Ballroom blitz at the White House raises eyebrows

The writer is the FT’s architecture critic

Sometimes you see stuff online and it just doesn’t look right. President Donald Trump’s $300mn-ish ballroom extension is almost twice the size of the entire existing White House. Surely that’s not correct? Well, it’s Trump. So yes. Turns out it is. A 90,000 sq ft extension to a 55,000 sq ft residence. It’s like adding a conservatory twice the size of your house. Only your house is one of the most historic and recognisable in the world.

Some of the discussion around the new ballroom has focused on style. Its architect, James McCrery, is a Catholic classicist known for big churches and conservative historicism. Some has been about funding. No taxpayer dollars are involved, apparently. Trump suggests he is personally funding much of the work but shouldn’t Americans know?

Then there’s the question of scale. This is an insane size for an extension; it will overpower the White House, an aircraft carrier beside a yacht. And finally there’s the optics of building a ballroom in the middle of a government shutdown. “At this moment in time”, said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, “the ballroom is really the president’s main priority.” Well, quite.

There are two big issues here beyond the obvious chutzpah, megalomania and political distraction. The first is the disregard for history. Trump has form here. In building Trump Tower in 1980s New York, he demolished the elegant Bonwit Teller department store, promising to save the sculptures from the facade to donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He reneged and trashed them — it was cheaper.

In July, Trump said of the ballroom, we “won’t interfere with the current building”. Sitting in the Oval Office last week, he said: “We determined that, after really a tremendous amount of study with some of the best architects in the world, we determined that really knocking it down, trying to use a little section — you know, the East Wing, was not much.”

It’s a familiar refrain; the building has been messed about with, it’s not original. Frequently, with historic buildings, that works, and in the US often only the exterior is landmarked. But this is the White House. Can you really say that a colonnade designed and built (albeit later restored) by Thomas Jefferson can be sacrificed? Or a building commissioned by Theodore Roosevelt and designed by McKim, Mead and White, architects of the shamefully demolished Penn Station? Or a bunker built by FDR during the second world war? Or the rose garden laid out by Jacqueline Kennedy (which Trump paved over)?

There is history in every fragment of this place. Some of those foundations and walls would have been laid by enslaved people. The interest in a building like this is precisely in the accretions, the layers, the most intimate archaeology of the US.

Then there is style. Not because of any objections to classicism (McCrery’s design shows some restraint compared with Trump’s usual chrysophilia. The problem is the interior. The renderings show a space more like St Petersburg than Washington. The huge chandeliers, the arches, the orangery windows.

The White House is not a palace because as the centre of power it doesn’t need to be. It was meant to be modest and domestic, for a republic not a kingdom. The British burnt the original building down in 1812 but it still bears comparison with 10 Downing Street, a modest terrace for a great empire. Only the insecure desire scale to massage their delicate egos.

So far, no plans have been submitted for approval to the National Capital Planning Commission (which is, of course, closed due to the shutdown). But demolition is nearly complete. No legal mechanism can stop the destruction. As always, architecture provides a pretty perfect metaphor.