Scenes from the Mall, Part 2: Bacon bits
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Since nobody on CNN or elsewhere seems to have mentioned this -- and please let me know in the comments if I missed the reference -- the architect of the Lincoln Memorial, a major star of today’s televised events on the Mall, was Henry Bacon. Some details on Bacon:
As a young architect he worked in the office of McKim, Mead & White. One of the founders of that firm, Charles McKim, was a co-author of the 1902 plan for the Mall that determined the future site for the Lincoln Memorial. McKim and his collaborators on the plan -- Daniel Burnham, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. (son of the famed landscape architect) and the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens -- felt strongly that the memorial, when built, ought to stand on one end of an east-west axis with the Capitol.
Bacon died in 1924, at age 57, just two years after the Lincoln Memorial was completed. Easily his best-known piece of architecture, it ranked seventh on the American Institute of Architects’ 2007 list of America’s Favorite Architecture.
The massive seated statue of Lincoln inside the memorial is the work of Daniel Chester French, whom Bacon got to know while designing a summer house and studio for the sculptor in Massachusetts.
--Christopher Hawthorne
Photo via Flickr user Cliff1066.
(With thanks to Thomas Hines.)
