Revisions to a hotly contested design for the President Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial are to be revealed Tuesday, but the design’s staunchest opponents — the Eisenhower family — don’t have high hopes that their calls for an overhaul have been heeded.
After months of delay, the Eisenhower Memorial Commission is hoping to move forward with an official approval of the design by famed architect Frank Gehry. If the commission votes for approval, the design would then go before the National Capital Planning Commission.
But Anne Eisenhower, the late president’s granddaughter, told The Washington Examiner on Thursday that she believed the changes would be mostly superficial. “I don’t expect anything substantial,” she said.
The family was invited this week to see the new model in Gehry’s Los Angeles office, but Eisenhower said no one would be able to make the trip before Tuesday’s scheduled meeting.
A spokeswoman for the Memorial Commission said Gehry has made “refinements” to the design, and the architect has taken the family’s input into account.
The family has opposed the design, which features a statue of Eisenhower as a young boy looking at stone reliefs of Eisenhower the general and president and is bordered by towering stainless steel panels that stretch 100 feet long. The panels depict black-and-white etchings of Eisenhower and landscapes reminiscent of his boyhood home in Kansas.
“We have a real problem with the metal curtains,” Anne Eisenhower said, adding that she and her siblings are concerned about the cost of upkeep and the rate at which the steel would age.
“My guess is they’ll still be there,” she went on. “The changes are probably in the details of the statue.”
Some groups have opposed the design since Gehry first unveiled it more than a year ago, but the opposition to it gained steam after grandson David Eisenhower resigned from the Memorial Commission in December. At the time, he said he could no longer support the direction the commission was taking with the design.
The family has said it finds the main depiction of Eisenhower as a boy offensive to his legacy as a two-term president and a supreme commander during World War II.
Although the opposition has led to letters from members of Congress to the Memorial Commission urging a reconsideration and a congressional hearing on the matter, the commission has stood by Gehry’s vision.
