If you have ever seen Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, you know that design has a powerful role in honoring veterans who served their country and in healing the emotional wounds of their survivors.
But as the fight over another design planned for the National Mall, the controversial World War II Memorial, makes clear, the battle over the best way to commemorate the nation’s war dead still rages. Some favor massive forms, like the grandiose white pillars that will ring the World War II monument. Others seek more modest statements, like the thin black granite walls of the Vietnam Memorial.
In the end, though, the issue isn’t a choice between big or small, classical or modern. What counts is whether these designs are appropriate for their functions and their settings — and what impact they have on the spirits of the people who visit them.
That is why, on this Veterans’ Day weekend, there is reason to celebrate what a team of Chicago designers have achieved at the Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery, located in Elwood about 50 miles southwest of the Loop and 12 miles south of Joliet. It’s an understated, yet emotionally powerful landscape, one that, we can be thankful, is free of trumped-up symbolism or cutesy gardening.
The $19 million cemetery was designed by two Chicago firms: Harry Weese Associates, which handled the buildings, and Joe Karr & Associates, which was responsible for the landscape. (A third firm, Royston Hanamoto Alley & Abey of Mill Valley, Calif., served as a consultant.) Their client was the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
It seems almost cruel to say so, but the year-old, 982-acre Lincoln cemetery was built because of a simple demographic fact: the impending deaths of a generation of World War II veterans. Ultimately, it may be the site of 400,000 burials, making it one of the largest veterans’ cemeteries in the nation.
To date, more than 1,600 people have been laid to rest there, including veterans of the Korean, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf Wars. There even is one Civil War soldier — Theodore Hyatt, a Medal of Honor winner — whose remains were transferred from cemetery in nearby Lockport.
Constructed on the site of the former Joliet Arsenal, just west of the intersection of Illinois Highway 53 and Hoff Road, the Lincoln cemetery presented daunting challenges to the two Chicago firms that were its principal designers.
The most obvious obstacle was the massive steel structures carrying high-tension electrical wires across the site. The wires made it extremely difficult to create a sense of dignity and repose.
The architects also had to devise a way to convey the feeling that each individual burial matters. Today, there are roughly six to eight burials a day at the Lincoln cemetery. But over time, as more veterans die, that number is expected to rise to as many as 60 burials a day.
Wisely, the designers began not with what was on the cemetery plot but what was around it: to the south and west, thick woods of ash, maple and oak trees; to the east and south, corn and soybean fields.
Rather than imposing an arbitrary geometry on this classically Midwestern site, their design recalls the romantically conceived parks of the great 19th Century landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted. He told U.S. officials to shape the first group of national cemeteries as a “sacred grove” for the war dead.
A gently curving entrance road, lined by sunset red maples, leads southward to an entrance area flanked on both sides by tiered limestone walls. The road keeps curving to a visitors’ center consisting of adjoining, pyramid-topped buildings. Alongside them is a pull-off area where vehicles line up for funeral corteges.
Then comes the most formal area, a ramrod-straight drive that leads due westward to a 60-foot flagpole. A paved area for large-scale ceremonies surrounds it. From there, curving roads head toward burial areas — some for caskets, others for cremated remains. Ultimately, the road heads to three, pyramid-roofed buildings, known as “committal shelters,” where services are performed.
It is, altogether, a spare landscape, yet it never seems spartan or harsh. One reason it works so well has to do with the way the architects have brought out the best of the surrounding landscape — and what they have done what they can to tuck away the features that scar the site.
Along the curving entrance road, for example, the red maples draw the drivers’ eye toward the ground and thus away from the ugly electrical wires. With equal aplomb, Karr placed the tiered limestone walls of the entrance area just beyond the point where the wires slip out of view. That way, the visitor experiences an appropriately unblemished landscape and the walls form what is, in effect, the real entrance to the cemetery. They achieve that identity in a manner that is utterly in keeping with the character of the landscape, forming a gateway without gates.
This sense of harmony with nature continues throughout the cemetery, from the berms that block the view of unsightly roads in and around the site to the way Karr has brought ash trees into the above-ground burial areas.
Dashes of color, like the red of the sugar maples, warm things up in contrast to the bleak winter landscape of the nearby farm fields. Still, the overall palette is appropriately restrained and restful.
In a similarly modest spirit, Weese’s Dave Munson has shaped key buildings so that they have a distinctive identity but still allow nature to predominate.
The visitors’ center buildings are simple, sheltering structures, like little houses on the prairie. Because their architecture is so understated, the visitor cannot help but sense the enormous Midwestern sky.
Yet for all that the cemetery allows the vastness of nature to take center stage, it is hardly featureless or without a sense of order.
The pyramid-shaped roofs of the visitors’ center pavilions seize the eye as one enters the cemetery and foreshadow the presence of the three committal shelters. The paved ceremonial area, with its huge flagpole and massive curving wall of limestone, provides a strong focus for communal events like those held on Memorial Day. As now-open areas of the cemetery fill in, especially those with rows of granite headstones, they will assume a strong identity of their own.
Most important, the cemetery’s sense of order is designed to enhance the experience of visitors. In the long run, it should keep the cemetery from seeming institutional and impersonal.
Bricks forming the paved area around the flagpole are set flush to the ground, enabling those in wheelchairs to move over them easily. In addition, the architects designed above-ground burial areas as a series of outdoor rooms, shaped by limestone walls, lending these areas a feeling of intimacy.
Best are the committal shelters, whose pyramid-topped exteriors are deceptively modest; indeed, they are so unremarkable-looking that they might be park pavilions. Once inside, however, the visitor experiences a soaring space of Doulgas fir beams and trusses, as well as steel rods that hold everything in place. Light enters from a skylight above and curving walls of limestone are placed so they shield those participating in services from the prevailing wind.
True, there are faults. Bigger signs on Illinois Highway 53 are needed to point people toward the cemetery; some elderly visitors have trouble reading the small signs there now. The cemetery’s administrative offices are barracks-like and banal. And the serene simplicity of the landscape could be disturbed if plans proceed to introduce such features as flowerbeds with brightly colored annuals.
Still, the architects and their clients deserve credit for creating a landscape that manages to evoke strong emotions without being mawkish. If all our cemeteries combined the monumental and the modest as well as this one does, we might be able to end the long-running design battles over how to honor the nation’s war dead.
