The National Mall -- Rethinking Washington's Monumental Core, Edited by Nathan Glazer and Cynthia R. Field, Johns Hopkins UPress '08, 220 pages, ISBN #0801888050. Index, bibliography, source notes, b&w glossy images sprinkled through text.
"Make no little plans," said Chicago arthitect Daniel Hudson Burnham a century ago. "They lack the magic to stir men's blood." As one of the designers of the U.S. Senate Park Commission Plan for the use of the National Mall, Burnham's vision and optimism was emblematic of the spirit those designers brought to the task, men like Stanford White's architect partner Charles Follen McKim, and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens.
This oversized volume with scores of black and white photos centers on a series of ten essays by a variety of authorities. Included among them are pieces by Witold Rybczynski on architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.'s "Idea for the Mall," Nathan Glazer on "Monuments, Modernism and the Mall," and Judy Scott Feldman on "The Problematics of Building on the Mall Today."
The scope of this volume is such as to encompass every major development during more than a century, from planning for the re-use of an open field to today's political maneuvering, in which special interest groups vie for the right to erect their favored memorial on the National Mall.
