It’s Time to Bury Frank Gehry’s Eisenhower Memorial

The Eisenhower Memorial is dead. Not the memorial itself, but the wildly unpopular design by Frank Gehry.

The decisive blow is Congress’ 2014 budget, which denied the $49 million in construction funds requested by the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, the body charged with building the memorial. Instead, Congress allotted $1 million for operations, thereby halving the Commission’s previous annual budget. Congress also reinstated the requirement that the Commission possess 100% of construction funding before it can break ground.

This sets an impossibly high bar. The Commission’s 2014 budget request estimated that it would need an additional $25 million in construction funds for 2015. It is inconceivable that a Congress unwilling to devote a single dollar toward construction will appropriate the combined $74 million. Furthermore, the Commission said it needs to raise $35 million in private funds—yet there is every indication that such fundraising has been an utter failure.

Congress also called for the Commission to work with the Eisenhower family, which has vehemently opposed the design for being grandiose and extravagant. Since they object to Gehry’s fundamental concept (the gargantuan columns and steel “tapestries”), there can be no compromise. Congress’s message is clear: Gehry has got to go.

It is not just Congress that is refusing support. Every party that has a say has turned against the memorial. In November, the plan went before the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, one of two agencies that must approve the design. At that meeting, all seven commissioners critiqued the design.

Alex Krieger, a professor of urban design at Harvard, judged the plan according to the standards of a “traditional first-semester architecture exercise.” He emphatically said, “This would fail.” Krieger complained that each iteration of the design has made it worse...

I saw a color sketch but I would like to see a very detailed plan before declaring that this is the only work of Gehry that I have ever seen that looks like it (1) is actually constructible and (2) that does not appear to have half the viewers get an immediate upset stomach.

I feel that everyone has to make a living, but it amazes me how this guy keeps getting commissions based upon the history of his problem prone projects.

Many of the great trend setters in architecture had designs that were unconstructible with technology available at the time. (More has been spent on repair the leaking and problematic Falling Water than was spent to build it originally.) Gehry however falls into a complete class of his own.

Moshe Safdie, Gehry, I. M. Pei and others on the cutting edge of architecture almost always are going to have “court costs” for the owners and builders that end up utilizing their services. Often their buildings are referred to as monuments, but it would be better termed to call then monuments to ego.

At the time of the Hyatt Regency Skywalks collapse, a famous industrial designer (Victor Papanek) that I heard interviewed said that as design and architecture merge into a executable package they often have a “Gee Whizz” factor that remains problematic in execution. It is the factor that the designer insists upon and becomes integral to its sale to the owner but the designer’s own team of architects and engineers aren’t able to fully make it constructible and sound. It is the factor that makes viewers of the finished product say, Gee Whizz how do they keep that up there, or gee whizz, how did they do that.

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