Memorial plagued by setbacks as federal agency asks architect to consider minor revisions as Ike’s family continues to withhold support from design likened to ‘Nazi concentration camp’

An aerial view of Eisenhower Square looking down Independence Avenue towards the southwest. Photograph: Gehry Partners /AP

The National Mall, Washington’s very crowded green centerpiece, has seen something of a building boom recently, with new memorials and museums of varying quality arising in the capital’s core. Yet the latest addition to Pierre L’Enfant’s already chockfull landscape might not get built at all.

A memorial to President Dwight Eisenhower, long planned for a four-acre plot near the base of the Capitol, received yet another setback last week when its architect, Frank Gehry, rebuffed calls from the Commission of Fine Arts to revise his designs. Gehry, the Los Angeles-based innovator beset known for the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, has been locked in a struggle with descendants of the president who hate the design, as well as traditionalists who have compared the plans to “an incomplete highway overpass.” The project has been on thin ice already; in its last budget, Congress dismissed a request for $49m in construction funding and appropriated only minimal funding to pay salaries at the memorial commission. Efforts to raise private funding have stalled, especially as the Eisenhower family has withheld its support. Darrell Issa, the subpoena-happy chairman of the House oversight committee, has been on the case too, wondering if the architect selection process was rigged.

The memorial has been criticized in some quarters for being too modern, but its real surprise is its conformity. The design consists of a park that features large bas-relief sculptures of Eisenhower as both second world war general and American president, neither of which would look out of place in DC’s more conservative precincts. Surrounding the park are massive, see-through woven metal hangings, which Gehry calls “tapestries”, that depict pastoral landscapes of Eisenhower’s hometown of Abilene, Kansas. The tapestries would frame the space and create a sort of open-air building, though members of the Eisenhower family have gone so far to protest that the metal scrims remind them of Communist imagery or chain-link fences at a Nazi concentration camp.

The Commission of Fine Arts, the independent agency tasked with advising the government on aesthetic matters, has praised Gehry’s designs in the past but asked him to consider minor revisions. Several members of the commission objected to the scale of the memorial. In response, Gehry submitted a redesign that incorporates a few dozen more trees – but left the basic components of the memorial untouched. Gehry did not attend the presentation of the new designs last week, and an architect at his firm said: “We are staying with the overall big ideas for the project.”

Additional stone or bronze carvings depicting Dwight D Eisenhower's accomplishments as army general and president mark the latest creative changes architect Frank Gehry has made to his design for a planned memorial park honoring Ike near the National Mall. Photograph: Gehry Partners/AP

Plans to build a national memorial honoring President Dwight D. Eisenhower will be delayed into next year as the general's family continues to object to a design by architect Frank Gehry. Photograph: Gehry Partners/AP

This isn’t the first time Gehry, whose other notable projects include the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and Disney Hall in downtown Los Angeles, has run into trouble in Washington. Last decade, he was hired by the once-venerable Corcoran Gallery, Washington’s oldest private museum, to design a $200m expansion that featured his signature billowing titanium walls and a mix of traditional and curving galleries. The addition was scrapped. It was only one of the many bad calls by the museum’s “often obscenely inept leadership,” in the words of the Washington Post’s architecture critic – and earlier this month the Corcoran announced it would fuse its collection with the National Gallery of Art and cease to exist as an independent institution.

And Gehry has a history of struggles with boards and impolitic comments. In 2000, he abruptly pulled out of the competition to design the New York Times’s new headquarters, even though he was the heavy favorite; according to the Corcoran’s then-director, “He said he walked into that room and then walked right out.” A few years later, when the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation left his name off the list of architects for a new World Trade Center, Gehry boasted that he had turned the offer down: “I found it demeaning that the agency paid only $40,000 for all that work. I can understand why the kids did it, but why would people my age do it?” (He offered a sorry-not-sorry clarification a few weeks after: “I think those who know me understood the intent of my words. To those who were offended, I offer my most sincere apologies.”)

If it’s ever built, Gehry’s memorial will join a crowded field of recent additions to the Mall, some architecturally impressive and others much less so. The most promising addition is the under-construction National Museum of African American History and Culture, designed by the British architect David Adjaye and scheduled to open in 2015, which cloaks a modernist structure with shimmering bronze-coated decorative panels. The museum is on target to raise $500m for the new facility, thanks in part to a $13m donation from Oprah Winfrey, whose name will grace the building’s theater.

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Newer memorials, by contrast, have been far less progressive. The second world war memorial, which opened in 2004, interrupts the view from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial with arch-traditionalist triumphal arches, eagles and wreathes. A new visitors’ center at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, expected to open in 2016, will controversially transform Maya Lin’s masterpiece of mournful sobriety into a full-blown, 35,000-square foot display featuring digital and interactive elements. Most divisive of all was the Martin Luther King Jr memorial, sited just off the Mall in West Potomac Park, a giant granite likeness of the civil rights titan that critics both left and right denounced as kitsch.

A family takes a self portrait of themselves at the Martin Luther King Memorial just off the national mall. Photograph: Mike Theiler/Reuters

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