Four Freedoms Park lies at the southernmost tip of Roosevelt Island, atop one of New York’s most spectacular landfills. Though Louis Kahn designed the memorial—to Franklin Delano Roosevelt—in 1972, his plans were shelved after his untimely death two years later, coinciding with the city’s financial crisis. That may have been for the best. When the project was first presented to the public, art critic Thomas B.
Hess ominously intoned that its “brutal, centralized force” evoked “the dark magical omnipresence of the government and the demigods who command it and us.” Time passed, the bureaucratic penumbra receded, and in the 2000s a group of private patrons decided to finish the job.
When Four Freedoms finally opened in 2012, Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman described the park as “monumental triumph for New York” and its “new spiritual heart.” I can’t say I’ve ever seen what Kimmelman saw. While Kahn had a genius for manipulating brick and concrete into austere, yet welcoming spaces, the roofless inner precinct of the memorial (to say nothing of the attenuate…
