Friedrich St. Florian, an architect whose design for the World War II Memorial on the National Mall in Washington inspired criticism and controversy as well as praise, died on Dec. 18 at his home in Providence, R.I. He was 91.
His death was confirmed by his daughter Alisia.
From the beginning, the memorial itself, its siting on the Mall in proximity to the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, and Mr. St. Florian’s design, all provoked opposition.
The memorial, a bronze and granite monument featuring facing semicircles of 56 pillars decorated with bronze wreaths, and punctuated by two triumphal arches, was criticized as banal, beneath its subject and evoking the fascist dictatorships whose defeat it ostensibly commemorated.
Others praised Mr. St. Florian for a design that fit seamlessly into its hallowed space on the Mall.
The pillars represent the states and territories, and the arches, the two principal theaters of the war. The semicircles of pillars face a pool with a fountain, and 24 bronze bas-reliefs on the entrance balustrades illustrate scenes from the war years, at home and abroad.
Despite all the criticism the memorial is still on the Mall, more than 20 years after its opening, and thousands visit every year. Mr. St. Florian, an immigrant from Austria who was dean of architectural studies at the Rhode Island School of Design from 1978 to 1988, was mostly unfazed by the criticism, though he acknowledged that he was stung by comparisons to the Nazi architect Albert Speer.
“In 20 years, it will be part of this family of great memorials, and nobody will have any arguments about it,” he told a New York Times reporter in 2000, as the controversy simmered. Another Times journalist who went to see him in Providence four years later, shortly before the monument’s inauguration, reported that the architect “exudes a certain calm and detachment.”
In a speech at Kenyon College in 2014, Mr. St. Florian explained that “monuments are expected to keep remembrance alive,” adding: “They offer the comfort of a memory transfer, that allows us to forget.”
Dietrich Neumann, a professor of architecture and art history at Brown University, who curated a retrospective of Mr. St. Florian’s work in 2006, praised him for striving to meet the needs of both context and constituents. “He respected the memorial landscape, and the prevailing taste among those veterans who wanted to feel at home,” Mr. Neumann said in an interview, meaning that the style would have been familiar to them from Washington’s other monuments.
The criticism, though, was fierce.
Herbert Muschamp, the architecture critic of The New York Times, called Mr. St. Florian’s design “seriously flawed,” in a 2001 review.
He said it “diminishes the substance of its architectural context,” compared the memorial’s “modern classical style” to structures erected under “Mussolini, Roosevelt, Stalin and other government leaders in the 1930s,” and said it “displays a profound sense of historical amnesia,” largely because it substituted a bland vision of triumph, in the critic’s view, for insight into the specific, cataclysmic nature of the conflict.
“It is faithful to Ronald Reagan, who confused making combat training movies with actually seeing wartime action,” Mr. Muschamp concluded.
A Washington Post critic, Marc Fisher, was no less scathing.
“The National World War II Memorial has the emotional impact of a slab of granite,” he wrote. “If it tells any story at all, it is so broad as to be indecipherable.”
“Nowhere does it honor the great war’s transformational role in our history,” Mr. Fisher added, citing the war’s unifying effect on a diverse nation. “I had feared that this memorial would be the hodgepodge of cliché and Soviet-style pomposity that it is.”
Mr. Neumann countered that there was “a certain humility” in Mr. St. Florian’s approach. “It wasn’t about making a statement about himself, it was about creating the right building for the conditions.”
And Mr. St. Florian’s plan drew support from Senator Robert Dole, a World War II veteran; Frederick Smith, chairman of Federal Express; and Tom Hanks, the actor who starred in the World War II movie “Saving Private Ryan.”
Friedrich Florian Gartler was born in Graz, Austria, on Dec. 21, 1932, the son of Friedrich Gartler, a hydraulic engineer, and Maria (Prassl) Gartler. He received a degree in architecture from the Graz University of Technology in 1960. After graduating, he petitioned the Austrian government to alter his name to St. Florian to recall that of a Roman army commander who was martyred for refusing to follow orders targeting Christians.
He won a Fulbright Fellowship in 1961 and came to Columbia University, where he earned a master’s degree in urban design. He joined the faculty of the Rhode Island School of Design in 1963 and taught there for over 50 years, as well as at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a period in the 1970s.
Mr. St. Florian also had a private architecture practice in Providence, and was the principal architect for a major downtown shopping mall, Providence Place, which opened in 1999 and is now in receivership. He placed second in the competition for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and won for the memorial design in 1996, an event which, as he acknowledged, changed his life and career.
In addition to his daughter Alisia, Mr. St. Florian is survived by his wife, Livia, another daughter, Ilaria, and five grandchildren.
Mr. Neumann, the Brown professor, noted that criticism of the monuments to Jefferson and Washington on the Mall had also been fierce. But “for the long run, for this continuity you want to have, I think he was right.”
“He saw the multifaceted needs of this memorial, especially for the veterans,” Mr. Neumann continued. “I think he weighed that very carefully.”
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