For nearly two centuries, the White House’s main entrance — framed by a row of graceful Ionic columns — has been a signature image of the seat of American power.
Now the Trump-appointed head of a federal arts commission is proposing to replace them with a more ornate style favored by President Donald Trump. Those more decorative columns, a style known as Corinthian, are considered the most luxurious in classical architecture and appear on buildings such as the U.S. Capitol and the Supreme Court. They have long been deployed on Trump’s properties, and the president has handpicked them for his planned White House ballroom, too.
“Corinthian is the highest order [of column], and that’s what our other two branches of government have,” Rodney Mims Cook Jr., the Trump appointee who chairs the Commission of Fine Arts, a federal panel charged with advising the president on design matters, said in an interview last week. “Why the White House didn’t originally use them, at least on the north front, which is considered the front door, is beyond me.”
A White House spokesperson told The Washington Post that while Trump prefers Corinthian columns in new construction, there are no plans to change the existing Ionic columns outside the White House. Cook said he had yet to discuss the idea directly with the president.
But Cook’s proposal to overhaul the front entrance to the White House, known as the North Portico, reflects a common dynamic in Trump’s Washington, where the president’s deputies and allies often anticipate and implement his desires — and frequently upend decades of tradition and norms in the process.
Some of Cook’s allies have cheered his idea. “Historic buildings, as important as the White House is, nevertheless they change through time,” said Richard Cameron, a longtime colleague who has pushed to redesign New York’s Penn Station.
Many other architects and designers say they’re baffled or even horrified by Cook’s proposal.
“The Corinthian would be inappropriate for the Executive Residence,” said Steven Semes, a professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Notre Dame and an expert in classical architecture, warning that it would “harm” the original design of a building long known as the “People’s House.”
He added that the White House’s Ionic columns evoke “the character of dignity, grace and a kind of intimacy or domesticity,” whereas Corinthian columns are “used to express the height of formality and monumentality” for buildings such as the Capitol.
Several former federal arts commissioners expressed similar concerns, adding that any changes to the executive mansion should go through a formal review process.
“It is a completely inappropriate idea and at odds with universally held historic preservation standards,” said Bruce Redman Becker, an architect and Biden appointee to the Commission of Fine Arts who was removed by Trump last year.
James Hoban, the White House’s original architect, designed the North Portico and its current columns — his final touch on the building, completed in 1830. The White House Historical Association, a nonprofit that focuses on educating the public about the residence’s history, has called the columns “iconic” and a key part of Hoban’s vision.
“Few elements have so inspired American architecture,” Stewart McLaurin, the White House Historical Association’s president, wrote about the North Portico in a 2021 biography of Hoban.
Trump has long preferred Corinthian columns, which graced one of his childhood homes and stretched floor-to-ceiling in his Trump Tower apartment in New York. The president has mused about constructing Corinthian columns for new government buildings and potentially using them at the White House mansion, according to two people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s private remarks.
For design experts such as Semes, who has spent more than four decades teaching and writing about classical architecture, the distinction between the columns is clear and unmistakable, providing subtle or even overt visual cues that can change a building’s character.
Ionic columns are known for their slender design and curvilinear ornamentation, he said. They also have a smaller capital — the decorative part between the shaft of the column and the beams above — compared with Corinthian columns, which have capitals that can be twice as tall as the Ionic capitals and are often decorated with leaves and scrolls.
The column styles originate in Greek architecture, along with other columns such as Doric, and are known as different architectural orders.
The orders “are like the scales in music or like characters in a play,” said Semes, comparing the “muscular” Doric column to a soldier, the “dignified” Ionic columns to a mature woman and the “showy” Corinthian column to a younger maiden. “They are not just the columns and their capitals but are systems of proportion and ornament that infuse the entire building.”
Shalom Baranes, the lead architect on the White House ballroom, has said that Trump handpicked Corinthian columns on the ballroom project now under construction next to the mansion. Asked whether he had spoken with Trump about using Corinthian columns on other White House projects, Baranes declined to comment.
Cook, who publicly proposed changing the White House columns in a meeting last month as he voted to approve Trump’s ballroom, said he was conscious of the discrepancy between the ballroom’s planned Corinthian columns and the White House mansion’s Ionic columns.
“We should have some consistency” between the two buildings, he said.
Outside architects took a different view.
“Having buildings with two different classical orders next to each other isn’t that unusual,” said Matthew Bell, a University of Maryland architecture professor, arguing to keep the mansion’s Ionic columns. “Whether they were correct or not, in terms of their usage, that’s what Hoban put on the building.”
Carl Elefante, a past president of the American Institute of Architects and a critic of the ballroom — which he compared to a camel, or “a horse designed by a committee” — said he was troubled to think that it could reshape the White House, too.
“Why are we going to take the abomination of this ungainly design and start to affect the actual White House itself, rather than the other way around?” Elefante said.
Trump has repeatedly run afoul of architects and preservationists as he has steadily remade the White House and its grounds in his second term. He rapidly demolished the White House’s East Wing annex last year to build his planned $400 million ballroom, after initially saying he would not touch it; paved over the Rose Garden to make room for a patio; imposed his vision on numerous internal fixtures and rooms, including the Lincoln Bathroom; and is redesigning Lafayette Square, the park outside the mansion.
Some of those changes have drawn complaints and lawsuits, but Trump — a longtime real estate magnate before entering politics — has defended them as overdue upgrades.
“We’re improving the building,” Trump said at a Medal of Honor ceremony earlier this month, touting the ballroom and other changes to the White House.
John Odhiambo Onyango, the chairman of Howard University’s architecture program and a longtime colleague of Cook, said that switching to Corinthian columns could be an improvement, and not a particularly disruptive one.
“It’s not fundamentally making a big change,” such as proposing a postmodern style addition to the White House, Onyango said. “It’s actually in keeping with the historical character of the building.”
Cook also rejected the suggestion that the White House should not have the most ornate columns because it is a home, rather than a building open to the public like the Capitol.
“That argument falls pretty flat,” he said. “It’s not a private home — it’s a public building. It’s a government home for our executive.” He invoked the Roman Colosseum, which ascends from using Doric columns on the first level to Ionic on the second and Corinthian on third, as an example of how Corinthian columns are considered the highest order.
“It’s just the rules,” he said.
Cook said he was not proposing to change the Ionic columns in the White House’s South Portico or the pilasters, a type of smaller column, elsewhere on campus. He said that only the capitals — the tops of the Ionic columns — could be replaced with the Corinthian style.
Semes dismissed the idea of changing the top of the existing columns, saying that trying to modify just part of the structure would add new complications.
“It’s like surgically adding or removing a couple of inches to one of your legs, thinking that you could still walk,” he said. “It becomes a very different animal. And it becomes a completely absurd animal.”
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