A Go-Ahead for "Bad Manners"

By KURT ANDERSEN

It used to be a rather simple task to design monuments for Washington. The requisite material was marble, the form was strictly neoclassical, the intended effect was stirring -- Sousa in stone. Thus the memorials to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, even Kennedy. But then in the 1970s Congress started authorizing the commemoration of darker history, epochs for which symbolic expression was a complicated, contentious enterprise. No sooner was there an end to the dispute over Maya Ying Lin's rueful, abstract Viet Nam Veterans Memorial than a new debate arose over another unorthodox, intentionally disturbing design: the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum by Architect James Ingo Freed. The Washington Commission of Fine Arts rejected Freed's building at its first public review a month ago. And although the commission approved a revised plan last week, it seemed to give the go-ahead a little grudgingly.

The commission, headed by National Gallery Director J. Carter Brown, had wanted a building more like the rest of official Washington: civics-class grand, well behaved, regular. The commissioners were particularly uncomfortable with the museum's stark Hall of Remembrance -- a nearly separate 75-ft.-high hexagon jutting out toward the Mall, overlooking the Washington Monument grounds and, in the distance, the Jefferson Memorial, and violating the street wall established by its more conventional neighbor, the Bureau of Printing and Engraving. Says Commission Secretary Charles Atherton: "The greatest concern was about the great mass of the museum. It would be too assertive on the site." One commissioner said the Hall of Remembrance looked like a gun turret.

Freed, perhaps the most talented of the partners in the Manhattan-based firm of I.M. Pei, nipped and tucked at his design to meet the objections. The overall size was reduced by about 10%, the height of the hexagon was cut by 5 ft., and, most important, the building was pulled back 40 ft. from the Mall. But Freed's compromises were grudging too. A memorial to the most awful events of the century, he argues persuasively, ought not to abide by spick-and-span urbanism. "I'm not sure this building should have good manners," Freed says. "I can't tolerate prettification -- that's what the Germans did at the camps, with Tyrolean facades and flowerpots on the sills."

A Jew whose family fled Germany in 1939, Freed, 56, says he wants his design to evoke "mystery, fear, a sense of unbelieving." The main building will contain explanatory exhibits -- photographs, artifacts, documents, films and so on. The Hall of Remembrance will have niches where hundreds of candles can be lit in memory of particular Holocaust victims. The architecture is full of allusion to the Holocaust. Inside, rough brick and exposed steel trusses unsettlingly mimic death-camp construction technique, though not its precise forms; two rows of four towers (here containing offices) recall the camps' ubiquitous guard towers. Even the dimensions (cramped) and lighting (bleached) of the passenger elevators are designed to make visitors feel appropriately uncomfortable.

Some Washington officials have suggested that such a place does not belong in the nation's capital, that Nazi genocide is not, after all, an integral part of the American story. But Congress settled that argument when it authorized the museum in 1980 (to be built with $45 million to $50 million in private funds). Some of the critics now suggest the structure ought to be redesigned as a much smaller, less conspicuous museum. No: a nice little Holocaust memorial would be worse than none at all. "This building," Freed says rightly, "has to have something indigestible about it."