Erik Bootsma’s post at GGW yesterday in regards to the Eisenhower Memorial competition included renderings of the top six competition alternatives. I’d only seen the top two previously, and all six are interesting. Here they are:

D. Cook	Bartos / Esteban	Fermin / Wolfe	Ruiz	Collison	Franck / R. Cook
	Click each thumbnail for larger image.

The winning proposal by Daniel Cook is visually beautiful, and probably displays the strongest classical features, but it’s not my favorite. Cook has produced a wonderful plan for a model city square, but one that doesn’t address the specific features of the site. There is nothing to cover or visually mitigate the hideous Department of Education building, and the symmetrical paths don’t line up with the diagonal streets bordering the site. It’s a lovely plan lifted directly from the textbook, without enough tweaking for the location.

The second place concept by Sylvester Bartos and Whitley Esteban, which I endorsed Wednesday, focuses on the Maryland Avenue diagonal and is architecturally similar to the World War II memorial. Those are strengths. A weakness is that the rest of the site outside the central circle seems like an afterthought. Grassy lawns are OK, but additional programming of some kind would have strengthened this more.

Third place was a tie. The plan by Rob Fermin and Bruce Wolfe presents an interesting idea, but it appears underdeveloped. A colonnade could be beautiful, but the rendering doesn’t tell us much about how the site would work. Which direction would the colonnade face? What’s going on in the area with the globe and olive branches? Is it just a bare concrete expanse with those designs stamped in? I can’t tell enough about this proposal to know if I’d like it.

The other third place proposal came from Francisco Ruiz, who produced by far the most unique of these six ideas. His plan would develop a large portion of the site with two private mixed-use buildings extended along the Maryland Avenue axis, pointing to an L-shaped Eisenhower memorial pavilion at the northeast corner. This plan may well be the best urbanistically, but the pavilion doesn’t seem right. Ruiz’s unadorned southern-style agrarian classicism would be ideal for a Jefferson memorial, but strikes me as not quite right for a 20th Century general.

Scott Collison’s design received a commendation, and is my favorite. It would be my choice for the memorial. It turns the weaknesses of the site into strengths, most notably by using the plain Department of Education building as a frame for a perfectly-proportioned monument. The shape and ornament of Collison’s building are more original and thought-out than the others; I appreciate that his design incorporates the sort of angular details and deco features popular during Eisenhower’s career into a new and unique form of classicism. This is also the only design proposed that I can imagine becoming as iconic to the city as the gargantuan Jefferson and Lincoln memorials, which I think is a strength. The only weakness I see is that the plaza may be a little on the bare side. Even so, this is an extremely good proposal. It’s beautiful, and it screams Eisenhower.

Finally, another commendation went to the design by Michael Franck and Rodney Cook, which I also like very much, for much the same reasoning. It produces a singular giant column as monument, surrounded by a series of fountains in the shape of Eisenhower’s five star general insignia. The space is fantastic as a plaza, and could become a sort of Dupont Circle for the neighborhood (in the busy tourist season, at least). The rest of the site is a little underdeveloped, but could be a nice space if the expansive grass lawns were programmed more strongly.

All six of these proposals deserve praise, and I think all six of them have potential to be better than Gehry’s, which I think is lackluster and contrived. I especially like the Collison and Franck/Cook concepts, which do the best job of producing unique classical designs that have a clear relation to Eisenhower, and sit well upon the Maryland Avenue site. I would love for one of those designs to be selected and actually built.