EDITORIAL: RI’s Great Architect Travels to DC for WWII Memorial’s 20th Anniversary, That He Designed
EDITORIAL
EDITORIAL: RI’s Great Architect Travels to DC for WWII Memorial’s 20th Anniversary, That He Designed
The ceremony takes place on Saturday morning at 10:00 AM.
As part of the ceremony, WWII Veterans will place wreaths at the Freedom Wall of the Memorial in remembrance of the more than 400,000 Americans who lost their lives during World War II.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThe memorial is one of America’s greatest for two reasons. First, its design is brilliant. Crafting a monument to sit between the Lincoln and Washington Monuments was one of the most daunting design challenges in architectural lore. And St. Florian did it perfectly.
Then, and maybe more importantly, designing a proper edifice to pay tribute to the men and women who sacrificed so much to rid the world of evil was a truly monumental effort.
The accomplishments of The Greatest Generation are even more impressive at a time when selfless service seems to be a history lesson.
In 2022, Professor Nicolaus Mills of Sarah Lawrence College and the author of “Their Last Battle: The Fight for the National World War II Memorial,” told GoLocal in a phone interview that St. Florian’s greatest accomplishment was also a battle — one that included personal attacks on him and “race-baiting” due to St. Florian's Austrian heritage.
For St. Florian, the early competitions in his career gave him the confidence and the experience to go after arguably the greatest architectural prize of the century.
"When I started to think about the design, I realized the big problem with the site was that it was between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. And the view between those two icons cannot be intercepted," said St. Florian in an interview with GoLocal.
"So for me, even before I thought about the architecture aspect of what is a memorial, it was an urban design issue. So I made diagrams and [Gian Lorenzo] Bernini had similar issues at St. Peter's," said St. Florian.
St. Florian said, "Both the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument were on hills, artificial hills and that is when I had the idea of lowering the level of the piazza [of the World War II]."
After St. Florian won the competition for the World War II monument, politics and more politics began to interfere. There were complaints about the size and the scope, the columns, the location, petty Washington, D.C. politics and ugly insults due to St. Florian's ethnicity.
"The World War II Memorial on the Mall in Washington is St. Florian’s most abiding monument. Beating out hundreds of contestants in a national competition, this immigrant from a country taken over by Nazi Germany was able to fashion an exceptional, inspirational work of art in a city of major commemorative architecture. As a tribute to 'The Greatest Generation,' St. Florian’s World War II Memorial was not without controversy; it would have been impossible to satisfy all the critics, not to mention the many federal oversight committees and government agencies involved. Yet, St. Florian’s classical landscape of memory is a dignified exercise in the grandest tradition of civic design," said GoLocal architecture critic Will Morgan.
All of Rhode Island should be proud that one of our residents accomplished so much, so brilliantly, in honor of the best and bravest.
PHOTO: Nicolas Raymond CC: 2.0
Editor's Note: a previous version identified Sarah Lawrence as a University. It is a college.