I don't know how much of it is tax money and how much of it is dimes from schoolchildren and grants from gazillionaires, but I'm sure you'll be, as the late Hubert Horatio Humphrey was wont to say, "as pleased as punch" that the FDR Memorial is nearing completion at the southern tip of -- where else -- Roosevelt Island in the East River off Manhattan. Or perhaps you'll find it annoying.
Like so many of these all-modern, grandiose pieces of fluff, this one will feature a big, empty nothing, a vast and roofless room of stone lapped 'round by the swirling river; a place where, one supposes, "a traveller from an antique land might" lean upon his shovel -- and despair. "Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level waters stretch far away."
--Maybe it's just me, but I'm starting to get a little sick of the fad for empty spots in the landscape with some cryptic and psuedosophisticated allusions to something happening or some famous dead person, bereft of context and chosen, as nearly as I can tell, on the basis of Nazi war criminal Albert Speer's esthetic of "ruin value." (I am reminded that Gutzon Borglum's plans for Mt. Rushmore included a well-protected artificial cavern explaining who was portrayed and why -- yeah, that didn't get built as planned, either, though some effort was made in '98 to leave the future a hint). We can do better than this; we will leave our distant descendants unintentional enigmas enough without going out of our way to create them.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
10 comments:
As so often happens, this is pretty much a straight steal. The original is, to my experience, pretty effective but of course the purpose is very different.
Wonder how many folks are going to have an Easter Island experience there in a few hundred years...
tweaker
"'a traveller from an antique land might' lean upon his shovel -- and despair."
Multi-generational literary humo(u)r. I love it.
You referenced Albert Speer? I'll agree it applies to this travesty, but wow, you *are* a brazen woman. :)
Actually, that shell of the Hospital does add "Ruin Value" to the Roosevelt Legacy. Kinda fits what "That Man" left behind for Us to "New Deal" with, don'tcha think?
Not to worry. When the oceans rise due to global warming the damn thing will be flooded.
He was going to do the same thing at Stone Mountain, except it was to be a Confederate Memorial cave. That didn't get done, either.
A few years ago, at my alma mater Texas A&M, the annual bonfire build ended up with a dozen people dead and more injured, when the stack of logs came tumbling down. Google the incident if you want more details.
Anyway, on the site of the bonfire the University erected what looks like a modernist mini-Stonehenge of memorials to the dead, complete with etched-in-stone pictures of the students, mini biographies, and memorials to each individual. Basically they died because of poor engineering and improper supervision by the students in charge.
TAMU used to be a military academy and still has a contingent of cadets, about half of whom are sworn into the military services upon graduation. At the entrance to the cadet dorm quad on campus, there is a small stone, a few feet tall and long, with small brass pieces listing the names of former cadets who have died in battles, in service to their countries. There are quite a lot of names.
A functional sense of perspective can be a real bastard.
I remember the bonfire disaster. Sad, especially for an engineering school.
RobertSlaughter: Indy has Speer's Design Disease, from the looming State Government Center to the Brobdingnagian Lucas Oil Stadium, public buildings built to no human scale that communicate, "You are a bug" to the public who paid for 'em. So I figure I can speak from some experience.
I weren't challenging your experience. Sorry to hear about the Speer disease. I have read "Inside the Third Reich", and he has a readable style.
The surprising thing for me, because so much of the internet descends into Godwin's Law, that someone would actually quote one. But I also found that humorous -- they may have been evil, but none were stupid. And ignoring what they said makes a repeat performance all too probable.
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