There’s been plenty of criticism of Frank Gehry’s proposed design for the Eisenhower Memorial. The family of the 34th president has compared it to totalitarian art, while members of Congress have launched investigations into how exactly Gehry was chosen for the task. (Even Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has had to jump into the fray to mediate the conflict.) But what there haven’t been many of is proposed alternatives. Now there are.

Earlier this week the National Civic Art Society, which has helped marshal the opposition to Gehry’s design, organized an event where they showed off a number of possible alternative designs for the memorial that will eventually be located in front of the Department of Education off of Independence Avenue.

The majority of the proposals—including three that were chosen as winners—borrowed from the classical architecture and design featured in many of the city’s existing memorials and monuments, featuring everything from arches to an obelisk. Phillip Kennicott, the Post’s architecture critic and a fan of Gehry’s design, was none-too-impressed with the proposed alternatives, writing:

But designing a particular memorial, to a particular man, in a particular spot, is a technical as well as aesthetic challenge, and none of the drawings on display suggest anything like Gehry’s technical accomplishment. Gehry’s decision to reinvent rather than regurgitate classical memorial elements also seems much more sensible and paradoxically safe in view of the myriad and dissonant unwanted historical allusions thrown off by the classical stew on display at the NCAS exhibition, allusions to Albert Speer, the New Deal, and even Victoriana that all seem discordant ways to memorialize Eisenhower. Gehry is channeling classical architecture in a much more fundamental way than the parroting of classical architecture on display at the Kirby Center.

In related news, Greater Greater Washington has a separate proposal to quiet the fighting over the Eisenhower Memorial: just move it to another site in the city.