WASHINGTON—Opposition on both sides of the aisle is rising as Trump plows ahead with destroying the White House, the People’s House, built centuries ago by enslaved labor and treasured ever since by Americans.
Trump’s “main priority,” according to his press secretary, is building an opulent but ugly ballroom on White House grounds. Would he only expend equal energy on saving healthcare for the many millions losing it because of his policies, which are even uglier than his architectural disaster of a ballroom?
Typical for Trump is his lying about the project from the beginning. At first, he said it would not disturb the present structure, and now we see that it will overshadow everything on the White House grounds. At first, he said it would cost “only $250 million.” Then it went up to $300 million, then $350 million, and it seems now the sky is the limit. His disregard for the needs of the people matches the disdain of Marie Antoinette when she said of the hungry people of her realm, while she basked in palatial opulence, “Let them eat cake.”
Sycophants, among them big corporations like Comcast, a communications giant, are forking over a great deal of money to build the ballroom and to please their master’s urge to bulldoze things, including freedom of speech that they, in particular, should be championing.
Trump said in the Oval Office, which he is also ruining with gaudy additions and racist subtractions, over the noise of the bulldozers outside, “Ahh, I love that sound, the sound of construction and I love the money it brings in.” He is as pleased taking a bulldozer to the White House, it seems, as he has been taking a bulldozer to the healthcare of the American people.
Why should we be surprised by the ballroom deal, however? Just look at some of the gingerbread mansions which Trump’s Gilded Age predecessors erected in Newport, R.I.—or on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.
For that matter, look at the GOP president’s estate in Mar-a-Lago, Fla., and his other planned “improvements” to “The People’s House” and the nation’s capital in general since he moved back into the White House on January 20.
I mean a replica of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe at the D.C. end of Arlington Memorial Bridge, topped with a miniature Statue of Liberty? Come on.
And speaking of gilding, that’s another manifestation of Trump’s vanity: Gilded golden drapes, gilded carpets, gilded cornices, gilded everything in the Oval Office. All that glitters is not gold, except to Trump.
Not to mention replacing a bust of Cesar Chavez, the fabled United Farm Workers leader, with a statuette of Andrew Jackson, the imperialist who drove millions of indigenous people on the Trail of Tears from the Southeast to arid “Indian Territory,” Oklahoma. Many died en route.
Or paving over Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden outside the White House West Wing—where the presidential offices are—with cement blocks.
All this makes Richard Nixon’s plan to dress up the White House Secret Service force in gaudy uniforms, complete with tunics and golden epaulets, in 1969, seem tame by comparison. The uniforms were laughed out of town.
Still, Trump’s 1,000-person all-reinforced-glass four-story ballroom looming over the White House is, in a way, in sync with the architectural distinction, or lack of it, of Washington, D.C.
Take it from yours truly. I’m from Chicago. I grew up with fine and interesting architecture all around me, by Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, H.H. Richardson, Mies Van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright (I lived across the street from buildings by the last two). Outdoor statuary from Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, Alexander Calder, and Claes Oldenberg. Frank Gehry’s glass pedestrian bridge over Columbus Drive in Chicago’s Millennium/Grant Park, just east of “The Bean.”
And Albert Weinert. He crafted the memorial statue to labor’s Haymarket martyrs in Waldheim Cemetery.
Add terrific parks by Frederick Law Olmsted. And even with some notable losses, we have unique, magnificent, and interesting buildings galore. Just walk into the south lobby of the old Chicago Public Library and look up. Six stories of open staircases done in intricate patterns of shining terra cotta tiles. D.C. has nothing like this.
All of that has become part of a huge treasury of things protected by and for the public. Miles and miles of territory along Lake Michigan in Chicago are public parks and property where private billionaire developers are kept out for a large part, despite repeated efforts to get in, unfortunately, sometimes successful. There would be an uprising for sure in the Windy City if Trump tried to build anything like his ballroom in the lakeshore parks.
In D.C., neoclassicism—think imitating the Greeks and the Romans—is the predominant style of our capital city’s core, thanks to the McMillan Plan of 1902. It proposed replacing what was a jumbled mess with some sort of order, uniformity, and federal office buildings.
By and large, it succeeded…too well. Before that, the area, now the Federal Triangle, was a mélange of small markets, alley shanties, boarding houses, stables, and, putting it politely, brothels.
The McMillan neo-classicism extends beyond that. The Jefferson Memorial is the Roman Pantheon. The Lincoln Memorial is monumentally Greek. Famed architect Daniel H. Burnham used the Roman Baths of Caracalla as his model for Union Station, the unified railroad terminal. The Agriculture Department is an elongated classical architecture. Its annex isn’t. Nor is the original Smithsonian. They’re both modified Gothic….maybe.
There are nice Art Deco touches on the neo-classical Justice (now Injustice) Department and the Federal Trade Commission. It took a mass movement of D.C. residents to save the Romanesque Old Post Office and its distinctive tower. It later became the Trump Hotel. (Trump has since sold it, at a profit.)
The original West Building of the National Gallery is neo-classical, and a “gift,” like much of the art in it, from Roaring 20s multimillionaire financier Paul Mellon. He gave the collection and financed the building to escape paying millions of dollars in back income taxes.
And while Trump dug up first lady Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden, he didn’t knock down Lafayette Square, which she saved through vigorous personal lobbying in 1961. The U.S. courts needed more space, and intended to knock down all of its small and lovely row houses.
Kennedy forged a compromise. The houses stayed, but the court buildings, which are taller, but which also are deep reddish-brown and blend in, stand in what were their back yards. Entrances skillfully are quiet in their surroundings, and only one is on the square.
But how messy was D.C.? The Mall, now a miles-long park lined with trees on the edges and grassy down the middle—plus the Reflecting Pool–stretches from the Capitol all the way to the Lincoln Memorial. It used to be a tangle of wooded bushes-lined paths and a jumble of four (!) railroad stations and their surface tracks.
Its western reaches featured undistinguished “tempos,” temporary offices for the massive influx of extra workers who came during World War II. The cardboard-box-like tempos finally came down in the early 1960s. A century before the tempos, the western section of the Mall was actually a malarial swamp.
Much later, the architecturally distinguished, very somber Vietnam Veterans Memorial replaced the tempos. It’s inscribed with all the names of U.S. military service members who died. Maya Lin’s black marble memorial was controversial when it was first erected—it’s a big gash in the ground, like a wound—but now it’s a shrine. People come day and night to sign a guest book, leave flowers, take rubbings of loved ones’ names etched in the stone, and cry.
Of course, traditionalists insisted on a second memorial nearby, with three soldiers in uniform plodding along.
The World War II memorial, though, might be called both classical and brutalist, and it’s right next to the simple stone obelisk of the Washington Monument. Brutalist also describes the memorial to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., facing the Jefferson Memorial across the Tidal Basin. All we can say is the statue of Dr. King does not look like Dr. King.
The Library of Congress and the Supreme Court now flank the Capitol on one side. The library and the old Executive Office Building, called “Old State” and built in the 1880s, are supposed to mimic French architecture from the era of Napoleon III. Old State is derided as a wedding cake. Really, it’s rather fun,
There are other exceptions to the Greco-Roman architecture, good and bad. Indeed, if Trump was going to knock down anything, he should have knocked down the FBI building, which is across Pennsylvania Avenue from its parent agency, now the Injustice Department.
It’s outmoded, too small for the FBI workforce, needs millions of dollars of renovation inside to bring it up to code, and, as the late Chicago Tribune critic Paul Gapp said, “brutal.” Other descriptions from architecture schools: “Ugly,” “intimidating,” and “out of place.” It’s named for the late witch-hunting FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI building looms over the Injustice Department. So did he.
There are two I.M. Pei buildings in town: The main Martin Luther King Library, recently renovated on the inside, out of necessity, and the East Building of the National Gallery of Art.
That structure is dedicated to modern art, and it’s aging quite well. But with one quirk. After a recent renovation, its roof has been opened for the first time ever and features outdoor sculpture, too. The centerpiece? A giant—and hilarious—big dark blue rooster, not visible from the street. Donald Trump doesn’t know about it yet. The union workers in the Labor Department, across the street, do.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views reflected here are those of the author.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
