Ever since President Trump announced plans to build a ballroom in the White House, prominent architecture groups have raised concerns. Just last week, the Society of Architectural Historians urged that “such a significant change to a historic building of this import should follow a rigorous and deliberate design and review process.”
A few days later, demolition crews tore off the facade of the East Wing.
The speed with which the president is moving ahead with buiding the ballroom, which is expected to cost more than $200 million and to be privately funded, caught the architecture profession by surprise. And it raised questions about whether the administration was following the traditional approval process for building on the White House grounds.
Some of the country’s most prominent architecture groups had been calling for careful deliberation, review and planning.
“While we recognize that the White House is a building with evolving needs, and that it has undergone various exterior and interior modifications since construction began in 1792, the proposed ballroom will be the first major change to its exterior appearance in the last 83 years (since the East Wing in its current form was built in 1942),” the Society of Architectural Historians said in its statement last week.
The American Institute of Architects noted over the summer that although the project would be privately funded, the White House was not a private building. “The historic edifice at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the People’s House, a national treasure and an enduring symbol of our democracy,” it said in a statement in August, after the proposal was revealed. “Any modifications to it — especially modifications of this magnitude — should reflect the importance, scale and symbolic weight of the White House itself.”
The Trump administration brushed off criticisms in a news release that referred to the long history of construction projects at the White House.
“In the latest instance of manufactured outrage, unhinged leftists and their Fake News allies are clutching their pearls over President Donald J. Trump’s visionary addition of a grand, privately funded ballroom to the White House — a bold, necessary addition that echoes the storied history of improvements and renovations from commanders-in-chief to keep the executive residence as a beacon of American excellence,” it said in the statement.
Some preservation specialists who have worked on White House proposals in the past raised questions about how the ballroom project was being reviewed.
Thomas M. Gallas, who was a member of the National Capital Planning Commission when it reviewed a proposal to build a new tennis pavilion on the White House grounds during Mr. Trump’s first term, said that such proposals would typically be submitted for review earlier.
“Usually those reviews happen in the early stages of what we would call concept design or schematic design,” he said in an interview. “Through the review process, if change is needed, you want to make those early before the architects and engineers have drawn the construction documents.”
Joan M. Brierton, a preservation specialist who spent nearly three decades with the General Services Administration overseeing federal building projects before leaving this year, said that changes to the White House typically required review by a number of commissions. She pointed to a series of projects reviewed by the Commission of Fine Arts in recent years, including the construction of the tennis pavilion.
Even some conservative architecture critics still have unresolved worries.
“My concern is that the ballroom wing might overwhelm the historic mansion in scale,” said Catesby Leigh, an architecture critic who helped found the National Civic Art Society alongside James McCrery II, the ballroom’s architect.
Will Scharf, Mr. Trump’s staff secretary and the chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission, said at a meeting last month that people have called for years for a large event space at the White House. He questioned reports suggesting that the commission should have been consulted earlier, calling them “deceiving.”
Mr. Scharf said that the commission had jurisdiction over construction, not demolition. When a plan is submitted, he said, the commission would review it with other parties to make sure it is “as beautiful as it can be.”
“I know the president thinks very highly of this commission, and I’m excited for us to play a role in the ballroom project when the time is appropriate for us to do so,” he said at the meeting.
Edward Lengel, who served as chief historian of the White House Historical Association for two years until 2018, said he had been getting questions about the process. “People have asked me if this is illegal. I don’t think this is illegal,” he said. “I think this is a big loophole that has always been there. Previous presidents have observed precedent and not tried to exploit that loophole.”
When officials unveiled plans for the ballroom in late July, some conservatives believed it resembled the president’s vow to make “Federal Architecture Beautiful Again” — as he wrote in August in an executive order about the merits of neoclassical design.
Many conservatives have stood behind the ballroom project. On social media, Victoria Coates, chief historian of the Heritage Foundation, described complaints about construction as “pearl clutching.”
“All of us who have been privileged to work at the White House know that as the People’s House, it is not the most imperially grand complex in the world, nor should it be,” she wrote. “But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be improved and expanded as necessary.”
Zachary Small is a Times reporter writing about the art world’s relationship to money, politics and technology.
Ashley Wu is a graphics reporter for The Times who uses data and visuals to help explain complex topics.
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