President Biden’s decision to appoint four new members to the U.S Commission of Fine Arts has focussed public attention on this body. The New York Times rather snarkily described the Commission as a “low-key, earnest design advisory group”; just tell that to the architectural firms that have had to undergo detailed and sometimes severe reviews. Not all the reporting has been accurate; the Commission does not report to Congress, nor is the chair appointed, he or she is elected by the commissioners.
The Commission of Fine Arts was created in 1909 personally by President Theodore Roosevelt to act as an aesthetic watchdog over the urban makeover of Washington, D.C. that produced the National Mall, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Jefferson Memorial, as well as an extensive urban park system. Congress formalized Roosevelt’s decision a year later. The Commission reviews the designs of new federal buildings, monuments, and memorials in the District, as well as all new buildings—private as well as public—in the monumental core of the city. Over the years the Commission’s responsibilities have grown to include reviewing overseas military cemeteries, all coins and medals issued by the U.S. Mint, and heraldic designs of the Army. When Charles Freer founded the Freer Gallery he stipulated that all acquisitions (and deaccessions) be approved by the Commission, and when I was a member, one of our more pleasurable duties was to visit the Gallery and inspect their latest acquisitions.
There are seven members of the Commission, appointed by the President for four-year terms. The first commissioners included Daniel Burnham, Thomas Hastings (architect of the New York Public Library), Cass Gilbert (architect of the Supreme Court), the sculptor Daniel Chester French, and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. Such prominent architects as Charles A. Platt, John Russell Pope, Henry Bacon, and Paul Cret later served; so did the artists Lee Lawrie and Paul Manship. The postwar period saw such leading designers as Pietro Belluschi, Wallace K. Harrison, Hideo Sasaki, Gordon Bunshaft, and Kevin Roche. It also included leading figures in the design field such as Aline Saarinen and Adele Chatfield-Taylor. There have been periods when appointments to the Commission have been political, but generally it is composed of architects, landscape architects, and artists. J. Carter Brown, the director of the National Gallery, was chair for three decades, and was followed by his successor at the Gallery, Rusty Powell. Commissioners serve at the pleasure of the president, and President Biden was entirely within his rights to make replacement appointments, although this is the first time a president has done so. It is a shame that the National Gallery is no longer represented, and I hope a landscape architect will join the Commission in the not too distant future.
Photo: John Russell Pope’s proposal for the Lincoln Memorial, 1911-12