Kahn's Memorial to FDR: Concrete Brutality

Empty, long stretches of white concrete

Imposing scale, dwarfing (intimidating) humans

The slabs of concrete cannot fit in with the New York skyline

Floating, truncated, bodiless head. Classical busts grounded the head to the top part of body. The sculptor is Jo Davidson, who nonetheless sculpted beautiful renditions of other notable people.

Forty years years after the architect Louis Kahn died without completing the Roosevelt Memorial in New York City, the memorial park is now complete, and part of the city's landscape. And what an ugly addition it is.

Here's what Wikipedia says about Kahn:

In 1932, Kahn and Dominique Berninger founded the Architectural Research Group, whose members were interested in the populist social agenda and new aesthetics of the European avant-gardes.

And about his Roosevelt Memorial:

Architecture critics love this work. The only sane people who don't fear to call this work ugly are ordinary people. Here is a commentator at an WNYC News, who says:

I am a great admirer of FDR and absolutely agree that his work should be commemorated. However, this monument is not the right way - and I think your coverage should reflect divergent views on the project - not just people who are involved with it, singing its praises. To me and to people I know who live on the island, the huge granite slab on the southern tip of the island is an ugly monstrosity. It truly reflects the worst of architecture from the period in which is was designed - concrete brutality. This was once an idyllic, peaceful, natural area on the island - this project has ruined it, totally insensitive to its surroundings. It's the wrong monument to FDR and WNYC should investigate other people's reactions to it.

I think his original phrase "concrete brutality" should be part of the vocabulary of critics of modernist architecture.

I've written about Kahn's architecture here. Below is a quote from that post:

Is architecture the last frontier?

Any self-serving, "artistic" architect can have his day in the field. Once his buildings have been commissioned by the "in crowd", and built, they are there to last. And hundreds, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people will get to visit these "emperor has no clothes" structures.

Another concrete brutality, or a more sophisticated marble brutality, is the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington D.C. Here is my article on the memorial: Minimalist Art and the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial. I write:

There was fierce opposition to the memorial from the start, where statesmen, veterans and the general public demanded that a more heroic symbol be built. One of the most poignant outrages was that nowhere on the monument is the word Vietnam carved, as though the place never existed, and the soldiers fought a non-existent war.

I continue:

This controversy precipitated the erection of another monument. Sculptor Frederick Hart...constructed a three-man composition which he called "The Three Soldiers", clearly Vietnam soldiers standing in their combat gear and rifles...A flagpole was...placed near the Three Soldiers with the fitting inscription: "This flag represents the services rendered to our country by the veterans of the Vietnam War."

The Three Soldiers
By Frederick Hart

Sculpture placed at the Vietnam
Veteran's Memorial
in Washington DC


Above is the Theodore Roosevelt Sculpture at Theodore Roosevelt Island in Washington D.C.

The sculpture is by Paul Manship, who also sculpted the Prometheus statue at Rockefeller Center in New York.