In Memoriam

AT THE MAIN ENTRANCE to the new National World War II Memorial in Washington, the visitor encounters this rather ponderous inscription on a formidable chunk of granite: "Here in the presence of Washington and Lincoln, one the eighteenth century father and the other the nineteenth century preserver of our nation, we honor those twentieth century Americans who took up the struggle during the Second World War and made the sacrifices to perpetuate the gift our forefathers entrusted to us: a nation conceived in liberty and justice." All this verbiage endeavors to explain two things: This is a memorial, and we decided to run it across the Mall, between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, even though that made some folks really angry.

It's a bad sign when a memorial needs a big inscription to let you know that it is, in fact, a memorial. Uninformed visitors looking at the World War II Memorial from a distance might not realize what they are looking at. Standing on the grounds of the Washington Monument and looking west, you see a sunken plaza with a big pool and a pair of vertical water sprays, along with two semicircular arrangements of free-standing pillar-like blocks flanking pavilions at the north and south ends of the plaza. The words "Atlantic" and "Pacific" inscribed on the pavilions provide a clue. But the elms surrounding the memorial site dwarf the pillars, partially obscuring the pavilions and diminishing their scale. This anti-monumental camouflaging of the World War II Memorial will be even more accentuated when the elms at the east end of its site are mature.

We shouldn't exaggerate the point. The World War II Memorial does look like some sort of ceremonial venue, even from a distance. Typically, however, memorials are objects, composed with architectural and sculptural elements that offer a legible subordination of parts to the whole. A memorial is usually endowed with an emotionally resonant focus. In traditional work, it is often sculptural: a statue or relief panel. But even Maya Lin's minimalist Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall has such a focus: the vertex where her two wall sections meet.

Lacking all this, the World War II Memorial seems merely a memorial plaza, not a memorial. It is a place, not a monument, and it lacks anything resembling a focus. As a place, it's not bad, particularly in a city that has had limited success creating good civic spaces in recent decades (Freedom Plaza and Pershing Park on Pennsylvania Avenue are two lamentable examples). No doubt the tens of thousands of World War II veterans who will flock to this venue for the official dedication on Memorial Day will find much to like.

THE MEMORIAL'S DEFECTS begin with the fact that the wrong site was chosen for it. It is located across Seventeenth Street from the Washington Monument grounds, on the great Mall axis extending from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. From the beginning, a cardinal restriction on its design was that it not intrude on this axis. And despite the exaggerated denunciations of preservationists, who attempted to mire the $175 million project in litigation, it does not intrude.

That's precisely the problem. A memorial to World War II should be very intrusive. If a memorial to the great crusade against Germany and Japan can't intrude--and it can't, because that would disrupt the grand symmetry of the Capitol-Washington Monument-Lincoln Memorial ensemble--it should have gone elsewhere. It should have been built where visitors need not descend into a sunken plaza. It should have been built where an emphatically vertical mass could sit squarely on a major axis. Those sites exist: the spacious circle at the Virginia end of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, or Scott Circle on the Sixteenth Street axis, six blocks north of the White House. (The equestrian of General Winfield Scott could surely be accommodated elsewhere.) What's more, a great honorific arch--of which Washington presently has none, unlike any other major Western capital--would have been the appropriate form for such a monument.