginnings of the entrance balustrades, alongside Seventeenth Street, as well as each end of the two pillared hemicycles. They do not serve their obviously appropriate function as pedestals for heroic figures, whether allegorical or realist, or both.

Why this suppression of the heroic figure? Is it a matter of official Washington’s phobia of making too bold a statement on the Mall? Of reiterating the dynamic figures at the Iwo Jima memorial in Arlington (or the troop of overgrown toy soldiers at the Korean War Memorial)? Is it a feeling that the heroic figure is art-historically and sociologically exhausted, inimical to that mysterious phenomenon known as “modern self-consciousness”? Perhaps it arises from the shibboleth against “glorifying war,” as if traditional war memorials in this country weren’t concerned rather with glorifying those who have risked, and all too often given, their lives in the cause of liberty.

Another major problem is the Freedom Wall. This is a curved wall on the sunken plaza’s west side, adjacent to the Reflecting Pool. Flanked by waterfalls and fronted by a still pool, the Freedom Wall is decorated with 4,000 gilt stars suspended from a bronze panel with a pale green patina. Each star stands for 100 Americans who lost their lives in the war. The stars vary somewhat in size, and Kaskey has avoided placing them in tidy rows, but it doesn’t much matter. They pack zero perceptual punch. Not surprisingly, there is yet another granite block bearing an explanatory inscription in front of the Freedom Wall, this one proclaiming, “Here we mark the price of freedom.” We ought to declare this a law of memorial design: If you have to put up a sign explaining what an element in your memorial is doing, then it’s doing nothing.

THE FREEDOM WALL, like the memorial’s cluttering pillars, reflects the difficulty the design architect, Friedrich St. Florian, had reconciling his conceptualist roots with a perceptualist tradition. Born in 1932 in the Austrian city of Graz and long associated with the Rhode Island School of Design, St. Florian made his name decades ago as an experimental modernist whose designs turned up in university museums rather than on building sites. He struggled during the memorial design process with the “sacred precinct” where the Freedom Wall is situated. At one point he proposed a cluttered scheme including a granite cenotaph block minimally decorated with wreaths, and, behind it, a tilted, jagged basalt plane symbolizing the “seismic upheaval” of war–with an eternal flame shooting up in its midst. The panoply of stars may be simpler, but it is obvious St. Florian never attained his goal of providing an unconventional focus for the memorial that would express the tragedy of war. The result is that the visitor leaves the World War II Memorial with no sense of that tragedy–experiencing it instead precisely where he ought to: at Arlington Memorial Cemetery.

As for the pillars, the good news is that they supplanted the even more forlorn array of capital-less columns contained in St. Florian’s original competition-winning scheme of 1996. Like the pillars, the “headless” columns supported nothing, but they represented a heavy-handed attempt at symbolizing the trauma of war, and at giving a canonic classical form a postmodern twist. As built, however, the memorial contains nothing so jarringly unconventional. There is really nothing postmodern about it at all. It might pass, in fact, for a period piece, a specimen of the stripped classicism of the 1920s and 1930s. The pavilions’ boxiness and minimal exterior enrichment certainly conform to the recipe, but they compare very unfavorably with Sir Edwin Lutyens’s pair of arched pylons that flank his World War I cemetery for British troops at Etaples, France. With their intricate massing and decorative banners carved in the round, Lutyens’s pylons are much more powerful and evocative forms.

Within the confines of site requirements and reductive classicism, however, St. Florian and Kaskey can claim some noteworthy achievements. The contrast between the frozen movement of the eagles’ spread wings and the pavilions’ static forms registers vividly. Also, the lack of tension in the ribbons the eagles clasp in their beaks makes the wreaths appear to be floating in the air–a fine touch. The memorial’s overabundant inscriptions employ a majestic Roman font developed by Nicholas Benson. And though the pillars are monotonous, a degree of rhythm is created by the alternation of their upright pedestals with the battered, or inward-tilted, bases for the balustrades with the entwined rope motif connecting them–the latter a simple but effective symbol of national unity.

The pavilion balconies, perched over two-tiered fountains, have uncut balustrades, with concave panels (both inside and out) substituting for balusters and making room for the knees of visitors who lean on the top-rails while gazing into the plaza. Water drain grills bear the motif of the star-in-a-circle-with-flanking-bars known to anybody who ever stuck a decal on a model warplane. Even the vertical openings in the pillars and pavilion piers, though they weaken the sense of mass such forms should convey, reward scrutiny. These openings are not just rectilinear voids, but rather boast slightly recessed, rounded jambs that enrich the interplay of light and shade. The pier openings, for their part, frame picturesque glimpses of the pavilion interiors and the plaza beyond.

SUCH ATTENTION TO DETAIL is welcome, but what is most encouraging about the World War II Memorial is that it reflects a sense of the city as a place of spectacle and dramatic vistas. In striving to convey a sense of openness and transparency at the memorial–hence those see-through pillars and piers–St. Florian has sought to frame engaging views not just of the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument but of the World War II Memorial precinct itself.

The memorial is thus designed to encourage circulation. Ramps with benches carved out in front descend from the pavilions into the plaza. The visitor walks not only across the plaza to get from one pavilion to the other, he also walks above and around it, taking in a wide variety of views of the memorial and its surroundings. The plaza not only provides a welcome counterpoint to the vast, amorphous landscape surrounding the Washington Monument, it is a people place–a place to see and be seen. Washington possesses too few spaces of this kind.

The preservationists were quite mistaken in their contention that the Rainbow Pool and its surroundings should be left untouched. There was always a need for a landscape-oriented episode at this rather barren spot on the Mall. But never, of course, a major monument. It goes without saying that a World War II Memorial should not be a place to see and be seen–let alone a place to soak one’s weary feet, now that the warm weather is upon us–any more than the Lincoln Memorial is. Nor should the names of battles and battle-theaters be girding fountains, as they do at the World War II Memorial. What does a battle roster have to do with a fountain? It belongs inside an arch or on the pedestal of a soldier’s statue.

But the World War II vets wanted this site. And they have loads of political clout. In our factoid-besotted era, it is not surprising to hear the World War II Memorial’s apologists celebrating the fact that its location puts the Vietnam and Korea Memorials in proper historical perspective, as they are situated in less conspicuous sites off the Mall’s central axis. Nor is it surprising to find the inscribed slab at the entrance to the memorial making a wordy time-line connection with Washington and Lincoln.

Nonetheless, the idea that monumental Washington should read in historical sequence is ridiculous. Sequence, in its trivializing documentary sense, is the enemy of memorials. An honorific arch, for example, resides within an ahistorical realm. Literally, as the historian of ancient Roman architecture, William L. MacDonald, has observed, arches often occur at crucial nodes–points of inflection–in a city’s network of streets and avenues. But imaginatively, arches rank among the noblest monumental denizens of the timeless city conceived as the great theater in which the human drama plays.

World War II deserved one. Instead we must settle, at the National World War II Memorial, for a welcome hint of better things to come in the nation’s commemorative art, as modernism’s neurotic inhibitions gradually wear away and classicism’s youthful exponents grow in numbers, skill, and accomplishment.

Catesby Leigh is a regular contributor on architectural topics to The Weekly Standard and author of the forthcoming Monumental America and its Discontents.