President Trump’s attempt to hugely expand the White House is lumbering forward. It suffered the tiniest of setbacks when the National Capital Planning Commission decided to postpone a vote on the project to its next meeting, on April 2. But it is highly unlikely that the commission, which has been stocked with Trump appointees, will not ultimately sign off on this enormous, banal box in a vaguely classical style that, if it goes forward, will overwhelm the White House and block the view between the White House and the Capitol that has been one of Washington’s signature vistas for more than two centuries.
At a public hearing last Thursday, Paul Ingrassia, the acting general counsel for the General Services Administration, described the ballroom as a “magnificent design.” He is not an architect or an architecture historian. He was invited to sit in on the commission’s deliberations in what appears to have been a consolation prize after reports that he had described himself in a leaked group text chat as having “a Nazi streak” derailed his appointment last year as head of the Office of Special Counsel in the White House.
Now the planning commission, like the Commission of Fine Arts, which approved the project last month, is made up of people appointed not on the basis of expertise — like the architects, planners and urban designers Mr. Trump fired to make way for them — but for their willingness to do the president’s bidding. As Rodney Mims Cook Jr., the classical architect who now heads the Commission of Fine Arts, said before it voted to approve the ballroom without even reviewing final plans, “This is an important thing to the president” that would “let the president do his job.”
Mr. Cook chose not to address the question of whether a building bigger than the presidential residence, with a ballroom that will seat about 1,000 people, the scale of an event space at a hotel catering to conventioneers, is essential for Mr. Trump or any other president to do his job. But Mr. Trump is not — has never been — much interested in doing the job of president as we constitutionally have known it. In order to be the imperial kind of president he has styled himself as, he requires imperial-style spaces. Certainly the historical White House didn’t have a throne room, much less a ballroom for his throngs of supporters and supplicants to gather. He presumably wanted it to be able to function more like Mar-a-Lago.
As with most of the destructive and divisive actions that the president has committed America to this year, it is not a solution to a real problem at all but the cover for a deeper desire, which in this case is to remake official Washington in his image. The ballroom is bombastic architecture pretending to be genteel.
It brings to mind not any previous American president but the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, who was obsessed with rebuilding Rome into some grand new version of itself. In 1924, two years after coming into absolute power, in a talk at the Campidoglio in the city’s historic center, he said, “It is necessary to liberate from the mediocre disfigurements of the old Rome.” He added, “Rome cannot, must not be, only a modern city in the by now banal sense of the word. It must be a city worthy of its glory.” Rome needed, he said, more grandezza — more grandeur.
Sound familiar? In 1937 in a report on Mussolini’s by then extensive reconstruction of Rome, National Geographic magazine quoted a guide who imagined that the Fascist dictator might say to the city, “That’s what you once were. I’ll make you great again.”
As Mussolini saw Rome as a mere shadow of its ancient self, Mr. Trump sees Washington as a city insufficiently grand for his ambitions. As a builder, he has always confused size with excellence — he would often give the floors in his skyscrapers falsely high numbers to make the buildings seem taller than they were — and when he looks at Washington, he probably really believes that it is a bit humdrum and lacking in panache, as if the founding fathers could not imagine something as noble as Mr. Trump has in mind.
His relationship to cities is one of fear and fearmongering: They may contain our history, but they also contain so many of the people he disdains. It’s the perspective of someone who travels by motorcade, spends his off-hours in Palm Beach, Fla., or on golf courses he owns and otherwise sees the world through the lens of TV news. He brought troops to Washington, D.C., and tried to send them into other cities — to his mind, places of liberal disorder that needed to be tamed.
Disorder, real or imagined, is the lifeblood of authoritarians, since they often come to power on the promise that they alone can turn chaos into order. And if those who strive for power have been known to exaggerate political disorder — or even, at times, stir it up themselves to create a pretext to impose their authority — they are every bit as likely to claim that the great cities they occupy are cesspools of decay and decline that cry out desperately for their transformational urban planning and architectural skills, which they tend to believe are as great as their political ones.
Mussolini wasn’t entirely wrong to see in the Rome of the 1920s a somewhat broken, rundown city, damaged by years of tension between the Vatican and the secular government of Italy over control of the city, which had led to a period of disinvestment, even decay. But his solution wasn’t to address the city’s problems so much as to distract from them by trying, almost desperately, to conjure the spirit of imperial Rome in the 20th century.
His strategy was to impose his vision of imperial grandeur on the old city, ripping apart the urban fabric to insert statues and monuments, grandiose public buildings, wide boulevards and formal axes. He cut a wide road, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, to connect the Piazza Venezia, the seat of his government, to the Colosseum, tying his regime to the age of the Roman emperors. He envisioned a huge new building as an expression of the power of his Fascist Party that would have gone up diagonally across from the Colosseum, competing with the ancient monument for pride of place. Later, when that project shifted to another site, an architect proposed celebrating Mussolini there in the form of a 200-yard-high tower, bigger and taller than St. Peter’s Basilica.
Elsewhere in Rome, Mussolini’s supporters proposed erecting a 262-foot-tall statue of Il Duce as a modern Hercules with his right hand raised in Fascist salute. The point of all of these monuments — which, fortunately, were never built — was to avoid any doubt that Mussolini’s achievements outshone those of the emperors.
In his attempt to make Rome imperial again, Mussolini profoundly misread Rome, which was never what he thought it was. It has always been a city of great monuments without monumental settings, a place of magnificent accidents. The essence of Rome is the way in which most of its greatest buildings hit you by surprise as you make your way through the complex maze of narrow, winding streets. It is in this that the city’s magic lies. Rome, even under the emperors, was a city of accretion, not a city of order.
Mussolini understood none of this. He looked at Rome and saw only mess and confusion. Even St. Peter’s, which with its great piazza by Bernini would seem to have provided the kind of formal monumentality Mussolini craved, was not good enough; the dictator sliced the Via Della Conciliazione through the city to connect the Vatican to the Tiber, demolishing much of the Borgo, the old neighborhood that since medieval times had formed a buffer between the Vatican and the river. Before Mussolini’s makeover, you navigated the dense web of streets until, suddenly, Bernini’s vast columns came into view and the enormous space they enclosed burst upon you like a revelation.
That was too subtle, too unpredictable, for the dictator. He had no appreciation of Rome’s extraordinary mix of the magnificent and the everyday, the way in which formality and casualness rub shoulders, because it underscores that there is something not fully controllable about the urban fabric, and control was what Mussolini wanted.
The true challenge of city building is not to impose the simplistic order that fascism seeks but to embrace the constant juxtaposition of high and low that has been a part of Rome and of every great city for centuries. To build a city is to accept the notion that it is a place that offers choice, which means that each of us will experience it differently. But as the fascist mentality leaves no room for different views and different forms of politics, it is disdainful of different kinds of urban experience, especially those urban experiences that are personal and even — dare I say it? — idiosyncratic.
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.
Most of Mr. Trump’s interventions have been traditional in style. Even though he started his career as a developer who built modern buildings, he long ago decided that only classical architecture could provide the majesty he craved. Thus he has decreed an end to modern federal buildings in Washington, and perhaps elsewhere, a decision that ignores the extraordinary record of distinguished modern courthouses, embassies and civic buildings that the federal government has built under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Instead, a litmus test of architectural style, not quality, will be the only thing that matters.
How all of this will play out with the planned renovation of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is hard to know. Mr. Trump has already damaged the center reputationally by insisting that his name be joined to Kennedy’s, ignoring the longstanding custom that living presidents in a democracy do not get their names on buildings or their visages on stamps and coins. Mr. Trump has announced plans to close the center for two years for a thorough renovation, which he apparently decided was necessary after so many artists refused to perform there that it was left with a nearly empty calendar.
The claim of a needed renovation was a face-saving falsehood, given that just a few years ago the center was renovated and a striking new wing was added by the modernist architect Steven Holl. Now no one really knows what Mr. Trump, who oversaw the firing of many of the staff and board members and their replacement with loyalists, plans to do. He has implied that he does not intend to tear the building down, but he said that about the East Wing, too, before he ordered it reduced to rubble.
The Kennedy Center is admittedly not a masterpiece. In fact, when it opened in 1971, it was largely reviled by architecture critics, who saw Edward Durell Stone’s design as overblown and pompous, which you might think would make it to Mr. Trump’s taste, but no. Over the years, like so much midcentury modernism, it has earned a place of respect not just in its own city but also in the larger architectural firmament. It does not deserve to be gutted.
Mr. Trump talks frequently about making federal architecture “beautiful again,” but what he does not need to say is that in his vision he alone is the arbiter of what is beautiful and what is not. It is clear that his taste is far from universally accepted. Of the 32,000 comments that the National Capital Planning Commission received in the public comment period for the ballroom, The Times calculated, 98 percent were opposed. All but one of the speakers who addressed the commission at its public hearing last week urged the commission to deny approval of the project.
But does Mr. Trump care? The president is doing a number of other deeply unpopular things right now. The ballroom is, as Mr. Cook put it, “an important thing to the president.” And so it keeps moving forward. He has eviscerated the agencies that review public buildings and monuments in Washington, filling them with loyalists who will praise his taste and approve his plans without even waiting for them to be completed. Right now, the future of our nation’s capital is being guided not by any legitimate system of architectural review but by sycophants who want only to please their leader. It’s just how things worked under Mussolini in Rome, until his power came to an end.
Paul Goldberger is a former architecture critic for The Times and The New Yorker and the author of “Why Architecture Matters.”
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