As everyone from members of Congress to conservative commentators the family of former President Dwight Eisenhower complains, the minds behind the controversial memorial to the 34th president rolled out a new image of their proposed designs this week showing what it would look like from the ground-level.
According to the AP, the images show two stone carvings that will help frame the memorial set to be located in front of the Department of Education building along Independence Avenue SW:
The work by Frank Gehry, to be built as a memorial park just off the National Mall, would feature two stones in “heroic scale,” carved as bas reliefs. Based on new images recently released to The Associated Press, the carvings would depict a famed photo of Ike addressing his troops on the eve of D-Day, and another of the Republican president studying the globe.
It’s not clear that the new images of the memorial will do much to quiet the criticism, though, since the majority of the complaints have been directed at the depictions of Eisenhower as a barefoot boy in Kansas and the 80-foot-tall woven-metal tapestries that will rise above and frame the memorial.
The AP also reports that minutes from the meeting of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission showed that David Eisenhower, the president’s grandson, approved of Gehry’s selection and gave favorable assessments of his first design proposals. In mid-2011, though, Susan Eisenhower and Anne Eisenhower, the president’s granddaughters, began voicing their opposition to the design; David Eisenhower resigned from the commission in December, leaving it with no family representation.
The commission is looking to have the current design approved by March and construction started later this year.
Martin Austermuhle