There is a lot of criticism being leveled at Frank Gehry’s design for the Eisenhower Memorial. It’s been compared to a Nazi death camp, a missile silo, and Soviet tributes to Marx and Lenin. The biggest point of contention, though, seems to be the depiction of Eisenhower as a young man. “[T]he only representation of Eisenhower himself [is] a statue of him as a barefoot teenage boy in Abilene,” wrote Conrad Black for the National Review Online. “This is nonsense. The monument is not raised up to a farm boy, but to the Supreme Commander of the Allied armies that liberated Western Europe in 1944 and 1945 and to a two-term president of the United States.”
Black, who maintains a lively writing practice from his federal prison cell in Florida, is misinformed. As Witold Rybczynski noted in the New York Times, two giant stone reliefs show Eisenhower the general and Eisenhower the elder statesman. “In this context, the small statue will have the effect of a footnote,” Rybczynski writes. It is significantly smaller than either of the stone reliefs. Also, the statue will not depict Eisenhower barefoot, says the memorial commission that is overseeing the project, which has come out forcefully and unanimously in favor of Gehry. But to show Eisenhower barefoot would be a nice touch. Eisenhower was proud of his rise from simple roots.
I hated Gehry’s design when I first saw images of the physical model. (more…)
I had the opportunity to ogle the fabulous offerings at the Architectural Design Home Design Show in New York City today. It runs through Sunday, and if you’re in NYC it’s worth a trip down to Pier 94 to check it out. Indoor furnishings predominate, but great outdoor products are interspersed throughout, from big names like 
