Who remembers the name of the architect who gave us the Lincoln Memorial in the nation’s capital? But who can forget the pensive Abraham Lincoln depicted there? For “in this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”
To quote Aram Bakshian in the Wall Street Journal: “First-rate artists and architects subordinate their egos to the subject at hand. The Lincoln Memorial is about Abraham Lincoln, not architect Henry Bacon and sculptor Daniel Chester French, brilliant as both men were.”
Note that the Jefferson Memorial is about Jefferson, not John Russell Pope—for it is Jefferson whose words are engraved all around the classical rotunda (“I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man”) and not the architect’s.
Who designed the Washington Monument? Or did it just rise over the years in phases, like any other geological formation or act of God?
But in this era the architect takes center stage. Our memorials become tributes to the designer rather than his subject. Renzo Piano is interviewed and feted, his attention-getting designs celebrated. But any connection they may have to the lasting and enduring may prove transient—unlike the monuments to Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln.
Look at the collection of designs for a monument to this country’s role in the First World War, formerly the Great War before it was followed by greater ones. One suggestion for a memorial to the more than 100,000 Americans who served in that war has been dubbed “Attack of the Mole People,” for it emphasizes the role of trench warfare in that war—a theme neither original nor uplifting, however relevant to that muddy struggle.
That’s all the sadder because there is already a modest but fitting monument to those Americans who served in that still debatable war: an open, classical structure complete with a dome and graceful Doric columns. But grace and modesty are no longer the style, and so we the people are presented with these all too contemporary abominations that mark another decline in American taste.
Onward and downward our designers go, victims of their own fatal attraction to the base and their indifference to the noble.