The East Wing of the White House — which held the offices of presidential first ladies and provided an symmetrical architectural counterbalance to the famed West Wing for 83 years — is now no more than rubble and memory.
President Donald Trump wrecked the two-story, 12,000-square-foot White House wing in three days to make room for a 90,000-square-foot, $300 million ballroom that he said will be bankrolled by his deep-pocketed funders.
Witnessing a large chunk of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. — arguably the world’s most famous building and National Historic Landmark — being hastily ripped down like common warehouse is an outrage. So is knowing the East Wing is being sacrificed for a giant, gaudy ballroom addition that will visually and physically outwrestle the main White House and its historic North Portico entrance.
Making matters worse: Trump’s blitzkrieg on the East Wing happened without as much as a hint of public review, due process or consideration for the White House’s historic status.
Given Chicago is home to the nation’s finest set of federal buildings — structures Trump tried to put on the market seven months ago — the East Wing’s execution without a fair hearing is alarming.
“More than a century of history has been destroyed by President Trump for an unnecessary ballroom,” U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) said Thursday. “The demolition of the East Wing of the White House show us there is no institution in America that this president will not undermine.”
Ballroom’s design is ‘bonkers’
Until this week, the White House benefited from levels of protections that largely kept it safe from demolition and ungainly additions.
Changes to the building, as with most historic federal structures, would normally undergo review and approval under the National Historic Preservation Act.
And work done by presidential executive order would ordinarily require approval by the federal Advisory Council on Historic Preservation to make sure the alterations line-up with the Secretary of Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties.
Then there is the National Capital Planning Commission which reviews and approves federal building construction within Washington, D.C.
So what happened with the East Wing?
A section of the National Historic Preservation actually excludes the White House, the Capitol Building and the Supreme Court building from federal review. Past administrations still submitted their buildings plans for review, as custom, but weren’t legally or administratively required to do so.
The Trump administration said it would send the ballroom plans to the National Capital Planning Commission. But the body is closed during the federal government shutdown and the chairperson of the 12-member panel, Will Scharf, a Trump appointee — as are two of the commission’s newest members — would appear unlikely to go against the president’s wishes, particularly with the East Wing now demolished.
Trump picked Washington, D.C.,-based McCrery Architects to design the ballroom. The little-known firm’s work includes churches, houses of worship and the U.S. Supreme Court gift shop. Their projects are almost exclusively neo-classical design that mimic Greek and Roman styles of the past.
“The very best American architecture is classical architecture once made American,” the firm’s founder and principal James McCrery told an audience at Michigan’s Hillsdale College last year, according to Fast Company. “Americans love classical architecture because it is our nation’s formative architecture and we love our nation’s formation.”
But earlier in McCrery’s career, he worked for ground-breaking modernist and deconstructivist New York architect Peter Eisenman.
Eisenman told the architecture newsletter Punch List that McCrery’s design for the ballroom is “bonkers,” and “putting a portico at the end of a long facade and not in the center is what one might say is untutored.”
McCrery’s renderings don’t do the project any favors either. The ballroom exterior is a cold, two-dimensional pastiche of windows, entrances and stylings more befitting of the old Chateau Bu-Sche banquet hall on Cicero Avenue in Alsip than next to the White House.
And the massive ballroom is all coffered ceilings and gilded column capitals designed to impress a president who has tainted the Oval Office with swap-meet level golden doo-dads, tchotchkes and accents.
What’s next
The East Wing incident shows it’s time to beef-up protections for our most important federal buildings.
The American Institute of Architects, the nonprofit National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Chicago-based Society of Architectural Historians are among the groups who called for the demolition to be halted, or existing rules regarding the razing and construction at historic federal sites to be followed.
All good, but ultimately useless — calling for locking the barn door after the horse has galloped off. Seeking a federal injunction to stop demolition pending a proper review might have been helpful, and there was time to do it given that Trump was openly talking about wrecking the ballroom since last summer.
Going forward, something needs to happen to better protect important federal architecture and development on the capital region in general. Clouded by the East Wing demolition debris is Trump’s proposal to build a knock off of the Paris’ Arc de Triomphe on a highly visible site on Memorial Circle, across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial.
Topped by a winged golden lady, the Arc de Trump looks like something the Allies would have blown up at the end of World War II.
The East Wing is gone. But those who support protecting the nation’s architecture and the country’s capital still have much work to do.