The Wall Street Journal-20080216-WEEKEND JOURNAL- Leisure - Arts -- Masterpiece- The Road to the Monument- How the Iconic Obelisk Honoring Washington Took Shape
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; Leisure & Arts -- Masterpiece: The Road to the Monument; How the Iconic Obelisk Honoring Washington Took Shape
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In perhaps no other capital around the world does the seat of government face a work of art in such conscious equilibrium. The Washington monument is both architecture and sculpture, a powerful symbol with layered meanings for different generations from Washington's time to ours.
Washington's death in December 1799 unsettled Americans with anxiety and nostalgia. Calls for a memorial began almost immediately, with sentiments intensifying in the years around 1832, the centennial of Washington's birth.
The architect Robert Mills (1781-1855) was perfectly suited to the task of fashioning an image that embodied the founding father's significance to this country. From Charleston, S.C., Mills was our first native-born, professionally trained architect and engineer. He apprenticed to the major architects of the day -- James Hoban, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Latrobe -- and designed his own buildings as early as 1812 in the emerging Greek Revival style. Mills's signature work was notable for its bold, clean simplicity and strong play of solid massings and voids, qualities he would bring to austere conclusion in his Washington monument.
His engineering abilities permitted him to design some of the most impressive curving staircases in early American architecture, from the facade of the South Carolina Asylum (1822-28), in Columbia, to the interiors of the U.S. Patent Office (1836-40) and Treasury Building (1836-42) -- and ultimately the spiral stairs within the Mall obelisk. Mills had moved to Washington by 1830, when he began to transform the look of the federal city. Incorporated in his grandest buildings was a variety of piers and columns, from the great hallways of the Patent Office to the block-long colonnades on the Treasury. These gave Mills a rich vocabulary of vertical forms that eventually led to his heroic vision of the Washington memorial.
The phallic aspect of the shaft suits Washington's paternity of the nation and his notable physical height as one of our tallest presidents (along with Lincoln). Standing on a broad rise of open land, Mills's obelisk also recalls the isolated silhouette of a lighthouse. Near the end of his "Autobiography" (1789), Benjamin Franklin related escaping a shipwreck thanks to a lighthouse. "This Deliverance impress'd me strongly with the Utility of Lighthouses, and made me resolve to encourage the building more of them in America." In the early 1790s, Washington himself directed lighthouses to be erected at Portland Head in New England and Montauk Point, Long Island. Mills knew of Benjamin Latrobe's designs for one planned for the mouth of the Mississippi in New Orleans. The form signals a sure course and clarity of purpose.
Mills had one earlier important commission for a monument to Washington -- in Baltimore, 1813-38. For it, he drew inspiration from books in Jefferson's library, in particular illustrations of the Place Vendome column in Paris and Trajan's Column in Rome. Mills's shaft was a similar cylindrical mass set on a massive cubic base. Preliminary designs included elaborate decorative carvings, inscriptions, and allegorical sculptures on the exterior. In the final structure, Mills simplified the whole with clean surfaces and the single standing figure of the general at the summit. The Washington National Monument would also undergo a similar process of design distillation, reaching the austere clarity we see today on the Mall.
Paradoxically, the further Mills refined his schemes, by eliminating the elaborate narrative program of sculpture and monumental circular pantheon proposed at the base, the more powerfully suggestive was the stark symbolic form he eventually constructed. (Today only the ring of flagpoles encircling the monument hints at the dense colonnade of the pantheon in early drawings.) The other major design shift made from the Baltimore memorial was to replace the towering column with the cubic geometry of an obelisk and its attendant associations of timeless wisdom and immortality. For Washington he conceived the elegantly tapered shaft with a small pyramid at its apex, resulting in a sense of soaring height.
Congress appropriated the land in 1848 and on July 4 the cornerstone was laid. Over the following years, Mills hoped that stone for its construction would come from the various states and regions of the country. But with the rise of the Know-Nothing Party and intensifying regional squabbles, work came to a halt short of 200 feet in 1855. The architect suffered a stroke and died later that year, his greatest work metaphorically amputated and emasculated. Through the Civil War years it seemed to signify the severance of the Union. Only renewed national sentiment in the Centennial period around 1876 prompted construction to resume and reach completion in the following decade.
Henry James, in his memoir "The American Scene" (1906), described the capital as "the City of Conversation. . . . Washington talks about herself, and about almost nothing else." Mills's work, "the fine Washington Obelisk," was "as if some loud monosyllable had been uttered, in a preoccupied company," an exclamation point among the babble. The Pop artist Claes Oldenburg worked up a watercolor in 1967, "Scissors in Motion: Proposed Monument to Replace the Obelisk, Washington, D.C.," for this city of red tape. Mills's legacy includes the spare geometric surfaces of Don Judd's and Carl Andre's minimalist sculptures of the 1960s and, nearby on the Mall, Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial (1982). The obelisk still exhilarates us with its purity, self-confidence and heroic individuality.
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Mr. Wilmerding is emeritus professor at Princeton and the author of "Compass & Clock: Defining Moments in American Culture, 1800-1850- 1900" (Abrams, 1999).
