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Image provided by Gehry Partners Llp shows the pro[osed Eisenhower...

Image provided by Gehry Partners Llp shows the pro[osed Eisenhower memorial for Washington, D.C. Some members of the Eisenhower family have recently voiced objections to the imagery to be depicted on large metal tapestries. Credit: AP

By DAVID BRUSSAT

Dwight D. Eisenhower has rarely had this much publicity since he left the Oval Office. The proposed Eisenhower memorial near the Mall, in Washington, designed by celebrity architect Frank Gehry, is stirring extraordinary opposition.

Gehry's design would fill up a rectangular block the size of four football fields containing a grove of sycamore trees edged on three sides by screens the size of basketball courts. These "tapestries" would hang from 10 posts 11 feet wide and eight stories tall. They would display the plains of Eisenhower's boyhood Kansas. On a path through the grove, atop a low wall, a life-sized sculpture, seated, would portray Ike as a "barefoot boy" marveling at nearby stone markers inscribed with his future accomplishments as general and president.

Eisenhower's son and five grandchildren oppose the design. They say that it soft-pedals the stature of the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe in the fight against Hitler, who as president led the nation through a nervous peace, mapping a strategy for the Cold War while overseeing an era of national prosperity, all without the presidential histrionics we have grown accustomed to deploring.

The proposed memorial manages to belittle Eisenhower's greatness while simultaneously embarrassing his famous sense of modesty.

Is that Frank Gehry talented, or what! The Eisenhower family has called for a halt in the design process, grandson David Eisenhower has resigned from the commission that is sponsoring the memorial, a design competition seeking classical alternatives to Gehry's proposal has been held and its sponsor, the National Civic Art Society, has issued a long denunciation of the proposal. A tidal wave of commentary, mostly negative, has flooded TV, radio, newspapers and the blogosphere.

Those supporting Gehry tend to be architecture critics circling wagons around their hero, insisting that his innovative design reflects Eisenhower's military and administrative creativity -- a trait few of them seem to have noticed until they were obliged to defend Gehry.

The Los Angeles Times' Christopher Knight sought to politicize the issue, hyperventilating at a perceived "McCarthyism" in the Civic Art Society's vivid critique. The critique's author, Civic Art Society Chairman Justin Shubow, parried the attack deftly: "Knight and other Gehry lackeys" seek to shift the issue to "identity politics since they know they will lose the aesthetic argument." I hope so. Still, architecture that evolves into the future based on a respect for the best work of the past is likely to be labeled "conservative" compared with architecture based on a succession of revolutionary departures from previous work, the recent no less than the historic. Yet the wide popular preference for traditional over modern architecture suggests that the public's architectural taste is bipartisan.

In any event, modernism has been the chosen style of the establishment -- architectural, cultural and corporate -- for more than half a century. Who are the mossbacks here? And who are really the agents of change? Traditional memorials long employed simple classical vocabulary to emphasize greatness in ways that are easily understood by the humble and the sophisticated, as with the Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. Today, monuments are battlegrounds that reflect the combat to which our politics have descended.

Perhaps that is inevitable, even appropriate. But before modern architecture became the status quo, it claimed to be about solving society's problems. Instead, it has merely reflected them. In selling its soul to the company store, modernism has doomed Americans to a built environment that hounds us with our bitterness, our fecklessness, our corporate greed. Must this continue? Not if the public speaks out.

If architecture is to play a more gentle role, the profession must heal itself by shelving its ego and designing places people like. Modern architecture has refused that task, but classical architecture has not. Still, people must tell the profession how to proceed.

The Eisenhower memorial represents such an opportunity for the public: A congressional hearing on Gehry's design will be held on March 20. The National Capital Planning Commission could decide whether to approve it at a meeting scheduled for April 5.

At issue is more than just whether the memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower will honor Ike or Gehry.

David Brussat is a member of The Providence Journal's editorial board. Email dbrussat@providencejournal.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.

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