On the eve of the opening – at last – of the Dwight D Eisenhower memorial in Washington DC, its designer talks about creating a monument worthy of its quietly heroic subject
It is “ugly and offensive to the eye” and “injurious to public morals”. It is “a hollow temple, not a hallowed one. The impious, soulless design evinces nothing sacred or transcendent. Base and plebeian… it mocks, in the voice of the nation, President Eisenhower and republican virtue. A de-moralised memorial, it rejects American values for an ersatz populist levelling-down. It rejects heroism and greatness.”
Thus spake Justin Shubow, president of the National Civic Art Society in Washington DC, since 2018 a Trump appointee to the US Commission for Fine Arts, and the man behind a draft executive order called “Making Federal Buildings Again” under which “the classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style” for federal courthouses and federal buildings in the National Capital Region.
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