Design: A Monument to Blah

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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.

Great war memorials can be bursts of glory. Go to Boston Common, and see the exalted 1897 bronze relief by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the one dedicated to the black Civil War regiment headed by Robert Gould Shaw. They can be grave and abstract, like the vivid slash that is Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial. What they can't be is tepid. World War II wasn't fought at room temperature. Can we possibly be satisfied to remember it that way?