Normandy American Cemetery Visitor Center

SMITHGROUP combines serenity and savoir faire in its design for the Normandy American Cemetery Visitor Center overlooking Omaha Beach.

By Suzanne Stephens
This is an excerpt of an article from the March 2008 edition of Architectural Record.

At a time when few know how well the design for the memorial to 9/11 in Lower Manhattan will survive various demands from separate interest groups, it might be a good idea for those involved to visit Normandy. Far above Omaha Beach at Colleville-sur-Mer, in northern France, a distinctively handsome two-level visitor center now honors those who died as a result of the allies storming the German-occupied territory on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Dedicated in 2007, the center extends along the eastern edge of the 172.5-acre American Cemetery where 9,387 soldiers are buried. The long, attenuated structure, partially submerged into a verdant landscape, is striking for its use of granite, limestone, and wood, as well as its elegant proportions and craftsmanship. Indeed, the staggered, high-relief, dark-gray granite walls recall Mies van der Rohe’s demolished Monument to Karl Liebnecht and Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin (1926), while its rectilinear plan brings to mind Mies’s house for the German Building Exhibition of 1931 in Berlin. Parts of the massing even evoke Frank Lloyd Wright’s second Herbert Jacobs House in Madison, Wisconsin, completed in 1948.

Responsible for the project was the “culture studio” in the 215-person Washington, D.C., office of the SmithGroup, a 155-year-old firm that originated in Detroit. Although it now has 10 offices and more than 800 people, SmithGroup went after a commission only 30,000 square feet in size. This might seem a tad small-scale for the plus-size firm. But the high-design architects considered for the job—I.M. Pei, Michael Graves, and Hugh Hardy’s firm, H3—indicate the significance of this first of many such visitor centers being planned by the American Battle Monuments Commission (ABMC). SmithGroup’s David Greenbaum, FAIA, notes that his office probably benefited by going into the interviews with a full team in place, including an associate architect from Paris, John Lampros.

The new center occupies a 20-acre site overlooking the beach, in a more prominent location than that of the former visitor center, a small rubble-stone bungalow near the parking area. The architects deliberately gave the new $30 million structure a massing and scale that does not overwhelm the cemetery’s earlier commemorative architecture dating to the mid-1950s. There, a memorial comprising a French limestone semicircular colonnade with flanking loggias, and a chapel in the form of a circular limestone tempietto, were designed by the Philadelphia firm Harbeson Hough Livingston and Larson (H2L2) in a style evocative of the stripped Classicism of the 1940s. These quietly arresting structures evocatively punctuate the gridded field of white marble grave markers, but definitely speak of another time.

With the new visitor center, the design team wanted to be referential, but not imitative: For inspiration, the architects looked at the war structures, bunkers, and surrounding granite walls on the property, as well as the hedgerows crossing the Norman terrain. The result is a steel-framed pavilion with granite walls that sits atop a poured-in-place-concrete base structure submerged in the ground.

Formal name of project: Normandy American Cemetery Visitor Center

Location: Normandy, France

Gross square footage: 30,000 sq.ft.

Total construction cost: $30 million

Owner:
The American Battle Monuments Commission

Architect:
SMITHGROUP Inc
1850 K Street, NW, Suite 250
Washington, DC 20006
T: 202 842 2100
F: 202 974 4500

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