According to ASLA's The Dirt, plans are underway for a 90-120 million dollar memorial commemorating President Eisenhower. A team led by architect Frank Gehry and including landscape architecture firm EDAW has won the right to design the memorial.
But do we really need a sprawling 4 acre memorial to Eisenhower similar to the FDR Memorial designed by Lawrence Haplrin? Eisenhower was a practical guy- building highways, founding the forerunner to the Departments of Health and Education, etc. Wouldn’t he be better memorialized by actually revitalizing one of the parks in downtown DC? Or maybe building one of those cool parks that connects over a highway?
New development has sprung up all over DC, but many of our parks look like they were last funded in the late 1970s.
Why is there so much money for memorials and so little money for parks in our nation's capitol? If half as much money went into building parks and plazas as goes into memorials in this town, it would be a much better place to live and work.
Not that there’s no place for commemoration. Eisenhower should be comemorated in some way, but a city cannot live on commemoration alone.
See The Dirt's Post on the memorial: http://dirt.asla.org/2009/04/06/gehry-wins-eisenhower-memorial-commission/
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