WP: Design's Critics Not Listening To Their Hearts (WWII Monument)

Design's Critics Not Listening To Their Hearts, Visitors Say

By Sue Anne Pressley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 31, 2004; Page B01

-snips-

From some corners, criticism of the long-awaited monument to the veterans of World War II has been harsh -- and loud. Columnists and critics in such major publications as the New York Times, The Washington Post and the New Yorker have derided it for what they term a militaristic tone and empty grandeur and for not conveying to an uninformed visitor what the war was all about.

Some critics have said that it is little more than an overflowing collection of symbols -- 4,000 gold-plated stars representing the 400,000 U.S. war dead, for instance -- that provides few clues about the conflict and its combatants. Architect Friedrich St. Florian has said that he was trying to convey the victory of democracy over tyranny while including as many elements of the war as possible.

....criticism from Sylvia Donbeck, 79, of Merrimack, N.H. She and her husband, Herman, 80, who served in the Navy during the war....

"We would like it to be more personal," Sylvia Donbeck said. "If there were names , it would make you have more feelings."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3180-2004May30.html

How do you pull off 400,000 names? People have to be a little sensical.

And ps. my dad was at Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima, and agrees with me.

Veterans of WWII....

Yeah, Heaven forbid that anyone do the "unreasonable" and actually consume a few square inches in inscribing each name. After all why waste any of the 7.4 acres, right? Much better to have tons of corporate concrete looming over the visitors and no benches for those who might need to rest.
:puke: :puke:

Let's make sure, though, that the glorious battles of that war are inscribed for the ages!

The grandson of a war profiteer (investment banker for the Nazis) and a member of the Hitler Youth. Ubetcha!

on "the wall".

this information was posted on the Austrian Government's web page
---------------------------------------------

Austrian Immigrant Friedrich St.Florian Designs National World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Friedrich St.Florian Gartler was born in Graz, Austria. At the age of ten he decided to be an architect. Two years before graduating from the Technical University in Graz, St.Florian.

In 1973 he became a U.S. citizen, "with strong roots in Austria," as he insists.

http://www.austria.org/oldsite/mar02/memorial.html

I think highlighting this is, frankly, racist.

as FRIEDRICH GARTLER....

you cannot change that FACT....although, the designer does use a different name from his birth name....

from Friedrich Gartler, named at his birth in Graz Austria in 1932 to Friedrich St. Florian....

concerning the WWII memorial. Why bring this particular fact up?

Hitler Youth....

Friedrich Gartler, born in Graz, Austria in 1932, now using the name of Friedrich St. Florian.....


If he was born in '32, he was 13 in '45.

The Anschluss in '38 made Austria a province of Das Dritte Reich.

Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth) membership was made compulsory for youths over 17 in 1939 and for all over the age of ten in 1941.

So, Friedrich St. Florian, nee FRIEDRICH GARTLER would have been a Hitler Youth member from '42 to '45.


here's a link to more about Hitler's Youth....
http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/hitleryouth.html

Front page of the Nazi publication, Der Stuermer, with a cartoon depicting a group of Hitler Youth marching forth to drive the forces of evil from the land. The caption under the cartoon reads, "We youth step happily forward facing the sun... With our faith we drive the devil from the land."

The headline reads, "Declaration of the Higher Clergy/So spoke Jesus Christ: You hippocrites who do not see the beam in your own eyes.



In Berlin, thousands of Party officials, Hitler Youth members, and Labor Service leaders take an oath of loyalty read by Rudolf Hess in Munich and broadcast across Germany...


American investigator George Atlas questions a member of the Hitler Youth arrested for blowing-up a U.S. Ninth Army jeep.


American troops of the US 7th Army force suspected members of the Hitler Youth to view the Dachau death train.

The Dachau death train consisted of nearly forty cars containing the bodies of between two and three thousand prisoners transported to Dachau in the last days of the war.

http://www.ushmm.org

is from Graz, too.

especially for a designer of a prominent American building or memorial or monument

http://ohiobio.org/lin.htm

NAME: Maya Lin

BORN: October 5, 1959

COMMUNITY AFFILIATIONS: born...Athens, Ohio (Athens County)

PARENTS: Henry Huan Lin (ceramist, dean of fine arts - Ohio University) and Julia Chang Lin (professor of literature)

EDUCATION:
graduated, Yale University, School of Architecture, B.A., 1981
graduated, Yale University, School of Architecture, M.A., 1986

OCCUPATION: architect, sculptor

Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Ancient and Modern: Maya Lin

Maya Lin (PBS)

National Women's History Project

Art and Culture Network

Forgive me but I missed the point of your post.

many people usually want to know the biography of people who design major monuments...and it was posted prominently by the AUSTRIAN GOVERNMENT on their web page...

Why couldn't they do an electronic list of names on a computer station - so you would at least have that to look at?

How much time did these same critics spend in getting any kind of a Monument placed in DC to finally honor our WWII veterans????
This monument was the result of an unknown man who at one time played a part in WWII and when visiting DC with his children and viewing all the monuments realized that their was none to honor WWII. He fought hard and long to get this dream of a National monument for WWII veterans and died just prior to seeing it finally built. It is finally there and it is giving a sense of pride to the last survivors and their families that they are not forgotten.
If others think they could have done better than they should have submitted a design. OH MY LORD...foreigners designing our monuments...should we return The Statue of Liberty...we seem to have a hate for the French???

There was no Revolutionary War Memorial,
no War of 1812 Memorial,
no Civil War Memorial,
no Mexican-American War Memorial,
no Spanish-American War Memorial,
no World War 1 Memorial,
no World War 2 Memorial,
no Korean War Memorial,
no Vietnam War Memorial,
no Desert Storm War Memorial,
no Enduring Freedom War Memorial,
no Iraqi Freedom War Memorial,
...
...
...

for more than 40 years, most seemed satisfied with that....


a modest group of Americans many years ago, now poofed up with PRIDE {one of the Cardinal Sins}...and anxious to make the BIGGEST MOST GLORIOUS monument ever for themselves....

my father was drafted in WWII and five of my uncles, all fought in Europe...none of them ever thought the WAR was anything to be proud of...they never wanted to talk about it, because it was so shameful...my father was tortured every day of his life, hearing the screams of the people that he dropped bombs on....he prayed every day that God would forgive him...my father would have been HORRIFIED to see the WWII monument to WAR, WAR, WAR....

... then added WW2 unknowsn, then added Korean War unknowns, then added Vietnam unknowns, then subtracted Vietnam (now-)known. For years and years, the only thing a President did was lay the wreath. It's in Arlington, not D.C.

I'm beyond disgusted when politicians pimp their favorite war or militarism on Memorial Day. Kerry did it right today. He paid his respects. Quietly. Privately.

My grandmother loved such symbols and was distressed that our home town WWII memorial (with names) was destroyed in a hurricane and was never replaced.

... then they can put the names on a memorial. No room? Gee ... what a fucking CLUE!! If there's no room, then we sure as hell need to think about that, don't we?

</rant>

one would think that miniaturized engraving would be a snap!

Names (or even one star per person) would sure give an idea of the magnitude of America's losses. When I ask my students to estimate the numbers of casualties from past conflicts, they almost always come up with low counts ... they are stunned when they learn about the Somme or the Battle of the Bulge.

http://www.wwiimemorial.com/default.asp?page=registry.asp&subpage=intro

See links under "Related" for 360 pan >>
http://www.cnn.com/2004/US/05/29/war.memorial

My take on the monument is that it would make Mussolini's architect proud.

But that's just a design perspective. Watching the emotional responses from elderly veterans at the initial opening of the monument makes me believe that it touches them very deeply ... and I won't complain about that.

http://savethemall.org/ was right to fight this thing.