Delusions of Grandeur: A Bigger Golder White House

The request to architects and builders competing to design the White House in the late 18th century asked for “a grandeur of conception, Republican simplicity, and … true elegance of proportion.” That simple phrase embodies tensions that have been debated since the building was occupied in 1800. The relative modesty—even austerity—of the White House in its original form as an Irish country house by architect James Hoban bespeaks the lack of wealth the nation possessed when it was completed in 1800, but also was symbolic of the role played by an executive elected by the populous who served at the pleasure of the voters. Having thrown off the shackles of monarchy, Americans had no desire to emulate the self-important extravagance of those empires’ seats of power.

There has always been pressure to enlarge the White House or make it grander as America gained in power and wealth and as the structure of government became more complex. Even relatively small changes have been controversial and deemed inappropriately extravagant, though. Deference to the modesty of the house’s early iterations has largely prevailed.

A president who treats the people who elected him as subjects who must pay fealty and obey him in all things is trying to will into existence a kingly seat of power. It’s just a ballroom, the minions argue, though the wing is about 1.75 times larger than the White House itself.

A speed walk through the White House’s architectural history shows just how disruptive this project actually is but also how it is a building block in the authoritarian edifice Trump and the radical-right elite is creating to turn his increasingly chaotic utterances into a new era of colonialist empire.

The White House was altered almost as soon as it was first occupied by John and Abigail Adams. The North Portico, a deep porch, was a welcoming addition to Hoban’s dour pile. The half-round South Porch gave the house its most distinctive feature, enriching the composition and its visibility across the vastness of The Ellipse and the National Mall. (Both of these were by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, at the urging of Thomas Jefferson, famously an architect as well as U.S. President.)

A low-roofed passageway held up by columns, called a colonnade, was extended both to the East and West. As conceived by Jefferson and executed by Latrobe, these additions concealed stables and other service structures and were meant to be subsidiary to the main house. As plantings grew in, they became almost invisible.

Charles McKim, of the legendary architecture firm McKim Mead & White, respected the recessive nature of the colonnades when, in 1902 he bookended them with the West Wing as offices for Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, and the East Wing, a dignified entrance pavilion for visitors. Both structures were unassertive and barely visible from either Lafayette Square to the north or President’s Park to the South, vistas shaped by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., in the naturalistic style of Central Park. Thus Hoban’s house has remained unambiguously the focal point of the ensemble visible to the public.

Trump is having none of that. Though the White House ballroom is now under the direction of a new architect, the most recent models and renderings give some idea of the bloat that has resulted from Trump’s ever growing appetite for state-dinner spectacle (from 650 diners to just under 1,000—and at $400 million, double the original equally dubious price tag). Though Trump touts the urgency of his gold-encrusted bauble, state dinners historically have maxed out at about 350 diners, with most much smaller. Trump has only held four of them in his five years in the Presidency—the lowest number in recent decades.

The architect Shalom Baranes presented the current state of the design to the National Capital Planning Commission that revealed a massing much broader in the beam as well as extending deep into President’s Park, once thought a sacred precinct. It is now proportionally a ranch house rather than the soaring Roman temple it imitates. To fix that moment of ugliness, Trump insisted that Baranes tack on a massive columned and pedimented porch that presides over a grand stair to basically nowhere. With a concealing copse of mature trees axed, this attention-getting grandiosity would steal attention from the main house.

Along with the East Wing, Trump had the history-drenched East Colonnade demolished and expects to replace it with a two story structure that accommodates a high-ceilinged passageway between ballroom and the main house. Though it is called a colonnade the dim new renderings appear to depict no elements of a traditional colonnade, and will probably read as a heavy-handed solid wall that slams into the main residence, capturing none of the deferential delicacy of its predecessor.

In depicting the impact of the new wing, Baranes’s renderings are dishonest. With drawings so small that Commissioners could hardly see them, he showed only elevations of the entire complex—no models or three dimensional drawings—which obscures the impact of the new wing’s bulk. He used unrealistic shadowing to play down his new pedimented porch and the passageways, while emphasizing the South Porch and North Portico, both of which would be visually diminished by the addition. Like the departed architect John McGrery before him, he renders the whole ensemble greige when the new construction would presumably be painted white to match the original—a very different visual experience.

Iconic residence

The White House has been powerfully symbolic, the image of America’s idea of home, an emblem of individualism, free-thinking and wealth building that did not depend on begging for scraps from a monarch busy with his own whims.

The Hoban White House loses its iconic autonomy as a residence, and becomes just another wing in a palace-in-the-making. The bulk of the ballroom wing and passage completely unbalances the ensemble. You’ve got to go for symmetry if you are playing the Classical architecture game! So Baranes said he is already cloning the East Wing passage to replace the West Colonnade at the President’s request. It would be a passage to nowhere, but for Trump’s certain desire to demolish the dowdy and cramped West Wing to create a tripartite palace in the European aristo tradition. The West Wing likely only survives because there is nowhere to put its current functions while its replacement is built.

This pocket history is not to make a case for architectural originalism per se. Sticking a portico here, and attaching a grand stair there, and pretending a wall can be a colonnade is an insult to Classicism, which demands a cohesive whole. This amateur effort insults the American people. It represents an unbelievably cramped view of what architecture can do and be.

Where are the gatekeepers?

Baranes is a familiar figure in Washington. His firm has technical expertise having done extensive renovations of historic government buildings as well as doggedly mediocre commercial projects. His is a “service” firm: it knows how to take orders, but in his built work there’s little evidence of an expansive imagination that can see opportunities the rote architects miss and take a more comprehensive and longer view of what the White House should be.

The National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts, which are pledged to keep special interests from mutilating historic buildings or littering the Mall with ill-conceived monuments (Garden of Heroes anyone?) have had their memberships overhauled by Trump. A grating obsequiousness, rather than an open-minded professionalism was the default setting at Baranes’s presentation. Only the head of Washington’s City Council tentatively offered tepid criticisms of the overweening bulk of the project, but was happy to wait on later presentations to see what further refinements might be offered.

The Fine Arts Commission similarly shirked its responsibilities. Preliminary meetings are the time to put the administration on notice about the violence it has done to the White House, to ask for a justification for the wing that is based on objective analysis rather than evidence-free assertions. (The administration claims there were structural and infrastructure issues that precluded keeping the wing but have not produced any documentation. We are free to assume no documentation exists.) Both commissions could have held the administration’s feet to the fire for the demolition of historic structures without any apparent analysis of whether important elements could be included and whether alternatives to destruction were available.

Instead the NCPC said reviewing demolition plans was not their job. Had they analyzed Trump’s plans before the wing was bulldozed—standard practice—they may have concluded that irreplaceable historic elements were at risk, which would have been grounds for rejecting Trump’s design.

In the context of a dangerous leader who has invaded one country, seeks to annex two others against its peoples’ will and wreaks terror on cities, this bowdlerization of the White House can seem trivial. It’s all of a piece, however, with Trump’s brutish narcissism and the aspiration of people around Trump to a new imperium where might makes right.

As we witness a shift to an all-powerful executive, tentatively endorsed by the current Supreme Court via the anodyne-sounding Unitary Executive Theory, we see the ballroom being rushed to completion as Trump’s way of establishing “facts on the ground”—a physical manifestation of the power he thinks he wields that can’t be reversed. Of course this garish venue will be useful to him for shaking down donors and favor seekers en masse if he is around, and if the ballroom gets done. There are lawsuits, inevitably.

Authoritarians always seem to need to remake capitals in their own image—and classicism is the chief vessel of asserting power through architecture. St. Petersburg, the 18th-century stage-set city was willed into being with tens of thousands of forced laborers by Tsar Peter the Great. In Albert Spear’s makeover of Berlin for the Nazis, the buildings were supposed to last for a thousand years. (They are mostly gone.)

Though I have never visited the White House I have no doubt that the rooms that are not treated as museum displays are a riot of dysfunctional accretions because new administrations typically move in and make do. Their quest to get as much done as fast as possible precludes the comprehensive analysis of the building’s shortcomings that the complex deserves and the reconciling of competing claims for closeness to the President.

The president’s house deserves better than a gaggle of stuck-together historicist fragments. A holistic analytic approach might show the need for an enlarged dining and conference facility, but there are myriad architectural ways to skin this cat while maintaining the primacy of Hoban’s residence.

The White House could be more inviting, generous, and human. Now it seems ever more remote from Americans (not to mention reality) as the security cordon has expanded to encompass the equivalent of a dozen city blocks. The trappings of security have heedlessly accumulated: sentry huts, truck deflectors, mazes of metal and concrete barriers and vehicles parked willy nilly. This chaos does not suggest disciplined deterrence so much as unsightly incompetence. The visitor experience is repellent and the high fences depressing. (At the NCPC, there was reference to redoing the entrances but no scope or plans were offered.)

The White House could still elevate and inspire. A comprehensible upgrade could subtly enhance the house as a vessel of America’s values and enhance the ability of the executive to negotiate, conciliate, and collaborate—with Congress, with foreign leaders.

Such a long-held definition of the presidency does not apply to the current grubby, corrupt, vindictive and power-crazed inhabitant, so the misbegotten ballroom should be stopped until sanity can be restored.