By Bradford McKee, Editor
Did Justin Shubow mean to mislead Congress about the Commemorative Works Act, or was his saying that the law requires classicism for designs on the National Mall just a prayerful error on his part? The occasion for his bold statement was a hearing held on June 1 by Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), who chairs the House Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands, in relation to what is currently the stalest of stalemates, the design that Frank Gehry has proposed for a memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower just off the Mall in Washington. In the Eisenhower debate, you basically have a group of not very informed neoconservatives on one side, foaming in opposition to Gehry’s design and also to his revisions to the design, which were a vain attempt to sway the Eisenhower family, who all seem to dislike Gehry’s ideas intensely. And then you have everybody else, who either think the schemes are just fine or who see them and recall that worse things have happened.
Bishop held the hearing to address the general problem of Mall clutter, the urge to “devour the remaining space in a zealous attempt to immortalize our generation,” as he said in his opening statement (though the very end of his statement contained a plea to “preserve a very prominent and fitting site on the Mall for the memorial to President Ronald Wilson Reagan”). Several wise and circumspect experts were called to testify about the Mall’s past and future. And then there was Shubow, a Yale-trained lawyer who operates something called the National Civic Art Society, which advocates for “the humanist tradition” in design. The NCAS seems to be a relatively new group, having reported $6 in investment income on the 2009 tax return it made available to the subcommittee.
Shubow is the author, most notably, of a chewy 153-page brief against Gehry and his design that he broadcast to the ends of Washington’s design ministries in January. The brief is packed with Gehry’s many distressing sins against humanism. It rails against the “secretive” competition process, run by the General Services Administration, whereby Gehry was picked from 44 competition entries and six other finalists to design the Eisenhower memorial (the competition process does have its share of skeptics). Shubow is also the author of an opinion piece in the Daily Caller in which he scores a point against Gehry’s design of the Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas by also scoring one rather crudely against people with Alzheimer’s disease.
He is a very sharp wit, indeed, which is no doubt why Bishop invited him to testify about the sanctity of the Mall. During the hearing, Shubow lamented, with regard to the Eisenhower selection and approval process, that “[t]he aesthetic and cultural confusion demonstrated by these sorts of agency decisions is astounding.”
Astounding. Confusion. Yes. At one point during his hearing, as Kriston Capps reported for Architect, Bishop asked Shubow whether he believed the Commemorative Works Act, which covers memorial placement in Washington, should require that all such works be classical. Shubow replied that it already does. I’ll spare you the forensics, but it does not. Though it’s hard to figure why Shubow would have said such a thing when he might otherwise have pointed out the law’s failure in this respect so that Bishop and his colleagues could get right to work on a reparative amendment.
The whole dirty, dishonest anti-Gehry, anti-nonclassical campaign drew to a kind of pause just after this hearing when Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar asked to review the latest design in hopes of an armistice and a way ahead for the project. For now, the official reviews by federal agencies are on hold. Few people know what Gehry thinks; in public, he has been a gentleman. It’s fairly clear what Susan Eisenhower, the president’s granddaughter and a leading opponent of the Gehry design, would like. She has disparaged the design in testimony with allusions to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Auschwitz. Though weeks later, on her blog, she stressed the importance of “treating people with respect,” and on that point, I couldn’t agree with her more.
Leave a Reply