Fdr Architect Wants Changes To Fit Spirit Of Design Groups, Clinton Want Wheelchair Depicted

The designer of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial said Thursday he will include a depiction of FDR in a wheelchair as long as it fits with the spirit of the design.

“I’m not obsessed on this issue,” said Lawrence Halprin, the San Francisco landscape architect who has been working on and off on the memorial for 20 years.

Others, however, were. Several advocacy groups of disabled people had planned a protest at the 7.5 acre memorial next week when President Clinton dedicates it. Discussions at the White House resulted in an announcement Wednesday that the president would send legislation to Congress to modify the design.

“This is a democracy,” said Halprin in a telephone interview. “If it is decided for some reason that we didn’t adequately cover what needed to be covered and, if by any chance, the Congress asks us to examine a possibility of doing it, that’s OK.”

Any change, however, “should come within the context of the memorial,” Halprin said. “I would work on it as an extension of the design and make it in the same spirit as the rest of the memorial.”

The visitor to the nearly completed site walks through four outdoor rooms, each representing one of Roosevelt’s terms. Chief among the design elements is a 12-foot-high granite wall - Halprin called it the spine - and waterfalls.

“It’s strange, we didn’t anticipate anything (like this) happening,” Halprin said. “We took l what we thought was a historical position and adequately covering all the questions of disability by what we did in the memorial. This startles us a bit.”

Roosevelt was paralyzed from the waist down from a polio attack in 1921. He was unable to stand unaided, yet he masked his disability to the point where only two photographs showing him in a wheelchair are known to exist.

The entry building to the memorial will display one of those pictures and an exact replica of the chair. And a time line of FDR’s life, in the last room, mentions his being paralyzed.

Halprin said he won’t think deeply about the change until a decision is made by the memorial commission and Congress.