The Rescue and Renaissance of Lafayette Square by White House Historical Association

White House

HISTORY The Kennedy WhiTe house

Part One

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The Rescue and Renaissance of Lafayette Square JOHN

C A R L

y involvement in Lafayette Square* during the Kennedy administration came about in March 1962 by pure chance and coincidence. I was in Washington for the first time since the late 1950s. My architectural projects in Asia, Hawaii, and California, coupled with my 1960 divorce from Grace Cushing, my wife and mother of my four children, had kept me more than busy in the Far West. I was in Washington to serve on two design juries, the Reynolds Aluminum Award for architecture on Monday and Tuesday, March 12 and 13, and following that, a twoday jury for the Justice Department to determine the design of a federal penitentiary in Georgia. On March 14, my old friend and fraternity brother, Paul Fay Jr., who was undersecretary of the navy, asked me if I wouldn’t like to go over to the White House and say hello to the president. I was once a friend of Jack Kennedy and had seen him on two or three occasions since our first meeting during the western part of his campaign. I was not nearly as close a friend to him as Paul Fay was. The “Red Head,” as Fay was known, told me that he had been asked by the president to head up a White House reception for World War II PT-boat heroes. He and Jack were both PTboat captains in the war. Fay told me he was organizing the event, and although I wasn’t a PT-boat hero, he could work me in. But he warned me that if pictures were taken, I should fade back toward the wall so I would not be confused with a hero. The Red Head also said he was bringing John Carl Warnecke, FAIA, and Jacqueline Kennedy review the model for the project on Lafayette Square, October 17, 1962. national archives

WA R N e C K e

his wife Anita, and another friend of the president, Jane Wheeler, to accompany us. I showed up at the White House at the appointed hour looking forward to a great evening. The president was in the Oval Office meeting first with the heroes. I was shuffled off to the dining room to wait with all the women guests. So there I am with the wives and friends of the PT-boat heroes, and the president is down there in the Oval Office reminiscing about the war years. Finally Jack leads the pack into the dining room. He looks around the room and sees women everywhere, then he looked straight at me. “Rose Bowl,” he said, “What in the hell are you doing here?” Jack remembered the name Fay had stuck me with after Stanford University’s 1940 undefeated Rose Bowl football season. JFK had picked up on it, and now, 20 years later, he was still calling me Rose Bowl.1 In response to his question what was I doing there, I said, “I’m on a jury, an architectural jury for your brother for the Department of Justice.” I wasn’t really working for Bobby Kennedy at all but for the department itself. I noticed, however, that Kennedy did an uptake on that remark. I began to see that he knew me only as a former football player and friend of Paul Fay, not as an architect. The next night, Thursday, March 15, with Jacqueline Kennedy away in India, Jack asked the Red Head and Anita to a small dinner in the family living quarters upstairs at the White House. By that time he had asked Fay what Rose Bowl meant when he said he was on an architectural jury for Bobby. Fay told him, “Well, didn’t you know, Warnecke has become very well known as an architect in America?” Actually, he did not.

I should explain my use of Lafayette Square. The official name for the area in front of the White House is in fact Lafayette Park. However, as my essay will show, my approach to it included not only the landscaped green area in the middle but the four faces of architecture all around. With its architecture considered, it is a square in every sense, an urban architectural square. It is the square we preserved and expanded upon, architecture and landscape combined.

After four days of architectural jury duty, I went out that last evening in town with Jane Wheeler. We stayed up quite late, and when I came back to the hotel, I asked the operator to turn my phone off—no calls whatsoever—I wanted to sleep. When I woke up late the next morning, I phoned and asked the operator if I had any messages. She said there was one: the president of the United States had phoned, and would I phone him back? And so, with my mouth still dry from the night before, I returned the call. evelyn Lincoln, secretary to the president, answered the phone. She said yes, the president wants to talk to you. The next thing I know I am talking to the president. He was very polite; he wanted to know when I was returning to San Francisco. I said I was leaving Washington that day. He said he didn’t want to intrude on my plans, but he had an architectural problem involving design proposals for Lafayette Park, which, I seem to recall, we always called in those days “Lafayette Square.” Would it be convenient for me to stay in town a few days and look into this situation for him? He wanted my opinion on the architecture of this project. I naturally said yes. What else can you say to a friend and particularly to the president? He asked me if I would get back to him on what I thought and any advice I could give him. I was to find Bill Walton. “I will have Walton contact you,” he said. “Walton will fill you in and show you what the problem is.” So I met with Bill Walton, who informed me that he was a personal friend of the president who, among other things, helped the president and first lady on matters related to art and architecture. After my lunch, Walton met me for a walk around the park. “Don’t loiter,” he said, “Walk fast. If the press sees me with you—well this Lafayette Park matter is somewhat of a public issue. So I don’t want to look like—what I’m doing here with you. They will want a story. Let’s look. I will show you the square.” As we walked around the square, Walton told me the story of how President and Mrs. Kennedy were uncomfortable with the design for new buildings that were about to replace the old run-down townhouses, once elegant residences, that stood along the outer parameter of the space. The president had been trying to get to the bottom of the problem by coming up with what he and the first lady considered an appropriate historic style of architecture for the new two large buildings that were to be built directly on the square. After walking the park and square, we went over to the

WHITe HOUSe HISTORY (Number 13)

General Services Administration (GSA) to see what we could see. At that time, Len Hunter was head of the architectural design division. I knew Hunter well because I had worked with him in 1956 when I was a member of a team of architects in a joint venture designing a new federal office and court building in San Francisco. Hunter showed me the designs for the new buildings on the park that the architects were in the process of developing in working drawings. They were drawings for buildings of monumental scale prepared by the Boston firms of Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson, and Abbott, and Perry, Shaw, Hepburn, and Dean. Both were distinguished architectural practices, the first the heirs of Henry Hobson Richardson and the second the restorers for John D. Rockefeller Jr. of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. The architects were creating building designs in the cold Modern style, which was then well established and dominant on the architectural scene. Len Hunter told me that these plans and elevations were fait accompli, for they had been approved and had gone through the Commission of Fine Arts approval process. He informed me that before long GSA would be demolishing the old historic houses and other buildings on the square. I had no prior knowledge of this project, nor that the president was so concerned with architecture. But I did understand his hesitation about this. Unknown to the president, it was the same sort of design challenge I had undertaken successfully in several other places of historical significance, such as the heart of the campus of the University of California at Berkeley, where my father and Arthur Brown Jr. had delivered Beaux Arts renditions of neoclassical architecture, and in the center of Stanford University, with its distinctive Romanesque buildings. Nor was it so different from the design problem I faced for a new state capitol for Hawaii, located in the heart of old Honolulu, in the palm-forested grounds of sacred Iolani Palace. The same circumstances shaped my master plan for the state capitol of California at Sacramento. By this time in my career, it had become second nature to me to sense those things that bothered my clients, and in the case of President Kennedy, it was obvious he did not want any new buildings in Lafayette Park to preempt the White House, which stood grandly on its lawns and in its groves at the south end. The solution was clear enough: to preserve the historic character of the square. Thus if the president and first lady wanted to save the old historic

don’t want to go there—not to the Oval Office (as it was only then beginning to be called). I don’t want to get stuck in front of a large desk. I want to meet in a room like— well, I understand the Cabinet Room has a big table in it. I want to spread these books out on a table.” So she led me into the Cabinet Room. I opened the books—to show pictures—all along the cabinet table opposite to where the president would sit. Before him would be nothing but pictures of famous squares. A few minutes after 11:00 a.m., in came the president with Bill Walton, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and several other close personal advisers. Mrs. Kennedy, who I would later learn was as concerned about the square as JFK, was still away on her trip to India. I asked the president to walk

that he would grasp what I meant. First thing next morning I was at the American Institute of Architects library at Octagon House, pulling down books with illustrations of squares all over the world, english squares, American squares, Italian squares, monumental squares, and residential squares. The White House faced north on a historical residential square, surrounding Lafayette Park. Although I knew what I wanted to say, I needed something visual, so I took the books with me. JFK had asked me for my advice and I was now prepared to give it. I went to Mrs. Lincoln’s cubicle office on Monday with my armload of books. She said, “You’re all set to go to the president’s office at 11 o’clock.” I responded, “I

President John F. Kennedy with Bill Walton, his friend and adviser on matters of art, chooses a location for a painting to be hung in the Oval Office, 1961.

cornell caPa / MagnuM Photos

houses and the White House, then it would be necessary to preserve the 19th-century character of the whole square. Key to this was preserving the old townhouses, which were not in the program and scope of the project and were not included in the congressional budget. They now stood in the shadows of the wrecking ball. By the end of my meeting with GSA, I knew exactly what I wanted to say to John F. Kennedy. After leaving GSA, I called Mrs. Lincoln, telling her I was ready to talk to the president on my observations about Lafayette Park. She said, “Will 11 o’clock Monday be all right?” I said fine. On Sunday I decided just how I might best present my concept to the president. He was not an architect; I had to get my message across in such a way

with me around the cabinet table and see the pictures of famous squares in england, France, and Italy. As we walked, I told him about the contrasting types of squares— monumental and residential. The monumental square is composed of large-scale structures presenting a continuous facade expressing might and grandeur of government or church. We saw San Marco in Venice, St. Peter’s in Rome,

The Rescue and Renaissance of Lafayette Square

and Place de la Concorde and Place Vendôme in Paris. Next I showed him plans from the City Beautiful scheme for Washington devised by the McMillan Commission in 1901. The great Beaux Arts architect Cass Gilbert had proposed a new design for Lafayette Park—a monumental square—with large new neoclassical buildings housing important governmental departments of the executive branch. This idea, had it been carried out, would have been somewhat like the Federal Triangle, entirely faced in Renaissance-type neoclassicism. Small portions of Gilbert’s plan were completed and can be seen today—the Treasury Annex on the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Madison Place, and the Chamber of Commerce Building on H Street. JFK appeared very aware of these. We then turned to books and photographs of residential squares. These were composed of small-scale residential structures with continuous or unbroken facades facing a central open area. Squares of this type were Grosvenor Square, Belgrave Square, and Bedford Square in London and St. Ignacio Square in Rome. I described the few historic residential squares in America: Beacon Hill in Boston, Washington Square in New York, Jackson Square in New Orleans, and the old Plaza of Santa Fe. Fortunately I had visited the better examples just a few years earlier, when in the summer of 1959 my wife Grace Cushing, my older son John, and I had taken a two-month tour of europe, starting in Greece and ending in england. I would later learn that some of the places were very familiar to the president. While attending Harvard, Jack

had made a similar summer tour with his classmate LeMoyne Billings, and he remembered the historic places most of all. Having resided in London while his father was American ambassador to Great Britain gave him exposure to London’s squares. He fully understood what I was saying and its meaning for Lafayette Square. I was looking at Lafayette Square as a whole, not only GSA’s program for two very large buildings or the restrictions that governed the designs of the Boston architects. I was starting over, and I was very interested in the old townhouses and buildings that still faced the park. They were scheduled for demolition, stood empty and forlorn. Saving these buildings, which were on the east and west sides of the park, was to me the obvious and only way the 19th-century history of the park could be preserved. So I proposed that they be retained and restored. To do the design of the square right, one had to go all the way: make it either residential or monumental, one way or the other. The difference lay in scale; the basic problem that the Boston architects were presenting to the president was a compromise on the west or Jackson Place side of the square, with a long cold modern building in the center stretching between two historic residences (one, Decatur House, still a private home) at each end. On Madison Place, on the east, none of the older historic buildings, such as the Tayloe House and the Cutts or Dolley Madison House, were to be saved. They were to be replaced by a Modern-style courts building. I told the president that if he wanted to save the 19th-

WHITe HOUSe HISTORY (Number 13)

library of congress

Place de la Concorde in Paris, c. 1900.

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A bird’s-eye view of the Vatican and St. Peter’s Church in Rome, c. 1883.

the bostonian society

Louisburg Square in the Beacon Hill section of Boston, c. 1870–1900.

library of congress

Washington Square, New York City, c. 1900–1920.

In the McMillan plan of 1902 Washington was projected as the “City Beautiful.” Note how great government buildings are placed symmetrically to face the square monumentally.

The Rescue and Renaissance of Lafayette Square

century character of the square, he should build new office structures behind the older historic buildings. In fact, the Boston architects had already shown this possibility to me in the drawings I had seen at GSA. Their plans and elevations showed that at least two-thirds of the bulk of the new executive office building on the west side of the square would be oriented to 17th Street, not Jackson Place. Indeed, with a little shifting around, they could put the entire new building on 17th Street. If the president wanted to save the 19th-century character of the square, he should restore and enhance it in appearance as the sort of residential area Pierre Charles L’enfant had originally planned. This would mean discarding the 1902 McMillan plan. I amplified my concept by suggesting a few new town houses, which might replicate the existing houses, as fillin for the tall, narrow office buildings from the 1920s, when the government began to replace houses there with offices.2 With the residential concept, I assured the president, he could have both historic buildings preserved and restored and all the new space he needed. This was a concept of design I had been pioneering in the West for 15 years. By designing the office buildings in a Modern style that also expressed the contrast and continuity of the historic old buildings, the new buildings would not only pay tribute to the distinguished history of the square; they would also enhance the overall impact of the park and the architectural setting of the White House. In its context, the White House is a relatively small building, flanked by a lot of open landscape. No longer rivaled by tall city structures, the White House would become again the center of

WHITe HOUSe HISTORY (Number 13)

The west “wall” of Lafayette Square (above) from within the park. Rising behind the historic row is Warnecke’s New Executive Office Building (NEOB).

John carl Warnecke associates

Warnecke’s project for the facades of the townhouses facing Jackson Place on Lafayette Square (below). The historic Stephen Decatur House is on the far right, and the next two buildings house the White House Historical Association. Buildings far left are part of the Blair House complex.

interest of Lafayette Square. This was particularly important on Jackson Place and Madison Place, where the houses were concentrated. Any large structures there would diminish the importance of the White House in the overall composition. The president seemed pleased and even intrigued by my advice. In his commentary, which was off-the-cuff, he said that he had promised Sam Rayburn, Speaker of the House, that he would locate the courts building on the park. Utilizing his own architectural instincts, JFK continued, “There doesn’t seem to be as much space or land on this Madison Place site on the east side of the square as there is on the west side. Could some of it be low and some tall, as the Boston architects were proposing for the executive office building on the west?” I told him that the space was tight, but I believed that this could be accomplished with access to the courts building from the park as he had promised Sam Rayburn. At this time I had not been told the serious obstacles Kennedy had confronted in his year long attempt to find a solution to the design of Lafayette Square. Here was a new and comprehensive concept that answered most of his reservations. After discussing the approach with his advisers, Kennedy next asked me if I thought that the proposed new office and courts as I described them could be constructed within the $28 million GSA budget originally appropriated by Congress. This, he knew, was essential if the work was to go forward. I thought for a minute. Instead of the proposed new white marble courts buildings, if the new buildings were built of brick, I felt this would be not only appropriate but in all probability could be

The Rescue and Renaissance of Lafayette Square

coMMission of fine arts

Lafayette Square under construction (above), prior to the completion of the in-fill buildings, which would complement the historic row.

WHITe HOUSe HISTORY (Number 13)

coMMission of fine arts coMMission of fine arts

The two-page GSA News Release, dated October 17, 1962, announcing the plan for redeveloping Lafayette Square (right top and bottom).

The Rescue and Renaissance of Lafayette Square

achieved within this budget. After a pause, I told the president yes, that I believed the new buildings could be built within the budget. “Let’s do it,” Jack said with a wave of his hand to all those surrounding him at the cabinet table. It was with that simple gesture that the architecture and historic character of Lafayette Square were saved. I was at my hotel packing later that day, hurrying to catch a plane back to San Francisco, when I got a phone call. “What in the world went on over there in the White House today?” It was Len Hunter from the GSA. I told him that President Kennedy had asked me for an opinion on the design of the park. So I told him what I thought. If he liked my recommendation, which it appeared he did, I assumed he would pass this on to GSA and his architects. “It was much more than an opinion the president wanted,” Hunter replied. “He now wants you to design the project.” When Jacqueline Kennedy returned from India and heard about the meeting in the Cabinet Room, she was thrilled, and especially so to learn that her husband had agreed to drop the constrictions of the McMillan plan and adopt a concept for a residential square based upon historic preservation. On April 16, 1962, she wrote to David e. Finley, chair of the Commission of Fine Arts and also chair of the National Trust for Historic Preservation: “Hold your breath because this is what is going to happen. . . . all our wildest dreams come true.”3 Mrs. Kennedy continued in her letter to describe how I planned to save all the older buildings on both the west and east sides of the park and design all the new buildings in context with the old. Later in the fall of 1962 I would finally meet Jackie, and after seeing all the preliminary design studies of the project, she was delighted. Soon after obtaining the approval of the Commission of Fine Arts, she and President Kennedy held a small dinner in the White House in my honor. I knew very well that my Lafayette Square concept was opposite to that of the architectural profession, which supported the doctrine of Modern design in architecture that then prevailed both in the United States and throughout the world. To understand the power of the Modern viewpoint in architecture at that time, one must see and read about the thinking of nearly all architects in the early 1960s. This era fell within the 50-year period in which the International style dominated modern architecture and was the only prevailing mode. Architectural critic Peter Blake looks back at this period in his book No Place Like Utopia (1993). He states that

WHITe HOUSe HISTORY (Number 13)

there was a solid consensus about the responsibility of architects and planners following World War II: Clearly we had to rebuild our cities and our countrysides. . . . and the only way to meet it (or so it seemed) was to mass produce buildings, which meant, of course, developing certain standardized norms that would inevitably produce repetitive patterns of the sort that had characterized other forms of mass production—for example, automobiles, trailers, even bricks and concrete blocks. The new architecture would have to be modular and machinelike in appearance. . . . Modern architecture spoke the language of a free social-democratic society deeply concerned with the real problems of the postwar years. Neoclassical architecture, on the other hand, spoke the language of elitism and totalitarianism. . . . The Modern Movement, in our view, was a politically radical commitment to enhancing the human condition—a way of dealing with predictably desperate problems of excessive urbanization and universal overpopulation.

In short, Blake concludes, “We thought we could help create a more beautiful man-made world.”4 This entrenched idea was what the president and first lady had been facing in their concerns for the scenes of American history. They were aware of the Modern style, of course, but what they did not know was how deeply the doctrine was embedded and rooted in the architectural world of the early 1960s. It would take another decade for those concepts to weaken and start to crumble before serious questioning as to their validity. Yet another decade would pass before Postmodern would emerge and take Modern’s place as the new style of the 1980s. My own philosophy and approach to architecture developed early in my career and was unique for the 1960s. I grew up in the West, where, no question, the pioneer spirit still existed. To an extent it still does, and I admire it. Although I obtained an architectural degree from Harvard University under Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus school of architecture in Germany and of Modern architecture itself, I had another influence perhaps even stronger. My architect father attended the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, and under his influence I had from boyhood a deep feeling for the unique character and context of each place in which I designed a building. I worked in my father’s office, under him and his partner Arthur Brown Jr., also a distinguished classical architect. It was clear that the odds were against my being understood in the Lafayette Square project for the president. To help with the task, fortunately, I had designed several outstanding Modern buildings, while at the same

John carl Warnecke and associates

Warnecke reviewing plans with President Kennedy.

time I had pioneered designing other Modern buildings meant to fit into existing important historic structures or natural sites. Wide recognition came to me for these diversified designs, and although in creating them I was going against the revered doctrine of pure Modern style, my designs captured both the basics of Modern and the traditions of a specific place. In historic places my designs were not eclectic copies of a previous style. I would have to live with and face the inevitable criticism of moving in this way with Lafayette Park. Neither the press nor the profession showed much mercy. What none of them realized, blinded by Modern doctrine, was how far ahead of the times I really was. Mine was an approach to the square that would emerge with strength based upon concepts I had developed myself in the Far West in the late 1940s, nearly 20 years before. But as Peter Blake says, the architects of the postwar decades worked with the conviction that whatever they

were doing, Modern design was going to change the world for the best. The bulldozer was their ally. They believed that the only solution to urban decay was to raze large portions of our inner cities as Le Corbusier had proposed when in the 1920s he drew diagrams for wiping clean of buildings the entire west bank of Paris, to be replaced with his own designs for a Modern garden city. In 1961 Jane Jacobs, an editor of Architectural Forum, realized how dangerous the doctrine of Modernism in architecture would be to the planning and economic development of cities as a whole. The only difference between Jacobs as a writer and me, with my experience as an architect designing nearly all known 20th-century building types over the past nearly 20 years, was that I had actually seen how damaging Modern design was to many of the natural and historical environments in which these buildings were placed. I had established myself as one of the top Modern architects in the United States; I knew precisely where Modern design and style worked and where this was not the case. I learned from actual experience the strengths and weaknesses of Modern design. In historic places I was altering the Modern as required. I was not trying to kill Modern and replace it with a new style as Robert Venturi would promote in the later 1960s in a genre that would in the 1970s be called Postmodern. Jacobs and Venturi were writing books and manifestos. I was only showing in my work where Modern was acceptable and where, in my opinion, it was not. Of course, the architectural profession could not have had the slightest idea of the impact that my contextual approach to design eventually would have on architecture. For me it was a direction I had moved toward comfortably in the late 1940s and the 1950s; I utilized it quite naturally in a design solution for Lafayette Park and in the architecture of the New executive Office Building and the Court of Claims, which were built behind the historic houses. As a part of the general review of design and a new and sensitive appreciation for antiques and old landmarks, seeded in the relatively brief Kennedy administration, my â&#x20AC;&#x153;unusualâ&#x20AC;? perspective made its mark indeed. I see its application every day. When I returned to Washington in the fall of 1962, I began to realize that in spite of support from both Kennedys, I had a hurdle or two between myself and the Commission of Fine Arts. Its approval was mandatory. Once the seminal meeting was scheduled, I was told that a crowd was expected to attend the public presentation and

The Rescue and Renaissance of Lafayette Square

press conference, where the design and details would be unveiled. After several decades of work getting congressional approval for the project, this was the first time the commission and public would see actual designs. My written text had been prepared by May 1962, but this is all that GSA had seen. President and Mrs. Kennedy read it, and Len Hunter told me Mrs. Kennedy was most pleased by it. As the actual presentation date approached, I was told belatedly that every aspect of my design would have to pass muster with the commission and that some members were still firmly committed to the schemes of the Boston architects for two large Modern buildings of white marble flanking the park. Keen public interest in the area around the White House also brought out members of the prestigious Committee of 100 and the Planning Commission for the District of Columbia. Several key members of the press were notified. With my presentation materials complete, I started to think about how to stage and phrase my presentation to win the support I must have. Toward the end of the day before the public hearing, on October 15, 1962, I learned that Jackie Kennedy planned to attend, representing the president. Understandably, I was most pleased by this news. I still knew nothing of her previous efforts. From my perspective she was simply playing the role of the Good Wife, who also admired my design. Being a veteran of many presentations before committees and knowing that so often the results are big surprises, I realized that I could not gamble on winning simply because Jackie was present. I needed the support of the president himself. About 6:00 p.m. the day before my presentation, with the help of my assistant, Harold Adams, I started a draft of a letter I hoped the president would agree to sign. This was to be a letter to Bernard Boutin, head of GSA, that could be made public prior to the presentation. After three drafts in which I utilized the principles of my design philosophy as applied to this project, I phoned Mrs. Kennedy’s press secretary Pam Turnere, a friend of mine, in the east Wing and asked her if she would be kind enough to carry the draft to the president and ask if he would sign it. Adams carried the letter with great speed and handed it to Pam. At about 7:00 p.m. the president signed it with only one change: to the end of the fourth paragraph he added, “I hope that the same can be done in other parts of the country.” The letter, sent to Boutin, was then given to the press the next morning, which was

WHITe HOUSe HISTORY (Number 13)

October 16, the day of the Commission of Fine Arts meeting: I would like to tell you how pleased Mrs. Kennedy and I are with the preliminary architectural studies of Lafayette Square. I have been reflecting on the significance of this work, not only in the terms of the importance of it to the environs of the White House and our capital, but to what it means in a broader sense to other cities and communities throughout America. As you know, I am fully cognizant of the progress made by American architects and planners in their contribution to our country in contemporary design. This coupled with equal progress made in our cities by their respective governing bodies in forging ahead with vast programs of urban renewal and redevelopment leads me to comment on the manner in which these plans are actually carried out. There are throughout our land specific areas and specific buildings of historical significance or architectural excellence that are threatened by this onward march of progress. I believe that the importance of Lafayette Square lies in the fact that we were not willing to destroy our cultural and historic heritage but that we were willing to find means of preserving it while still meeting the requirements of growth in government. I hope that the same can be done in other parts of the country. I am particularly pleased that in this case you and the architects were able to express in the new buildings the architecture of our times in a contemporary manner that harmonizes with historic buildings. I congratulate you on this fine start.5

In accepting this letter over his signature, President Kennedy endorsed my plan, as well as my concept and my approach to architecture applied to Lafayette Square. The text of the letter goes beyond the principles and doctrines and strongly objects to the intrusion of Modern style into important historic places. JFK endorses the idea of historic preservation, as well as my concept of land use. In this statement, well before Venturi’s essays on the weakness of Modern architecture,6 an American president stepped forward to state that everything old need not be torn down as Le Corbusier (and nearly all the leaders of Modern architecture) had envisioned. In this letter JFK also endorses the comprehensive approach to design that perceived new buildings as compatible with a variety of old ones, in the case of Lafayette Park spanning most of the 19th century. I wanted Kennedy to support the overall concept of Modern architecture, but I wanted him to espouse the idea that Modern design must be altered to work with important existing environments.

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Kennedy’s instincts and goals coincided with my architectural philosophy, and he did not hesitate. The presentation was a success. Jackie’s appearance was a showstopper. We departed, and the commission deliberated. Behind closed doors, the architect members of the Commission of Fine Arts hotly opposed my design for Lafayette Park. Ralph Walker, a top American architect and former president of the American Institute of Architects, clearly stated the attitude of practically the entire architectural profession: “To keep on using bad architecture and trying to preserve it because there is practically nothing except Decatur House on that side of the square that is worth preserving—the rest is junk architecturally—it is junk!”7 Mrs. Kennedy’s letter to Boutin the previous March 6 decrying the Boston architects’ “cold modern design,”8 which the Commission of Fine Arts had already approved, sparked Walker’s contempt: “I hope Jacqueline Kennedy wakes up to the fact that she lives in the twentieth century.”9 Walker then turned his wrath on the old Corcoran Gallery of Art, now known as the Renwick Gallery: “I think saving that old museum . . . I looked at it again when I went up to the Mayflower a while ago. . . . It is just a deplorable piece of degenerating architecture which will cost more to restore and put back into shape, and what are you going to use it for when you get through with it? . . . We live in an age of bigness. We don’t live in any age of

Bernard Boutin, administrator of the General Services Administration, addresses the group gathered for the presentation of Warnecke’s design for Lafayette Square. Jacqueline Kennedy sits next to Warnecke in the front row.

tiny little things put together. . . . [By Warnecke’s plan] what we have done is frivolously piddled away in the restoration of unimportant buildings. I want to say that as strongly as I can say it.”10 Douglas Orr, who had served as a member of President Harry Truman’s committee for rebuilding the White House, 1948–52, and had helped devise the gutting process that had taken place, added his confirmation of Walker’s remarks. “I agree with Ralph. I think all these little bits of houses sitting along the street is going to make the United States look perfectly ridiculous architecturally speaking in the eyes of the world. I think that to preserve the old Corcoran Art Gallery or the Dolley Madison House is pure folly.”11 The reaction of Walker and Orr was typical of responses from intellectual “somebodies,” who saw in the design proposals for Lafayette Park a golden opportunity to demolish “good for nothing old houses” and make way for a suitable Modern square before the White House. My presentation, together with the support of President and Mrs. Kennedy, however, carried the day, and we gained

The Rescue and Renaissance of Lafayette Square

WHITe HOUSe HISTORY (Number 13)

John carl Warnecke associates

majority approval from the seven-member commission. The architectural relationship of past, present, and future was soon expressed by the president in his dedication address at Dulles Airport, which was designed by my good friend, admirer, and mentor eero Saarinen.12 Saarinen had died unexpectedly a short time before, in 1961. I, for one, wanted to be at this dedication to hear JFK but also to be there in honor of eero and his design for the airport. Dulles Airport was seen as one of the great masterpieces of Modern architecture in the 1960s. Kennedy spotted me in the audience, and my presence seemed immediately to have reminded him of the architectural philosophy we now shared. He said: “This is a great airport and a great time in the life of our country. . . . We believe in the past and in the future, and I think this building symbolizes that great future, as Lafayette Park symbolizes that brilliant past.”13 These words united the past with the present and pointed to a strong and positive direction for the future. These were words that Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Mies Van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Paul Rudolph, I. M. Pei, Philip Johnson, and all the other avant garde architects of Modern design would never have uttered in that period of Modern design. Nor was Jackie Kennedy a stranger to the weaknesses of Modern design. Her letter to Bernard Boutin while Lafayette Park was still being reconsidered said, “All architects are innovators, and they would rather do something new than in the spirit of the old buildings. I think they are wrong in this case as the important thing is to preserve the 19th-century feeling of Lafayette Square.”14 A month before his death, Kennedy spoke at a tribute to Robert Frost at Amherst College, saying “I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our national environment, which will preserve great old American houses and squares and parks of our National past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future.”15 However, tearing down the old to make way for a new and better future was the dominating philosophy of Modern architecture. empowered first by World War II and the aftermath of rebuilding war-torn europe, the Modern philosophy was the moving spirit of the American people in the period of economic growth and prosperity of the 1960s. It would take 30 years after John F. Kennedy’s time before the profession of architecture would begin to

understand this new approach to design and architecture represented in Lafayette Square. The square became the first broadly publicized project in America in which new government buildings were incorporated on the same site with important older historic buildings that were preserved for contemporary reuse. This project was also the first time in the Modern period of design that the public saw new, large, modern buildings designed in context with old, historic buildings. Finally, it was the first time that new buildings were placed secondary to existing historic structures. As a result, all the 19thcentury townhouses facing the park and the White House would be saved, and the White House would remain the most important building on Lafayette Park. President Kennedy would have been particularly pleased with the excellent reviews the project slowly started to receive years after the design and construction were complete. Jackie lived long enough to be gratified by praise for an achievement that casts a long shadow in

American architecture and historic preservation. The urban planning concept that they endorsed 40 years ago goes way beyond today’s innovative styles of design in architecture. It is an approach to urban planning and architecture that we must follow if we hope to control suburban sprawl and save our open spaces and the beautiful natural world we live in and depend upon. By the mid-21st century, the design of Lafayette Square may well emerge as one of President and Mrs. Kennedy’s greatest long-lasting achievements. The idea continues to grow with ever greater power in all design and architecture. Warnecke during his presentation to the press of his design for Lafayette Square.

1. After graduating from Harvard, John F. Kennedy had attended Stanford University in the fall of 1940 as a graduate student looking into a possible career as a writer. He had just published his book While England Slept. A big football fan, he had seen me play in Stanford games that fall, when we won the national championship. 2. During the late 1920s legislation was passed authorizing the replacement of all the houses and other early buildings on the square with modern governmental office buildings. President Franklin D. Roosevelt first defied this legislation during World War II when he established Blair House as the White House guest house. Although Roosevelt was aware of the legislation, and honoring it, the actual activity toward mass change did not begin until late in the eisenhower administration. eisenhower himself stopped demolition of the State, War and Navy Building, now named in his honor. Warnecke would soon play a key role in its preservation. 3. Jacqueline Kennedy to David e. Finley, White House, April 16, 1962, David e. Finley Papers, Gallery Archives, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 4. Peter Blake, No Place Like Utopia (place: publisher, 1993), inclusive page numbers of quotation. 5. President John F. Kennedy to Bernard Boutin, General Services Administration, Washington, D.C., October 15, 1962. 6. Robert Venturi, Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966), 23, 104. 7. Minutes of the Commission of Fine Arts, transcripts of closed session, October 16, 1962, Commission Archives, Washington, D.C. For unearthing this manuscript I am grateful to the Warnecke Institute of Design, Art, and Architecture, where I was provided with copies in 1993. 8. Jacqueline Kennedy to Bernard Boutin, General Services Administration,Washington, D.C. 9. Minutes of the Commission of Fine Arts, transcripts of closed session, October 16, 1962. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Saarinen greatly admired my contextual approach to design and architecture. In 1958 he had seen the publication of my design for the United States embassy in Bangkok and wrote me on September 16, 1957: “This is just a note to tell you that I was looking at your embassy in the last issue of the Forum and I think it is very very beautiful. Congratulations.” 13. President John F. Kennedy, speech at the dedication of Dulles Airport, Washington Post, September 18, 1962, also in the official published papers of Kennedy. 14. Jacqueline Kennedy to Boutin, March 6, 1962. 15. President John F. Kennedy, speech in tribute to Robert Frost, made at the Convocation at Amherst College, October 26, 1963.

The Rescue and Renaissance of Lafayette Square