As Mussolini misunderstood Rome, Mr. Trump misunderstands Washington. Washington was conceived as an expression of democracy, a place in which the largest and grandest public building was the Capitol, where the representatives of the people gathered. The White House is a mansion, not a palace; it is large compared with the average house of its time, but it was never intended to intimidate. In person, especially if you are used to the oligarchic great houses of the Gilded Age of a century ago or the ones that have gone up in the Hamptons in New York or Jackson Hole, Wyo., that typify the age we are living in now, it’s surprisingly human-scaled and lived in. The president resides upstairs, like a shopkeeper over the store of state. There is a simplicity to it, a restraint. And it is not — at least was not before this past year — gilded.
Until now, every addition to the White House — the North Portico, the South Portico, the East Wing, the West Wing — was designed to defer to the original structure and to make it larger without appearing to be making it larger. The East Wing and the West Wing were pavilions, built later and intended to recede beside the White House. (Thomas Jefferson designed the East and West Colonnades before the wings were built.)
The proposed new ballroom, nominally designed by the architect Shalom Baranes but for all intents and purposes designed by Mr. Trump, does exactly the opposite. It is a huge, dumb box. The portico at one end is more than twice the size of the North Portico of the White House, and it doesn’t even serve as a door. It is more like a decorative emergency exit atop a vast staircase leading down to the White House grounds, the so-called President’s Park, which would also be compromised by the enormous addition.
It is not just symmetry that is being thrown away here; it is more than two centuries of respectful deference to building, function and history.
As Mussolini’s hand was apparent in all his schemes for Rome, both the ones that were realized and the ones that were not, the architects working on Mr. Trump’s various projects are more factotums than independent thinkers. Mr. Baranes is well suited to the task, since he has long had a reputation in Washington as an architect who works comfortably with real estate developers and can produce work of whatever type in whatever style his clients want.
James McCrery, who designed the first versions of the ballroom, is a respected classicist who, The Washington Post reported, was uncomfortable with the president’s desire to make the building as big as Mr. Trump wanted it. Mr. McCrery, who stepped aside from his central role in the project, seemingly made the mistake of believing that Mr. Trump had some understanding of the dignity and proportionality of classicism. But the client wanted what he wanted.
Mr. Baranes is not the only architect to have been caught in the trap of serving the president’s belief that bigger is always better. Nicolas Charbonneau of Harrison Design has come up with an arch Mr. Trump wants to build on a traffic circle facing the Lincoln Memorial across the Potomac that would be taller than the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. At 250 feet, his arch — or Mr. Trump’s arch, to be more accurate — would overshadow the Lincoln Memorial and destroy the subtle relationship between the memorial and Arlington National Cemetery. There is a reason that this land has not had a monument on it. The Lincoln Memorial was designed to be seen not only from the east, down the length of the National Mall, but also from the west, across the Potomac, and this arch would be a huge intrusion on that cherished vista.
Like Mussolini, Mr. Trump grasps at things that he thinks will express the strength of his regime but that only show its vulgarity. The arch, if built, would be less a monument than a roadblock.
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