The East Wing demolition is a parable of the Trump presidency
Appraising the president’s architectural plans
For a long time America’s first ladies worked from their bedroom. This was a comfy set-up but not a very dignified one. So in 1977 Rosalynn Carter put her desk in the East Wing of the White House. Apart from Hillary Clinton’s move to be near Bill in the West Wing—better to be taken seriously—presidents’ wives have championed their causes from the annex where Carter parked herself a half-century ago.
Melania Trump will not be returning there anytime soon. Her husband’s four-day demolition of the East Wing caught nearly everyone by surprise in its speed and scale this week. In its place will rise a big ballroom to hold 1,000 people. Donald Trump’s staff says this will be ready “long before” his term is up. He resents having to pitch an outdoor tent to host more than 200 guests, as is currently required.
If every structure is a statement, this one is an apt parable for the second Trump presidency, where smash-grab provocation is partly the point and where no one seems to give a hoot about procedures. In pre-Trump times all capital projects at the White House went before two federal agencies for review. The process can be maddeningly slow: recent improvements to the perimeter fence took four years to finish. The president promises to submit his plans at some point. But in the meantime it is a “move fast and break things” approach. The demolition job recalls Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision in the 1940s to bulldoze the first, modest iteration of the East Wing built by his cousin Teddy. That tear-down—to add a bomb shelter and more—drew protests, too.
The Trump administration has prompted a deluge of questions and answered few. Some concern the $300m price tag. The president says financing will be “100% by me and some friends of mine”. Preservationists are fretful. The National Trust for Historic Preservation fears the “massing and height” of the new structure will “overwhelm the White House itself”. Mr Trump’s proposed addition will add 90,000 square feet of floor space over what appear to be multiple stories. The executive residence (the central part of the White House complex) has 55,000 square feet over six floors.
No one can say for sure what the plan is because the available renderings are light on detail. These are by James McCrery, a bow-tie-wearing classical architect best known for designing Catholic churches. Mr McCrery is part of a small band of traditionalists disaffected with the elite consensus of the field, which takes high modernism and form-meets-function as touchstones. He calls that mode of architecture “ungodly” and “desperate”. Modernism, he once told an interviewer, “exhausted itself” and “has never recovered”.
Classicism is about ornament: columns, porticos, pediments, mouldings and gable roofs. But more importantly it is about harmony, symmetry, proportion and scale. Here Mr McCrery’s proposal to append a hulking mass to the historic mansion has prompted yet more questions.
Even his fellow traditionalists are asking them. In interviews, several winced at the lack of proportion and balance. One groused that placing a portico at the end rather than in the centre of a long facade treated it like a refrigerator magnet. Everyone was keen to defend the capabilities of Mr McCrery. The problem, they insisted, was the client.■