The East Wing of the White House is gone, making way for the President's new ballroom.Andrew Leyden/Getty Images
Backhoes tore into the brick and plaster of the White House’s East Wing, sending a chalky cloud drifting across the South Lawn. In a single morning last month, a piece of America’s most familiar building collapsed under the teeth of heavy machinery.
The metaphor was almost too crude, but U.S. President Donald Trump has never been subtle. In ripping down and remaking “the People’s House,” he is broadcasting a clear message: The rules don’t apply to him.
Trump played a developer on TV, and has always understood the symbolic power of architecture. And in his second term, he’s embarked on a renovation spree. Each episode brings a new tableau. Paving over the famous Rose Garden; faux-plaster moldings stuck to the walls of the Oval Office; demolishing the impeccable 1940s interior of the house’s Lincoln Bathroom. This is Trump rewriting the story of the place, making it a set for the Trump Show.
The smashing of the 1902 East Wing makes space for a new 90,000-square-foot ballroom, a steroidal neoclassical barn by the conservative architect James McCrery. It will be big enough to crown an emperor, should that be necessary.
This, like so much else with Trump, is unprecedented. The ballroom is vast enough to dwarf the rest of the complex. Its $300-million price tag is opaque. The use of secretive private financing invites the possibility of straightforward graft.
And, as with other Trump initiatives, none of that appears to matter. In his United States, masked government agents seize people off the streets; conflict-of-interest rules and Washington’s codes of preservation barely register as background hum.
By the same token: Why bother with building a ballroom? Trump has always wanted to be seen as a builder. In the 1970s, he transmogrified himself from the son of an outer-borough New York landlord into a braggadocious celebrity. Overstating his own wealth and accomplishments, he blustered his way into building things.
And wrecking them. He acquired the former department store Bonwit Teller. Its façade featured limestone reliefs by sculptor Rene Paul Chambellan. Trump promised them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art – and then, without warning, workers jackhammered them into rubble. A few years later, a new building had risen on the site with a new message, both name and imperative: TRUMP TOWER.
He seemingly wants to do the same at the White House. The East Wing was first designed in 1902 by the important New York architect Charles McKim, and was extended and renovated significantly in the 1940s. While not a great work of architecture, it was a skilful and modest piece of neoclassicism. More importantly, it did symbolic work as the preserve of the First Lady. In July, Trump promised the new ballroom would add to it but not touch it. Now it is dust.
The East Wing was designed in 1902 by Charles McKim.Jacquelyn Martin/The Associated Press
The inconsistency mirrors a larger one. In the summer Trump signed an executive order favouring neoclassical and so-called “traditional” architecture for federal buildings. It extolled an ideal of continuity and proportionality; it specifically praised Charles McKim. But there’s no room for such complexity in the Trump Show.
The ballroom threatens a larger balance, for the White House exists as much in landscape as in architecture. Its legibility depends on views from the adjacent square and the South Lawn, shaped by the 1791 L’Enfant Plan for Washington and remade in the early 20th century.
“Think of that image at night where you see a fountain, lit subtly, and the White House behind it,” says Charles Birnbaum, CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation. This sort of relationship has been managed through a delicate public discourse. “Destroying that legacy with a massive new structure is also a symbol of stomping on democracy,” Birnbaum argues.
Almost a century ago the grounds were rethought by the Olmsted Brothers, whose firm created great public landscapes including Central Park. They aimed to preserve “landscape qualities of great dignity and appropriateness.”
Tourists observe demolition of the East Wing from the top of the Washington Monument last week.Jessica Koscielniak/Reuters
Dignity? Appropriateness? Trump is in effect turning the People’s House into a monster home. “Trump’s action is ‘norm-busting,’” Birnbaum adds. “It is inappropriate visually, spatially, culturally, for everything that the executive mansion has symbolized to the American people.”
And Trump isn’t finished. He aims to put a coat of white paint on the Eisenhower Executive Office Building and, perhaps, alter the city with a giant triumphal arch. When the dust settles, Washington will be forever changed.