January 16, 2009 (Second Edition)
Dear Coalition Friends:
- The pocket-size, 2-fold AMERICA'S STRUGGLE FOR FREEDOM self-guided tour of the Jefferson, FDR, and Lincoln memorials (with a stop at the MLK Jr. marker) is now available on our website -- http://www.savethemall.org.
- Useful, reliable information for Inauguration Day visitors to Washington, D.C., who do not have tickets is hard to come by. Check out today's Washington Post Weekend Section for a handy Inauguration insert with stories about all the U.S. Presidents. Additional Inauguration information is provided at The Washington Post's website -- http://voices.washingtonpost.com/inauguration-central/
- See in today's New York Times "Exhibitions of a City, Outdoors and In" and an essay about the National Mall, excerpted below.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
January 16, 2009
Architecture
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
We like to think of the National Mall in Washington as immutable space: the permanent embodiment of the nation’s highest democratic ideals. But its history has been a roller-coaster ride of architectural controversy.
In Pierre Charles L’Enfant’s original plan for Washington, the Mall was nothing more than a sketch, part of an imperial vision transplanted from 18th-century France. The nascent American government, with little money for public projects, mostly ignored it. By the end of the 19th century critics were murmuring that the nation’s front lawn had deteriorated into a patchwork of unrelated parks, gloomy red-brick buildings and dilapidated train sheds.
Even after the government adopted the 1901 McMillan plan, the real genesis of the space we know today, insensitive planners continued to encroach on it, building grim rows of utilitarian federal office buildings along the edges to accommodate an expanding government.
Architects meanwhile have been fighting bitterly for centuries over what architectural forms should define the nation’s identity. Arguing that a classical language was the only appropriate way to express the country’s democratic values, traditionalists wanted to tear down the Victorian structures that had sprouted during the 19th century. Modernists would later deride the neo-Classical designs of buildings like the National Gallery of Art and the Jefferson Memorial as reactionary.
Such skirmishes are still being fought today. Some still cringe at the sight of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, completed in 1982, feeling that its abstract black granite surfaces are both elitist in conception and an affront to classical Washington. When the neo-Classical style World War II Memorial was completed in 2004, others — myself included — vilified it as a piece of sentimental propaganda that interrupted and thereby desecrated the sacred axis between the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol, a two-mile-long strip of lawn that had not been significantly altered for more than a half-century.
So on the eve of the presidential inauguration, we would do well to reflect on the meaning of this grand space. Despite the apparent stoicism of its monuments, the National Mall embodies the push and pull of a free society. Its design testifies to a history of conflict between a desire for national unity and the dissonant voices of a democratic republic. Its greatness lies partly in how it gives expression to those conflicts.
Read the rest of the essay here.
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