Frank Gehry’s Washington legacy: The Eisenhower Memorial - Roll Call

The eye-popping and reality-bending buildings that made Frank Gehry the most famous architect of his time, such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, did not make him an obvious fit to design the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, D.C., which honors the 34th president and supreme allied forces commander during World War II.

People look at the newly opened Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington on Sept. 18, 2020. (Caroline Brehman/CQ Roll Call)

Still, for Gehry, who died Friday at the age of 96, the Eisenhower Memorial is his most enduring legacy in the nation’s capital, a place frequently at the center of debates over architecture, design and preservation, from the current ruckus over President Donald Trump’s destruction of the East Wing of the White House and his proposed White House ballroom to replace it to whether the Housing and Urban Development Department’s Weaver Building is “the ugliest building in D.C.”