Responses to this message:
The monument was scheduled to open a few minutes ago on the Washington DC mall. Washingingtonpost.com has pictures of it. The thing looks monumental all right. But also very gray and bland in an official and highly sterile sort of way. The monument was designed by some guy named Friedrich St. Florian.
"It doesn't help that St. Florian's modernized neoclassicism — his wind-sheared surfaces and axial symmetry — instantly brings to mind Fascist architecture of the 1930s and '40s. It's true that in those same years neoclassicism was also the chosen style for government buildings all over Washington. But St. Florian's clean- lined take on neoclassicism more closely resembles the Art Deco — flavored Moderne favored by Mussolini. That colonnade? Il Duce would have loved it. In most other aspects the memorial is in tune with the flavorless avenues of bureaucratic Washington. Walk over to the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, and you can see a reprise of St. Florian's stars and flat-surface columns. But allow him this much — his design can't be accused of excess sentiment. It seems contrived to call up no feeling at all, unless you count a vague sense of officialdom, of a task discharged."
Ouch!
{;-) Dan (maybe it will grow on me) in Miami
http://tinyurl.com/yrf6k
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101040503 -629363,00.html
Responses to this message:
Post a response to this discussion thread
And check this out: The Top Posters' Page