unsurvivable, sort of. and she talks a lot about how the arts and the crafts were sort of how they kept their sanity. and it gave them something to do. and about how depression was so bad in a lot of the camps and that people -- there was the high incidence of suicide. and so people would make these little things of beauty to give to each other just as a way to say we support you and we care about you. >> our cities tour continues the weekend of may 5th and 6th on krr c-span 2 and 3. >> this past october, frank gary, the architect behind the proposed eisenhower national memorial spoke at the archives about the ideas behind his design. he was joined by his collaborator robert wilson. this is about an hour.

>> thank you for the introduction. i know how much you were looking forward to this great program. my remarks will be brief. but as a representative as the eisenhower memorial commission, i'm happy and pleased that tonight we have with us three commissioners, chairman from beverly hills, kra. california, commissioner alfred godelburg from new york city and commissioner susan harris from washington, d.c. eisenhower legacy and the r president and general's memorialization. i regret that there isn't time to recognize more of you. i would like to thank the archivist of the united states for adding this evening's event to the memorialization of this

great general and this great president.as someone that dabbl history for a period of time, i think of the archivist of the united states as the keeper of the nation's memory, and if you will, of its identity. the participation of the national archives and of that special outlier unit in abilene, the great library that karl weisenbach leads so effectively, is a huge fundamental contribution for us being able to look to the future and the continuing first class reinterpretation of the eisenhower legacy through the decades and centuries. as we move forward, the archivist has tonight in his own way created his own historic

event. the national memorialization of a president is a historic event, but this evening i think we are part of an unprecedented level of cooperation between elements of the government's action. we are a congressional commission. the archives has its own status and stature in society, and tonight as a result of the leadership of david ferreiro who has recognized the unique relationship between the designer of the eisenhower memorial and the great president that we are honoring. in a nutshell, one of the great transitional leaders in american history was dwight david eisenhower. last president born in the 19th century, among other things the first president to look at reconnaissance photographs taken from satellites in space that he put there. a transitional leader with many

other levels, and tonight we have the privilege of hearing from another great transitional leader in architecture, frank gehry arguably has brought the architectural level to a whole new level of understanding itself. this great architect along with his collaborator we have the opportunity to share with us the creative process which will enable and result in this great memorial is a special privilege to all of us. so, i'd like to turn the microphone back to the archivist of the united states, and thank you, david, for making this possible. >> so, i'd now like to introduce the two men who have

collaborated on the original concept and design of the eisenhower national memory. architect frank gehry has received the highest of honors of his profession including the pritzer architecture prize and numerous other accolades. his projects are located around the world, especially in europe and the united states. they include, among others, the disney concert hall in los angeles, the status center in m.i.t. in cambridge, the gug heim museum in spain and the bank building in berlin. he's currently completing work on the guggenheim of abu dhabi and the louis vuitton museum in paris. mr. gehry's work reflects his concern that people live comfortably in the space he creates. the buildings address the concept and culture of the sites and the budgets of their clients. he holds degrees from the university of southern california and the harvard college school of design. collaborating with mr. gehry is theater artist robert wilson. wilson.

mr. wilson has shaped the look of theater and opera through his signature use of light and classical rigor of the scenic and furniture design, he articulates the force and originality of his investigation. he attended the university of texas and moved to new york and attended pratt institute in brooklyn. he became a leader of manhattan downtown art scene and turned his attention to large-scale opera. with philip glass he created the monumental einstein on the beach in 1976 which won worldwide acclaim. he worked increasingly with major european theaters and opera houses and collaborated with internationally renowned writers and performers, and he's won numerous honors for his work around the world. in my previous life as director of the new york public library, i was proud to be responsible for the robert wilson audio and visual collection at the library for the performing arts in new york, so it's nice to be working with robert wilson again.

so, please welcome frank gehry and robert wilson to the stage. >> so, we're going to talk for a little while, and then i'll show you some wonderful pictures, and then open it up for questions from you for our visitors. so, i'd like to start by talking about the collaboration, the roles that you each play in this project. >> well, i was sort of the lead in the architectural thing. and i was worried about -- i

read in order to do the competition, i read everything i could find on eisenhower and realized what a great man he was. and i had no -- i knew he was great, but had no idea. it seemed to me that i needed somebody that understood how to present the man, how to present him, somebody who is an actor in his own. bob's an actor. and he knows how to develop a character. and it was just a fluke when i asked the -- when we began, i said i was going to reach out to him, and i had no idea whether he'd do it or not.

but we've known each other a long time. and he turned out to be ten times more than what i expected or what i thought i needed. now i know i needed beyond in developing this scene. which it is, after all, as the great bard said, all the world's a stage. and so we are creating a scene, but it's a complicated one. it lives in a complicated place, in a complicated time. and so it's very delicate and hopefully subtle. and hopefully in the spirit of the man, the modesty that is all over the history of this man. >> so, you said you did a lot of

reading to bring yourself up to speed. >> yeah. >> were there any surprises, things that you didn't know before? >> well, i knew the broad picture, but just finding out what the man was really like was very powerful for me. >> and, bob, the decision-making process for you about getting involved in this? >> well, i've known -- frank says that we've known each other for many years, and i've watched his career and been a huge admirer of his work, and it was a real honor to be able to have a chance to finally do something with him. i also kept going over and over through eisenhower's life and trying to find the one point

that somehow could maybe balance this span of life. you can say that math, "a" can be a line this long and "b" can be a line that's that long. and yet i find this "a" point in this man's life that seemed to maybe balance with his longer lifespan. and i kept looking for that subtext or that text, what they could be. and as frank said, the beautiful thing that kept coming back was this man who was the general and an important man in the history of war, and he's the president, yet throughout his life you can see the little boy in him. and that's so touching.

it has been said that genius is childhood recovered. and this is then eisenhower. and it comes in various things that he says throughout his life. so, that became this "a" point. >> in his last speech i guess when he went -- >> yeah, it's so touching. tell them. >> but he came back -- and i can't quote it. >> to abilene. >> and said, kind of, it's amazing that a barefoot boy could have his life -- have this incredible life. but he wasn't beating his chest and saying -- >> no.

>> -- hey, look at me. he was, like, going back to his childhood and saying, man, what an incredible experience i've had. and -- but all through it, all through it, i came back here because this is where i'm from. a barefoot boy. >> do you have the quote? >> yeah. the only quote i have is from the address where he says i come from -- >> colonel can quote it. >> you are the director, carl. >> so how did that translate -- >> you have the lincoln memorial is so strong and it's one image. it's just etched in our brains. we have the washington memorial and it's this one monument, this one visual element and it's so powerful. so, i don't know. one of the great things about this country, part of the

american myth is you say it's as simple as apple pie. jackson polak, you know, painted with house paint. abraham lincoln was born in a log cabin. so this idea of the barefoot boy from kansas, towards the end of his life has this way of reflecting of himself that he's simply a boy from kansas. somehow it became very compelling. >> and it worked with the site, because when we started out, we had much more complicated images. we wanted to build a tapestry. we did a lot of research and the jacquard and the tapestries, and it was logical that it could be built with metal fibers, so --

if it couldn't be done, we didn't have a plan "b," so we had to really work it. and then when we realized we were 70 feet from the education building and they didn't like the idea of looking into the back of a tapestry, that we had to make the tapestry transparent, which is very hard to do. with a jacquard loom. we managed to do it, but it lost its artistry. it became less -- it became more of a scene, and yet the fine arts commission, one of the commissioners mentioned, he thought that we ought to stay away from making a billboard,

which we all agreed. we wanted to have an artist do it, but if you ask an artist to do a tapestry like that, like chuck close, he would select the imagery so we were stuck. we couldn't find an artist that would do it. and lo and behold, there's a polish fellow, an artist from poland, this is kind of an all-purpose handyman and he's worked in my office, and he does construction work. but whenever i've ever had a problem of how to put something strange together, he always comes to the fore. and he kept saying to me, let me try it, let me try it, let me try it. and i said okay, so then he made this. and it's gotten much better.

this was the first try, and he studied albrecht dure's drawings and developed a language of strokes from the dure, and he applied it to the photograph we had of abilene. and it came out -- >> it's a landscape of trees. >> so why don't we look at -- >> want to look at it? >> yeah. so that people can see this extraordinary tapestry. >> this was the -- >> they're seeing it here. >> i'm looking at it right there. okay. so this was the competition, and the competition -- excuse me, i'm going to put somebody's eye out. i better go this way. [ laughter ] >> i'm sorry.

>> so this is the education building. there's the tapestry at one point. and then we were thinking of independence avenue, driving by. this is kind of like a theater, and maybe eventually you would find places to sit on the back end of the aerospace museum, which is not used at all. it's a beautiful terrace that overlooks this thing. and we needed to hold up the tapestry, and the engineers told me i needed a ten-foot round column to do it, and so i decided at that point to make them in stone. when we did that, it sort of clicked into washington.

i don't see it as a post-modern thing as much as a -- i mean, those columns are -- i think they're bigger than the ones in the pension building, in the -- whatever you call that building now. in this tapestry, we had v.e. day. so we covered that. we had eisenhower in the cabinet. we had eisenhower fixing a fence post, and we had talked about making reliefs -- stone reliefs. i was hoping they would get as good as the greek sculptures. so that's the dream. and them we had this grove with the tree for a quiet place for eisenhower. as we proceeded, we pulled in the tapestry quite a bit on each corner so that -- and you could see the education building from independence avenue so it wasn't blocked out. and instead of these being parallel to independence, they kind of created the territory.

and they sort of create the space because these buildings are very different designs. i mean, i don't know. some people don't like them. but i think we're trying to create a terrain, and when bob came in with the abilene picture and said, we realize this is incredible fortuitous image to pick for this from a functional the most open space in the sky, so we could make it transparent, so the guys could look out and

that it wasn't bombastic. it wasn't overpowering. it wasn't beating your chest eisenhower. it was just bringing the midwest scene. abilene is 400 miles from the geographic center of the united states. i don't think there's a midwest representation of the midwest. there's a lot of people out there. so we pull these in, made it more modest, kept the cartway, and these trees, i think you can see it in the -- the cartway for maryland avenue that had to be protected for the view to the capitol. it's just a clearing in the trees, and then in the summer you have trees with leaves. unfortunately, we can't put

leaves on the tapestry for summer. so it becomes a big park, a garden where people can come and relax. they're not being pummelled with information. it's very subtle. and the tapestry turned out to be a lot more transparent than we thought. there's the cartway. there's one like it at princeton. i think it is a called einstein walk. it's from the president's house advanced studies. that's kind of the image. that shows his house. that shows the grain elevator here.

i thought that was the speech. the final image bob and i will go to abilene and take the picture. this is not -- it will be close to this, but it will probably -- and so this -- this was taking the dure picture and breaking it down that led to this. these are all handmade, and it's one guy. so it's going to take him two years, and he's a brilliant artist. we pushed him hard at this point to be -- make it look like a tree. i think we pushed him too hard. we want it to be a little more artful. so you can see the strokes in the middle.

and then look how transparent it is. so there it is up against the education building. so it's going to be very subtle when it's all done. it's going to be very quiet. it's going to say abilene, but it's not going to hit you over the head with it. and then finally the memorial itself can be very modest, like him. >> maybe you want to tell them about that figure, too. >> yeah, why don't you talk about that. [ laughter ] >> so you have -- it's a little bit like a -- i work in the theater, and it's a little like a theatrical scrim which are used a number of times in various productions. so this gauze or this tapestry, transparent tapestry, will have

placed in front of it a figure of eisenhower as this barefoot boy, as a youth. so it's -- i think to me it's probably not something that is the big headline that we know of eisenhower. but, again, to me it was the one point that it kept coming back to that seemed to be really important. i made a work earlier in my career called the life and times of sigmund freud. and in reading about freud, i read something that when he was 68, when his grandson died, he

said that something within him passed away forever. and he said years -- much later in london to anna freud, he said i never overcome the death of this 4-year-old boy. and it was in that year that freud developed cancer. it was this little thing that kept coming back in my mind with freud, that it's not so much ut really seemed to be that point where his balance was in life and times. and so this man who was a giant in many ways was a simple boy. so i think it's a poetic way of looking at eisenhower. >> it's a great image of hope for kids coming there. >> yes.

>> i think that it's the american dream, barefoot boy from kansas is a world leader. >> and it will be life-sized, we think. he will be sitting on a wall. we're trying to find images that we found one of him like this. that we kind of like and how to make it. we're figuring out how to make it. so we think we've got the essence of it. and it's very -- we think it's very powerful. and now we've got to figure out how to talk about him -- >> as a president. >> -- and a soldier, and we're trying not to make it an episodic thing like the roosevelt memorial where you go to one period and then -- we're trying -- >> as frank keeps saying, not to have three memorials, but just

this one thing and then we have the reference to him as the -- >> so now that we have the other pieces. and we have vetted the tapestry and the education people seem to be liking us again, they were really -- i mean, i don't blame them. they were kind of threatened. >> so is this your -- is this your first experience working with the federal government? >> yeah. >> so what's that been like? >> i loved the first meeting when the lady brought in a little time clock. and it went off in an hour, and she just got up and left. and we had flown a whole bunch of people in. you know, we've had some help.

dan file has helped us. where are you, dan? >> right here. >> and rocco himself, he was eisenhower's chief of staff when eisenhower was president. at least he has a sense of washington and what's going on. i think mostly we've had good vibes from people, from the senators that we've met with. but the idea seems to resonate. i mean, we're not trying to jam something down people's throats. we're trying to make something that is lasting, that's in essence that represents this