Art: The New Monuments

Since the Pyramids, the globe has creaked under an accumulating weight of monuments raised to kings and leaders. But the U.S., the most prosperous nation history has ever known, has generally exercised considerable restraint in the monuments it has built for its heroes. Indeed, it has generally built them no monuments at all until they have been authenticated by history. At least until recently. Now every President can be sure of an almost instant memorial-and they tend to get bigger and bigger.

1971 is a bumper year for presidential monuments. One, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, designed by Gordon Bunshaft for the University of Texas campus in Austin, opened last spring. The other, the much-heralded John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, was created for Washington by Edward Durell Stone. It officially opens this week with a Mass by Leonard Bernstein, which he composed at the request of Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Together, the two buildings cost some $76 million, and they afford some unique evidence about official architectural taste in the U.S.

Failed Pomp. It has long been a national embarrassment that the nation's capital has had no proper showcase for the performing arts. This was the lack that the Kennedy Center's planners set out to remedy. When they began their work in the mid-'50s they were thinking of a national cultural center that would present all the traditional forms of opera, theater, ballet, orchestral performance and film. The grand-scale, centralized package they had in mind was a challenging problem for an architect. How does one design a "monumental" building that visually responds to the immense emotional and conceptual range of the performing arts? In the 19th century, this was notably solved by Charles Garnier's design for the Paris Opera, which has a luxuriant inventiveness of detail and baroque wealth of form that are the epitome of le style Napoleon III. Clearly, Washington hoped that Stone's design would be to the Kennedy style what Garnier's was to the Second Empire.

Yet the Kennedy Center (a designation assigned in 1964) is arguably the most frigid tribute a modern architect has paid to the muses. To walk down the river terrace, with its 630 feet of polished white Carrara wall monotonously glittering like a new kitchen, past the finned, bronze-anodized columns and the regimented shrubs, is an experience of failed pomp. There is an absence of human scale. Undifferentiated bays crash repetitively like boots on a parade ground. There is even the look of an inflated Greek temple, 20 times life size. Above all, the Center has an absolute lack of plasticity in space and detail. The halls and theaters are simply boxes-large boxes, to be sure, but they could hardly be more inert. The grand foyer, with its six-story mirrors, marble, chandeliers and inevitable red carpet, strives to be timeless but achieves only the crushing placelessness of an international air terminal. At the same time, Stone's attempted monumentality is often undone-even on its own terms-by a sense of kitsch. Thus (to take only one example) the walls of the opera house are padded with red material which-as in leathery club bars-is buttoned in panels with rows of brass tacks. But real tacks would be lost in so big a space. The solution? Fake brass tack heads, Oldenburg jumbo, four inches across.