Donald Trump plans a presidential library featuring a 50-floor skyscraper with commercial elements like a hotel. Photo / Donald J. Trump Presidential Library
The Boeing 747 on display in a video announcing the design for Donald Trump’s presidential library is the giveaway. Trump, who doesn’t deserve a presidential library, is planning one of the biggest grifts of his career.
That could have lasting consequences for American democracy.
Renderings of the building, to be designed by the Florida-based architecture firm Bermello Ajamil, appear to show a tower with some 50 floors set upon a wider podium or base. It would be the first skyscraper to serve as a presidential library, taller than the stubby structure designed for the Obama Presidential Centre, which opens in Chicago in June, and greatly larger than any existing presidential library. It is likely to have a significant commercial element, perhaps multiple floors devoted to a hotel, office space or high-end apartments or condos. Bermello Ajamil did not respond to an email or telephone message.
Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley who specialises in digital imagery and forensics, confirmed that substantial portions of video released on Monday were AI-generated. So, what we are being shown is a fundraising tool and not reliable evidence of what will actually be built. But it is a plausible guide to Trump’s ambition, a sign of what he would like to build. And that appears to be an enormously complicated luxury tower with a ground-level exhibition hall for military aircraft and other equipment, as well as a huge Boeing jet dubbed a “flying palace”.
The video includes multiple views of an open room or atrium with no obstructing support columns in its centre, displaying what appears to be the $400 million Boeing 747-8 gifted to Trump by the Government of Qatar. The wingspan of that plane measures 224 feet (68m), its length 250 feet (76m), its height more than 63 feet (19m). If one were to fit it snugly in a box, that box would be about 56,000sq ft (5200sq m).
The pavilion at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California, which displays a much smaller Boeing 707 that served as Air Force One, is 90,000sq ft. And even at that size, the plane had to be expertly dismantled and reassembled by Boeing staff, according to Joanne Drake, chief administrative officer of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute.
Trump’s exhibition hall, which also features military vehicles and other aircraft displayed on balconies that appear to project or are cantilevered into the large atrium, would probably require an even larger space.
It isn’t clear from the video how the tower above that space will be supported. Will it be supported by the larger, column-free structure underneath, which will be the size of a large airplane hangar? The building’s podium base also has a giant roof garden, which will create design challenges given the frequency of large storms in Miami. (Waterlogged soil is heavy.)
Emily Guglielmo, a licensed structural engineer with Martin/Martin Consulting Engineers, says that these are complex but not impossible engineering problems. But they will make the building more expensive – which means Trump will need to raise potentially billions of dollars to build his library.
How many billions? There is no price tag as of yet, but as a point of comparison, the 58-floor Citadel tower, designed by the blue-chip Foster + Partners, planned for Miami, could reportedly cost some US$2.5 billion (NZ$4.4b) – even without a giant exhibition hall for a 747 at its base. When the President floated ideas for a library after his first term, he was reported to be thinking in the $2 billion range, vastly more money than any previous presidential centre.
Guglielmo describes the challenge of building a tower atop a column-free space as a bit like building something on top of a bridge.
“I think it is technically feasible, but it would require an exceptionally large transfer structure,” like giant trusses to redirect the vertical load to huge columns around the perimeter of the structure.
Then there’s the challenge of building in Miami, which is in a hurricane zone, with frequent rains and salty air. “South Florida is a very corrosive environment,” says Guglielmo, and architects have to plan for significant “horizontal loads”. Meaning: the possibility of hurricane-force winds.
Even if the architects find elegant engineering solutions to these problems, there is the larger issue of the building’s aesthetic form, and its aggressive ugliness.
There is no particular design language common to presidential libraries. Republican former presidents tend to favour classical or vernacular designs, like the Spanish Mission-style Reagan Library designed by architect Hugh Stubbins, or the stripped-down classicism of the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum in Dallas, designed by Robert A.M. Stern. Democrats in recent decades have tended to favour a more contemporary language. Michelle and Barack Obama chose one of this country’s most progressive and innovative firms, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, to design the monolithic granite tower that anchors the Obama Presidential Centre.
Trump has managed to shatter all these precedents. The design language is neither stately and trim in the Republican mode, nor bold and innovative, as preferred by Democrats. It is, instead, generically contemporary, a glass tower struggling for some kind of distinctive shape or symbolic form, like so many towers built in Dubai or China. Like the towers of Dubai, Trump’s library has a gimmick: tinted and clear glass creates the suggestion of a giant Doric or Tuscan column rising up to support Trump’s name, in huge gold letters. This kind of architecture tends to date quickly.
The video includes brief glimpses of some of the things that have become a standard part of presidential libraries, including a theatre or lecture hall and a reproduction of the Oval Office. But there are also features unique to Trump: giant golden escalators to remind visitors of the 2015 announcement of his presidential campaign at Trump Tower in New York; what looks to be a reproduction of the US$400 million ballroom he is attempting to add where the now-demolished East Wing of the White House sits; and a facsimile of his embarrassing “Presidential Walk of Fame,” where he mocks some of his predecessors.
The tone of the video feels more like a promotional vehicle for the hospitality industry than a formal announcement of a new presidential centre. It is filmed in the twinkling twilight of the cocktail hour and features images of guests sipping drinks in black tie and long dresses. From the renderings, it’s clear that a substantial part of the new building will be used as event space, including the roof garden.
High-rise buildings are a good way to create density in the urban core, but in recent decades residential high-rises have become increasingly detached from their urban setting. Rooftop gardens and pools pull people up, off the street, into private, velvet-rope space. The basic form of Trump’s library borrows that private-space model, dressed up with the luxury surfaces – including lots of gold – that suggest the exclusivity of his personal brand, not the openness and access of a public building that houses records owned by the American people. Almost nothing suggests that this is a place where people will do research or convene to address matters of world significance.
The giant golden statues of Trump are, of course, both sad and risible, especially the legs of one seen briefly above the entrance to the building, which then disappears in the very next shot – an AI glitch, perhaps. But the unknown funding and revenue questions raised by this structure are deeply serious. By the time of the Obama administration, about 95% of the presidential records were digital, meaning they didn’t require huge amounts of storage space. So, what will fill those 50 floors of space?
Will they be monetised, as apartments or offices? And if so, who will profit from them?
Despite numerous efforts by Congress to establish ethics guidelines and bring transparency to the fundraising for presidential centres, these institutions are still allowed to seek unlimited private donations without disclosing their donors.
Will the Trump library be some kind of hybrid nonprofit foundation, built with gifts solicited from private donors including, perhaps, foreign governments – yet also a for-profit real estate development that enriches Trump personally?
The great modernist architect Le Corbusier once said that a house is a machine for living. Libraries and museums might be thought of as machines for learning. The Trump presidential centre appears intended to be a machine for emoluments, with one of the biggest emoluments in the history of America sitting in a giant hall at its base. If a good building is the ideal expression of some thought or form, this building is almost perfect, the absolute embodiment of Trump’s greed and grift.
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