NATIONAL SHRINE
Philip Johnson, 1966
A Memorial to Honour the People Who Immigrated to the USA
Ellis Island, in Upper New York Bay, housed the buildings where people immigrating to the USA between 1892 and 1954 were processed on entering the country. Originally housed in wooden buildings, the immigration station was rebuilt again c. 1900 after a fire. The facilities were expanded to keep pace with the increasing numbers of arrivals, and the island itself was enlarged by reclaiming land from the bay. The big main building, built in the French Renaissance style in 1900, was still functioning when the immigration station closed. By that time, some 16 million men, women and children had passed through Ellis Island on their way to a new life in the USA.
When the immigration station closed in November 1954 the buildings were left empty and gradually deteriorated. Around ten years later, the government decided to do something about the site to preserve its dignity and create a memorial on the island. In May 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the legislation that made Ellis Island a national monument. Shortly afterwards, the American architect Philip Johnson was commissioned to produce a plan for a memorial and museum to honour the millions who had passed through Ellis Island in the sixty-two years that it was in operation.
Philip Johnson was one of the most prominent US architects. As a young man he was among those who introduced European Modernist architecture to North America. He had been one of the organizers of an epoch-making exhibition held at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1932, which presented to the USA the work of such key figures as Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe. After Mies moved to the USA in the late 1930s, Johnson helped him establish himself there, and worked with him on such important projects as the Seagram Building in New York. And, by the 1960s, Johnson had designed various major buildings in his own right, such as his own residence, the transparent Glass House at New Canaan, Connecticut, which was famous all over the world.
Johnson knew that Ellis Island would be a sensitive project – everyone, from politicians to immigrants, popular journalists to specialist critics, would have an opinion about what to do with the site. The job seemed to ask for a major building, but there were decaying historical structures on the island and the Statue of Liberty was not far away. The architect would have to tread carefully in order to respect the opinions of others while producing a design that did not overwhelm the existing buildings or the famous statue.
Johnson’s plan has two main parts. First, he made a radical and to many surprising proposal for the existing buildings on the island. He decided to leave these structures as managed ruins. They were already starting to fall apart, so the architect suggested removing the roofs, glazing and wooden fittings, and stabilizing the walls that were left. This would create, Johnson argued, an atmospheric and dignified space in which visitors could quietly contemplate the countless people who had passed through.
Secondly, he proposed a completely new structure for the site, a large memorial to the 16 million immigrants. His design takes the form of a circular structure, open at the top, with walls sloping inwards – in other words, a truncated cone. The surface of the cone is punctuated with vertical ribs, and the whole structure is 300ft (91m) in diameter and 130ft (40m) high – a tactful 20ft (6m) shorter than the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty, which was clearly visible on Liberty Island, about 1700ft (518m) from the site.
Helical ramps wind around the cone, on both the inside and outside. Also attached to the structure is a succession of plaques, on which are inscribed all the known names of the people who had passed through the immigration station. The plaques are placed so that visitors would be able to read the names from the ramp. It was suggested that this should be done by reproducing the original shipping manifests, so bringing an element of historical immediacy to the otherwise very modern-looking memorial. The structure is thus an impressively large memorial that pays tribute to the immigrants as individuals while attempting to keep a low profile in the context of the site and Liberty herself.
When the plans were unveiled they were endorsed by the Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and by New York Senator Jacob Javits. However, many people did not see the virtues of tact or respect in Johnson’s scheme. Press reports dubbed the memorial ugly; people started to refer to it as Johnson’s Tower of Babel. The Herald Tribune compared the design to ‘a monstrous gas tank’. In an editorial, the New York Times saw Johnson’s monument as a wall, and pointed out that walls normally keep people apart, so were a totally inappropriate symbol for Ellis Island, which was a gateway to America.
The press also took exception to the way the plans turned the existing historic buildings into ruins. The ruination of the buildings was seen as disrespectful and fake. Commentators could find none of the romantic attachment to ruins often felt by European writers – perhaps because the architect had proposed taking an active hand in removing parts of the structures. The World Telegram and Sun described the idea as ‘romanticism run riot’. A few writers took a kinder view – the renowned architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable (writing in the New York Times) was more admiring, for example, and more appreciative of the memorial’s originality. But the general reaction was unfavourable.
It was not simply these responses that scuppered Johnson’s scheme for Ellis Island. In the middle of the Vietnam War, the government found it hard to afford the plans. A sum of $6 million had been earmarked for the scheme, but Johnson’s design looked likely to cost much more than that. In the event, Congress did not even draw on the $6 million, and the plans were dropped on financial grounds. The historic buildings on Ellis Island, meanwhile, were left to decay in their own time, without professional architectural help.
The island had to wait more than fifteen years for a new set of plans. The 1980s saw Ellis Island’s renovation linked with a scheme to restore the Statue of Liberty, but the new proposal for the island involved the building of a commercial hotel and conference centre. Many people – including the influential businessman Lee Iacocca, who was a government adviser and head of fundraising for the Statue of Liberty restoration – thought this idea too commercial and just as disrespectful as the Johnson plan, and it was dropped, in turn. Eventually, the main building on Ellis Island was adapted to house an immigration museum.
Johnson’s scheme is now a footnote in the career of a major architect, and is little known to the general public. But it has importance as a brave attempt to memorialize the people who passed through Ellis Island. It also looked forward to a very different memorial – one also using a list of names on a wall – that America has now embraced. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC contains the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall designed by Maya Lin and completed in 1982. This bears the names of 58,315 dead servicemen and women, and is one of the most successful and worthy of all war memorials. There is some poetic justice in the fact that it remembers those who died in the very war whose funding effectively put a stop to Johnson’s less graceful truncated cone on Ellis Island.
