Demolition continues on the East Wing of the White House on Friday. Photo / Matt McClain, The Washington Post
It was shocking to see images of heavy equipment clawing chunks out of the East Wing of the White House, reducing a historic structure built by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to a twisted mass of steel, stone and concrete.
United States President Donald Trump’s promise that his enormous new ballroom wouldn’t touch or interfere with the existing structure was no longer operative.
The assurances from his press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, that “nothing will be torn down” do not seem to have been made in good faith.
With damning visual evidence that the ballroom project would radically alter the design of the White House and its stately grounds, the public began to pay attention, absorbing the details.
That the new structure would now seat not 650 but 999 people, dwarfing the original 1792 White House designed by the immigrant architect James Hoban.
That the price was ballooning, from US$200 million to US$300m; and that the ballroom would be connected to Hoban’s Georgian-style mansion by a glass bridge.
How will that bridge connect? Will the whole thing be made of glass, like a tourist attraction in China? Or will it be a classical structure with a lot of glazing?
How will this affect the magnificent East Room of the historic structure, where Abigail Adams aired out the White House laundry, where the body of John F. Kennedy lay in state, where Barack Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden, where a portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart has greeted visitors of all ranks and stations with equal dignity since 1800?
We don’t know, and we don’t know if the President knows, given how quickly his promises about this terribly reckless project, to be built by Clark Construction, are evolving.
The American Institute of Architects asked for answers in August, months before the heavy equipment rolled in to start the destruction; last Wednesday, the National Trust for Historic Preservation demanded that the White House pause the demolition and submit the ballroom plans to “the legally required public review process”.
But it takes almost no time to reduce history to rubble, and by Friday Roosevelt’s wartime addition to the White House complex was gone.
Yes, the pictures were shocking but not so shocking as all the things we don’t know about this project, which is being paid for with private donations from some of the wealthiest people and corporations on the planet, all of whom who can directly profit from access to the president. Amazon, founded by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, is among the contributors.
And equally shocking are other images, with a long and troubling historical pedigree, that give context to the ballroom project and East Wing demolition.
Consider photographs of an architectural model laid out in the Oval Office - now gilded from floor to cornice like some postmodern mash-up of Versailles and Colonial Williamsburg - that emerged this month.
On October 15, renderings of a proposed victory arch, designed by architect Nicolas Leo Charbonneau of Harrison Design, were laid out on the Resolute Desk.
Later that day, at a dinner for donors, Trump held up a mock-up of the large monument and joked about how big it would be.
When asked by the press “Who is it for?” the President, who had been angling for a Nobel Peace Prize, said this traditional symbol of military victory was for “me”, adding, “It’s going to be beautiful”.
Images of leaders looking at architectural models are a classic trope of 20th-century political iconography.
They include democratically elected politicians, such as President John F. Kennedy surveying a table-sized model of the national arts centre that would, after his assassination, be dedicated to him.
Or President Richard Nixon inspecting a large, three-dimensional map of the core of monumental Washington as the nation began to prepare for its 200th birthday.
As architectural historian and Columbia University professor Barry Bergdoll pointed out in a speech at the National Building Museum last Thursday, the public display of the architectural model has a darker history in fascist and totalitarian politics, as well.
The leader as builder is an ancient idea, older than the Egyptian pyramids, older than the great public monuments of Rome, older than Emperor Constantine’s clumsy effort to eradicate memories of his predecessors by repurposing and rebranding their works as his own.
Photography reanimated this ancient idea for a mass modern audience, rendering the leader as a colossus relative to the toy-sized representations of his architectural legacy.
For democracies and authoritarian regimes alike, the image projected competence, the power and skill to serve the people with public works and leave a lasting legacy.
There are subtle differences between the images of authoritarians and elected leaders, in body language and other details.
Is the leader acting as a quality-control agent, asking questions, studying details? Or surveying his domain in miniature? Is he simply toying with the world?
While speaking to the donors at the White House about his new arch, Trump picked up the largest of the three models and waved it in front of them, like an oversize hotel game piece from Monopoly.
Like the ballroom and the giant flagpoles Trump has erected on the White House grounds, the arch hasn’t been reviewed by the National Capital Planning Commission or the Commission of Fine Arts, which for decades have weighed in on changes of this magnitude within the historical core of Washington.
The Trump Administration cites an exemption for the White House from the nation’s key historic preservation law as its rationale for proceeding with the East Wing demolition.
That same law, which reads, “Nothing in this Act shall be construed to be applicable to the White House and its grounds”, would apparently allow the President to demolish the entire White House if he chose to.
But this is no reason to shred decades of precedent and best practices, or to ignore the obligation to submit new construction to the NCPC for review.
Since Roosevelt built the East Wing, in haste during the middle of a war, and President Harry Truman added a controversial balcony to the White House in 1948, great care has been taken to make the federal architectural review process more thorough, more deliberate and more transparent. Trump is trampling on that progress.
Architecture is the pre-eminent metaphor for power, but it is also a metaphor - and an arena - for politics.
That includes balancing opposing worldviews, forging compromise, incorporating a wide range of perspectives and insight, and taking care with institutions and precedents that give stability.
It means making judicious decisions about how quickly, and how thoroughly, to change the public realm, including the built environment.
Authoritarian regimes concentrate judgment, taste and competence in the leader, and they prioritise speed when it comes large, symbolic projects.
In the premier authoritarian regimes of the 21st century - China and the Gulf states - rapid construction of massive infrastructure establishes legitimacy and consoles the populace for its thorough disenfranchisement from power.
Trump made speedy demolition his priority, and speedy construction of the new ballroom is essential to his symbolic purpose, to offer a stark contrast to the dysfunction of Congress and, by extension, the torpid rhythms of democratic self-governance.
He is the master builder, the developer who can cut through red tape.
That image, whether deserved or not, is why many people voted for him.
To shred precedent is simply to set new precedents.
And the precedent he is setting is that history doesn’t matter; laws, procedures and customs are irrelevant; and there is no role for collaboration, transparency and review in the construction of new buildings.
Buildings are gifts to the people from leaders who are infallible, not the organic expression of civic values and ideals.
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