At its first meeting to consider President Trump’s planned new White House ballroom, the Commission of Fine Arts on Thursday reported it had received more than 30 letters from the public about the project.
“The truth is almost all them were in some way critical,” said Thomas Luebke, the commission’s secretary.
One letter called the project “oversized, making the main structure dominated.” Another said Mr. Trump’s sudden demolition of the White House’s East Wing last year and push to quickly build a lavish new ballroom raised “urgent questions” about the “scale, appropriateness and adherence to the established design review traditions that protect our national landmarks.”
The members of the newly remade board — whom Mr. Trump appointed after he fired their predecessors — had their own questions and concerns, including about the size of the 1,000-person ballroom and the security of the facility. But they also made clear they believed it was their role to carry out the president’s agenda, and do so quickly.
“Our president has a very ambitious plan for the District of Columbia, as well as the world,” said Rodney Mims Cook Jr., the new chairman of the commission. “So we need to let the president do his job, and, as best we can, keep his mind off of things like this, that we can keep him rolling, and do it as elegantly and beautifully as the American people deserve for generations and further centuries into the future.”
The Commission of Fine Arts, which is overseeing the design of the president’s new ballroom plan, is one of two review panels that Mr. Trump has stacked with allies as he has pushed to construct a 90,000-square-foot building in the place of the East Wing, which the president tore down last fall before gaining approvals.
The administration has been under legal pressure from historic preservationists to submit the new ballroom project to a formal review process. So far, a federal judge has allowed initial construction on the project to proceed, but is set to hold a hearing Thursday afternoon to revisit whether the government was following protocol.
Shalom Baranes, the architect on the ballroom project, has presented preliminary plans to a second panel that is reviewing the project, the National Capital Planning Commission. Mr. Trump has installed his former personal lawyer as the chairman of that commission.
While Mr. Trump has appointment power over the entire board of the Commission of Fine Arts, he controls only about half of the National Capital Planning Commission. Both panels have roles in reviewing and approving federal construction projects in D.C.
At Thursday’s meeting, which was virtual, Mr. Baranes displayed some of his latest designs for the project, which he said contained some alterations from the work of the ballroom’s previous architect, who stepped back from the project after disagreeing with Mr. Trump over its scale.
Mr. Baranes indicated the president was heavily involved in the details of the design.
At Mr. Trump’s request, a portico roof has been added over the terrace to the south side of the ballroom, he said.
“The president expressed the desire to have the terrace covered,” Mr. Baranes said.
Mr. Baranes said Mr. Trump has settled on a design that would allow for about 1,000 seated guests in the ballroom, larger than initial proposals, but not as big as the largest design the president had considered.
Mr. Trump detailed how the project had grown in an Oval Office interview with The New York Times this month.
“I said, ‘Well we’ve got all this beautiful land. I don’t want to waste it.’” he said. He added: “So I said, ‘All right, I’ll go a little bit larger.’ So then I said: ‘Well, OK, let’s max it out. This is more like Trump, isn’t it? Let’s max it out.’”
Speaking to the commission Thursday, Mr. Baranes also said he is using fewer, but wider windows, and added a new stairway on one side of the project.
The architect noted that Mr. Trump planned to add a second story to the West Wing colonnade to try to even out the height of the complex. But he said more study was needed to determine whether such an addition would be structurally sound.
“We’ve not begun any design work whatsoever on that,” Mr. Baranes said. “There’s still a question of what that building can support structurally, and once we have that information, we’ll probably start to take on some initial sketches, some initial studies, but right now, there is no firm schedule associated with doing anything at all on the West Wing.”
Mr. Baranes said a three-dimensional, virtual model would soon be available to better display the plans for the ballroom.
In October, Mr. Trump abruptly tore down one side of the White House, demolishing the entire East Wing, which contained the historical offices of the first lady, spurring widespread outcry. At the time, no construction plans had been submitted to any oversight authority.
White House officials said at the time that there was no review was needed for a demolition and they would take plans to the proper commissions before starting construction.
Mr. Trump said the new ballroom is necessary to properly entertain hundreds of guests. In the past, large events have required tents to be set up on the White House lawn.
Mr. Trump has said taxpayers are not on the hook for the ballroom, whose expected costs have doubled from $200 million to $400 million. The president has said that he already raised $350 million from donors, including from major tech and crypto companies, and that businesses have pledged to donate steel and air conditioning for the structure.
Last week, the president appointed new members to the Commission of Fine Arts, and the administration said they shared Mr. Trump’s “America First” agenda.
One of those new members, Mary Anne Carter, who leads the National Endowment for the Arts and is an ally of Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said on Thursday she had some concerns about the vulnerability of the new addition to exterior threats and wanted to make sure Mr. Trump and future presidents would be safe in it.
Mr. Mims’s concerns centered on the appearance of the new portico that Mr. Trump ordered added to the project, calling it “immense” and asking whether the architect could “tone down” that part of the plan.
“We looked at several options for that,” Mr. Baranes responded. “We looked at ways of covering it at different scales with different numbers of columns. It was the president’s desire to proceed with this one.”
Even so, Mr. Mims said he felt it was important that Mr. Trump be able to “get on” with the project as quickly as possible. He requested Mr. Baranes present the commission with a physical model of the plans.
“This is an important thing to the president,” Mr. Mims said. “It’s an important thing to the nation. We all know it.” He added: “You can’t have the United States of America entertaining people in tents.”
Luke Broadwater covers the White House for The Times.
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