Lines drawn over design for national WWI memorial
Past, future plans clash; final vision for site up in the air.
WASHINGTON — When it was built in 1981 as part of an architectural revival of Pennsylvania Avenue, Pershing Park was a downtown oasis of tree line and water fountain steps from the White House. In the years since, the park has fallen into disrepair and has become a haven for homeless people and pigeons.
Now, despite its future as a new national World War I memorial, the park is being pulled into a dispute over how to best preserve its once-idyllic past. A groundbreaking ceremony for the memorial was held Thursday, but some members of Washington’s architecture community have lingering concerns because its design is not yet final.
“It’s the marriage of two needs, the idea of linking these two things — the new park and the existing program,” said Thomas Luebke, the secretary of the Commission of Fine Arts, one of the federal agencies that approves the design and building of national monuments. “There are some who will never be satisfied on either side.”
The process of building a monument in Washington is traditionally a controversial one, experts say, often dogged by financial challenges and disagreements over design and construction.
Pershing Park presents an additional challenge of melding new designs into an existing memorial, which is acclaimed in its own right as a milestone in the career of the landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg.
Besides the eponymous statue of Gen. John J. Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Forces in Europe, the park’s most defining features are a fountain in the center of the stone plaza and a pond that was designed to become an ice-skating rink in the winter. But the water feature proved too difficult to maintain amid National Park Service funding shortages.
“It’s a high-maintenance park,” said Peter May, the park service’s associate regional director for land and planning. “It’s really a kind of convoluted arrangement. It didn’t work that well.”
Friedberg said the park service neglected his design. “To me, that’s an obscenity,” he said. “Of course it’s failed. If you let Central Park go to seed, it would be a failed park, too.”
The current redesign for Pershing Park — which has received concept approval from the Commission of Fine Arts, National Park Service and the National Capital Planning Commission — features an estimated 65-foot-long sculptural wall with soldiers poised in battle and a smaller, more contained water feature.
“This has to serve as a memorial and a living, breathing memorial park,” said Edwin L. Fountain, the vice chairman of the World War I Centennial Commission and a descendant of World War I veterans. There is also concern that the groundbreaking is premature because the park’s design has yet to be fully approved.
“It’s a bit presumptuous,” said Elizabeth K. Meyer, a landscape architect appointed to the Commission of Fine Arts by President Barack Obama. She noted that the President Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial broke ground off the National Mall last week after 18 years of planning and controversy involving the Eisenhower’s family. By comparison, legislation to build the World War I memorial was signed in 2013.
“I’m a bit frustrated right now — that there’s a groundbreaking when there’s not an improved final design,” Meyer said.
The last time the fine arts commission discussed the design, in May, concerns were raised about missing details for the proposed water feature and how the sculpture wall would be built.
“What they’re trying to build is what we shouldn’t be — conservative, obvious and single-minded,” Friedberg said. “What we learned from the Vietnam Memorial is that it doesn’t have to be in-your-face.”