The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Commission asked Breuer to submit a proposal for the memorial after Pedersen and Tilney’s winning competition design was rejected by the Commission of Fine Arts, whose approval was required by Congress. For a site in West Potomac Park, Breuer and his associate Herbert Beckhard proposed a pinwheel of seven sixty-foot high stone triangles surrounding a granite block. One side of the granite block featured a low relief image of President Roosevelt reproduced from a photograph. Hidden loudspeakers were to broadcast recordings of Roosevelt’s speeches, which had greatly impressed Breuer as a new immigrant to the country in the late 1930s. The Commission of Fine Arts rejected Breuer’s design as well, considering its reliance on angular geometries harkening back to Walter Gropius’s 1922 Memorial to Those Killed in the Kapp Putsch to be out-of-date.