If there’s one thing Trump is excellent at doing, it’s inciting outrage among vast swaths of the population. The ongoing ballroom-cum–demolition derby debacle at the White House is no exception, the president deploying wanton destruction, donor corruption, and outright lies—with design choices at the intersection of nouveau riche and neoclassique—in a way that by now feels entirely predictable. As, in this case, it was: Trump is obsessed with monumentalizing his own existence, so it was only a matter of time until he finally decided to take his Roman Statue Twitter guy courtiers up on their offer to “make federal architecture beautiful again.” Since the Obama years, Trump has been talking about the need for a White House ballroom to replace the temporary tents and regalia hauled out during state dinners, and part of this project’s sour-grapes backstory (one more Trumpian hallmark) is that he claims to have once proposed the idea to his predecessor’s adviser David Axelrod, only to be snubbed.
To be fair, knocking down the East Wing, particularly during a government shutdown, with only a few contradictory renderings drawn up to diagram its replacement, did seem a tad premature. (Workers at the Treasury Department, which is next door, were told not to share photos—never a good sign.) Maybe this is why the American Institute of Architects had nothing to say until the structure lay in ruins—then issued a manic statement bemoaning that “the White House is not simply another building; it is the People’s House, a living symbol of democracy and national identity.” To the AIA, the demolition was an attack not just on America but the one thing equally sacred: the rules-based technocratic order that professional organizations exist to prop up. After acknowledging that the damage was “irreversible,” the statement called for “a qualifications-based selection of the architect” to finish the redesign. This bold countervision is little more than architectural harm reduction: Trump can have his ballroom, but he must bring in “the professional community and the public” (note which comes first) to make it a little less tacky.
Reaction from liberals was even more indignant. Saikat Chakrabarti, a former Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez staffer now running to replace Nancy Pelosi, pledged to introduce legislation renaming the ballroom (should it ever be built) the “Smithsonian Museum on Corruption and Authoritarianism.” Maureen Dowd, in her column in the Times, called readers’ attention to the old East Wing’s great historical significance: This was the location, it turns out, where Al Gore “loved to host small dinner parties focused on scholarly topics” such as “the meaning of metaphor.” What a loss. Dowd even rang up Axelrod, who accused Trump of “sundering history” by taking down a piece of this “quietly stately citadel of power.” The White House is—or at least ought to be—one of the most contentious sites in world history, a building originally assembled by slaves, where countless horrors have been drawn up and carried out. That the liberal coalition in which architecture is assumed to partake is once again insisting on its dignity represents not only an outmoded view of architectural politics but a paucity of imagination in architectural discourse writ large. The notion that so much as touching the White House is some kind of inconceivable desecration is boring and untrue: Boring in that any sanctification of the American historical apparatus is becoming increasingly meaningless and is better suited to the braying of the right. Untrue not in the shock nor destructiveness of the act but in the belief that its object was in any way sacred to begin with.
The right has assembled for itself an aesthetic program, an answer to what the future should look like, slopified as it may be.
There are, of course, many potshots one can take at Trump and his allies in the so-called trad architecture world, which itself is both an anachronistic holdover of the style wars of the 1980s and a wholly new entity forged in the twin fires of the Heritage Foundation and Twitter. “So much for tradition!” one could crow. “Look at what they’re doing to the architectural legacy of the ‘Real America’ that they are so ardently trying to resurrect!” Indeed, there seems to be a contradiction between the endless “traditionalist” bloviations of the right—about the Founding Fathers, about taking the country back (to what appears to be a strange amalgamation of the eighteenth century and the 1950s)—and the lobotomization of one of the most recognizable and dare I say lionized symbols of American history and culture. Similarly, there is the tension between the belief that architecture prior to the twentieth century—barring art deco—is inherently superior for reasons of exceptional craftsmanship and the almost parodic attempts to execute these forms by way of industrialized contemporary building techniques and materials.
This irony is especially apparent given the shambolic state of the ballroom project itself. When it was announced in August, the design consisted primarily of a ninety-thousand-square-foot shoebox bearing all the usual accoutrements: grand staircase and soaring portico, plus a ludicrous number of tall fanlight windows sporting a 1980s mullion configuration. Judging from the schematic visuals released by the White House, the interior appeared to be a cavern of rented party tables and chairs, with splendor connoted by gilt coffered ceilings and Corinthian pilasters. If the ballroom has a precedent, it would be the Winter Palace, one of the most overarticulated displays of ostentation, social neglect, and imperial hubris in political history, bested, perhaps, only by another Trump favorite: Versailles.
White House ballroom. Lauren Martin
In December, Trump went AWOL on his architect, James McCrery, after the latter reportedly grew wary of the former’s order to go bigger. McCrery worked for Peter Eisenman (from whom he may have acquired a penchant for bow ties) before allegedly finding God in the finials and rose windows of European cathedrals. He couldn’t stand the heat, it seems, and after the president moved on to Shalom Baranes Associates, a developer-friendly DC firm with an output consisting mostly of middling five-over-ones, McCrery became the latest, though certainly not the last, recipient of the Fell for It Again Award.
For those who understand architecture as a symbolic project, a practice that aims to express and concretize an ideological vision—especially of the future—Trump’s Winter Palace tack-on is more interesting and begins to make more sense. Unlike the left and especially unlike liberals, the right has assembled for itself an aesthetic program, an answer to what the future should look like, slopified as it may be. Indeed, like all fascists, its broader program is to aestheticize politics itself. (One must here remember the difference, articulated best by Godard, between the liberal idea of making political art and the socialist idea of making art politically so as to not fall into the same trap.) In short, conservatives understand that the project of politics is nothing short of remaking (or unmaking) the world itself.
One would think that after all their handwringing about racism, discrimination, and exploitation, liberals, too, would come to the conclusion that the symbology of such a nation no longer appropriately serves its purpose as a shared cultural icon or identity, that it has been undermined by an irreversible rot. For a moment, it almost looked like they were there. In 2018, Andrew Cuomo, chasing an angry Democratic base, went so far as to say that America “was never that great.” Seven years later, when the bulldozers plowed into the former site of Al Gore’s tedious salons, he was gunning for a Trump endorsement and pitching himself to Curtis Sliwa voters as MAGA lite.
Many, especially in younger generations, see through this posturing. They have watched wide-eyed as a genocide that would otherwise be swept under the rug by the manufacturing-consent machine was televised to them in horrific fragments on Instagram Live, and they know, in the simplest terms, that things are not the way they should be. Every day, it becomes clearer that the symbolic order needs to be remade, not preserved. The world of the twentieth century—much less the earlier ones—is no longer our world; its benevolent institutions have been stripped bare, and its malevolent ones have been given more ammunition than ever. The dreams of social equity and even environmentalism that so often powered modernist thinking have devolved beyond historical disappointments into a series of never-ending nightmares. The future of federal architecture, if we are going by what is actually being built at scale by the US government, appears to be the prison, the wall, the climate refugee camp.
The notion that so much as touching the White House is some kind of inconceivable desecration is boring and untrue.
The right has a cultural answer to the disintegration of the economic and social order. Trump’s ballroom is an expression of that: It’s a promise, backed by the full force of a corporatist, undemocratic state, that if you screw everyone else over, you can have a little glamour back, even if you can’t have direct access to it yourself. Technocratic liberalism, on the other hand, has no compelling vision. Biden’s signature infrastructure program was called Build Back Better, but it’s become clear that the loudest voices, especially in the field of urbanism, are only taking the first word seriously. The idea of “better” is a needless pain in the ass, and if you think what’s being built is ugly then you are a reactionary and should go fuck yourself. Overall, the architectural future that liberals want is a hackneyed mix of the cover art for Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein’s Abundance and the five-over-one, and all the posturing in the world can’t make the desiccated politics of neoliberalism and the worst of developer slop more than it is. (The left isn’t much better, given that we tend to have the same reverence for the trappings of the welfare state that the right would have for Prussian neoclassicist Karl Schinkel, should they know who he was.) Ceding the question of aesthetics to the right should be seen, given the mess we’re in, as a world-historical fumble. Now, all that’s left in its wake is a bleating plea for normalcy, for the old symbolic order to mean what it once meant, for the fiction that the White House is not the president’s but “the People’s House” to once again pass for fact.
“No better outlet for the pulse of the culture, education, and practice of architecture—in and beyond New York.” — John Hill
Assessing the current balance of power, one must ask why the “architectural establishment”—from the lobbying organizations that are supposed to represent the field to the profession’s most storied participants—has largely failed to amass or even grow close to political power of any kind. Trump’s ballroom is in some ways the pudding-proof of the right’s successful political machine, one in which even the lowliest lumpen grifter or grievance peddler can ascend to the Valhalla of Turning Point USA. It may be true that the right is backed by the world’s nastiest capitalists while the liberal coalition has to feed an army of nonprofits and bureaucrats. (The left, meanwhile, still has to sell newspapers—and write for them.)
However, the demolition of the East Wing should impart the urgent need for architecture itself to become a political force, lest it succumb to what is promising to be a humiliating future. This may also require us to build the power necessary to reshape architecture from within, whether through unionization or the initiation of architectural practitioners into the rapidly growing left-wing political organizations fighting for a better world. That world will need architects, and those architects will need to have a vision, as Lenin put it, as radical as reality itself. This ridiculous ballroom should say to us not that the right has won and this is its triumph, but rather that these people are organized while we are not. In short, my qualm isn’t that the White House is being torn down. If there is to be a new Winter Palace, we should be the ones storming it.