The arch could still be stopped in its tracks; the ballroom maybe not. Because it is an affront to everything classical and tasteful in DC’s monuments, it should be rapidly torn down and the East Wing of the White House restored.
Will the Dems and a new Congress have the balls to do this? Will the Trumpian monstrosities prevail? Oliver Wainright, The Guardian’s architecture critic, last month had some pregnant thoughts on the mutilation of Washington that must not continue.
“It won’t interfere with the current building,” Trump promised last July, when he announced the plans. “Not touching it.” It would seat 650 guests and cost $200m, funded by private donations. Less than three months later, without waiting for congressional approval, he tore down the historic East Wing, and dumped the rubble on a nearby public golf course (which he also plans to redevelop). The ballroom ballooned, as if injected with rapid weight-gain formula, to seat 1,000 in a building three times the volume of the White House. The price has also tripled to $600m, at least half of which will now be picked up by the taxpayer.
Trump boasted that his ballroom will be “more beautiful” than Versailles, but it looks like something thrown together from the classical off-cuts bin, without any regard to how the pieces fit. “It has all the kneejerk gestures of classicism,” a former Commission of Fine Arts (CFA) official told me, “but they are not integrated in a way that makes any sense.”
A sweeping ceremonial staircase leads to nowhere. A grand pedimented entrance is shunted to one end of the east facade. The portico columns run four rows deep. (“The supreme court is three deep,” Trump noted. “No other building has it, and I did it because it’s incredible.”) The ballroom’s proportions are so out of whack, it will make the White House look like a lopsided fiddler crab, the swollen appendage vastly dwarfing the original building.
. . . As Brent Leggs, president of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, remarked, it would “eviscerate the preservation of our shared civic and cultural heritage in the United States”.
The irony couldn’t be clearer. Trump bloviates about continuing America’s tradition of monument building, while weakening the very mechanisms that exist to protect the country’s heritage. Still, by slashing these protections, at least he is paving the way for his own additions to be toppled just as hastily as they were erected.
Given the construction quality so far, future topplers might not need much help. The Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool has now been drained for a second time, after the coating used in the first $15m renovation began peeling off within days of its completion. Despite a new filtration system intended to keep the water a pristine shade of “American Flag Blue”, massive algae blooms quickly turned it a swampy green. While Trump blamed vandals, justice department legal filings eventually conceded the failure was due to the “hasty and botched” renovation. “I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools,” Trump boasted, before awarding the no-bid contract to a company that had worked on his Virginia golf course.
Trump’s construction mania is all-consuming. He uses press conferences to show off his latest renovations and has spoken of how building is the “fun” thing he does to relax, in between kidnapping South American presidents, bombing the Middle East and bullying Greenland. But White House insiders say his therapeutic hobby has become the policy priority, a massive drain on the administration’s energies and resources. . . .
The closer autocrats come to their end, the more frenziedly do they build. Nero embarked on a golden palace before he was driven to suicide. Marie Antoinette built a model hamlet before she was beheaded. Hitler pored over architectural plans in his bunker during his final days. Trump is buried in catalogues of fixtures and fittings, busy inspecting the workmanship of his helipad-cum-cocktail patio, as the country crumbles around him.