Darts of Stone

In the national capital, Jefferson and Lincoln have their memorials, Washington his towering obelisk, and plans are ready for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But nearly 22 years after his death, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who held the presidency longer than anybody else, lacks any monument other than a small marker on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The reason is not for lack of trying. In 1959, a committee set up by Congress held an international competition, received 574 entries and picked as the winner a design by William Pedersen and Bradford Tilney, who proposed eight huge cantilevered concrete slabs bearing passages from F.D.R.'s speeches. It was dubbed "instant Stonehenge," after Britain's famous Druid ruins, received a panning from the public and the press and pained reactions from the Roosevelt family. Earlier this year, the committee decided to try again, this time without a competition. After considering the work of 15 architects, it unanimously chose Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained Marcel Breuer, 64, whose recently opened inverted-ziggurat Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan drew hostile criticism until it proved to be a perfect host to art.

Last week Breuer showed off a model of the memorial, to be built in the capital's West Potomac Park midway between Jefferson's and Lincoln's. But unlike those neoclassical memorials, Breuer's design calls for seven free standing walls, massive granite triangles each 60 ft. high at the apex, radiating from a central stone courtyard. Narrow pools of water run along the base of each wall; small contrariwise triangles beside the pools conceal spotlights. From the air, the monolithic walls appear to be the blades of some gigantic turbine. From the surrounding park land, they seem more like a miniature granite mountainscape, with the green lawn between the walls funneling in ward to a massive 32-ft. cube of highly polished granite. The granite cube will be lifted so that it seems to hover above the ground, and will bear a halftone visage of F.D.R. sandblasted into the stone. The voice of the late President will also be heard, softly broadcast through hidden loudspeakers.

"This is pure geometry," Breuer said, but he also saw some symbolism in the great stone darts, whose heights, he said, could stand for Roosevelt's concepts: "Their contours descend to meet the earth, much as the President's concepts reached out to the people for understanding, acceptance, and to become an integral part of the nation's thinking." But Breuer also sees the memorial, whose design F.D.R. Jr. finds "brilliant," as "very much a part of the land itself -- a place in which to relax, to stroll, to sit around, to contemplate." It will cost from $2,000,000 to $4,000,000.

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