The controversial proposal for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial now has a new component: a smartphone app, which, according to the memorial’s designers, visitors will be able to use on-site to “contextualize Eisenhower’s impact” and view historical and biographical content. Postmodern “starchitect” Frank Gehry’s plans for the monument have been mired in controversy since they were unveiled. And while the impulse to harness cutting-edge technology is admirable, the need for a supplementary “E- Memorial” highlights exactly what is wrong with the design: The physical monument does not reflect the man it purports to commemorate.
The $142 million proposal calls for ten colossal, unadorned 80-foot-tall, 11-foot-wide columns to support the monument’s most striking feature: vast woven metal billboards, enclosing the four acre site and bearing images of the Kansas landscape. These partitions would frame a central depiction of Eisenhower as a cadet (an improvement, perhaps, on the original plan to portray him as a young boy), flanked by stacked megaliths at odd angles and two other portraits.
The plans have met with fierce resistance from critics, not least from the Eisenhowers themselves. In Susan Eisenhower’s congressional testimony on the proposal, the late president’s granddaughter compared the steel screens to an “iron curtain” and the 80-foot columns to missile silos. Susan and her sister Anne also apprehended the design’s most fundamental flaw: Its grandest components do not form any coherent narrative or theme related to Eisenhower’s contributions to the nation and the world.
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