Tradition and Change Battle on the National Mall

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NYT: Tradition and Change Battle on the Mall
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: January 15, 2009


(Richard Perry/NYT)
The Washington Monument near the west end of the National Mall.

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....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/16/arts/design/16mall.html