Art: The Empty Room

In the present age, monument building seems to have fallen on sterile times. A case in point is the latest John F. Kennedy memorial, this one to be raised by a Dallas citizens’ committee three blocks from where the President was gunned down. To design it, Dallas called in Manhattan Architect Philip Johnson, 59, codesigner, with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, of Park Avenue’s Seagram Building.

“Simple, modest and dignified—those were the words I had to go on,” Johnson said. His scheme, after six months of study, was indeed simplicity itself. On a one-acre lot still to be cleared, he proposed erecting an open box with narrow openings at either end, “like a pair of magnets about to clamp together but held apart by some powerful force.” Material for the 50-ft.-sq., 30-ft.-high sanctuary will be unadorned concrete—”the material of our age.”

Johnson was full of explanations to the effect that the enclosing structure symbolized the “magnetism” of Kennedy. The boxlike effect means, says the architect, that: “You can’t see Dallas. You can’t see anything but the sky. You are forced into an attitude of reverie.” But most people, seeing the model, just thought it was terribly square.