He has already turned the Oval Office into a wrestler’s changing room. Now the president is building a place so gilded Nero would feel at home. Why did he pick an architect whose speciality is Catholic churches?
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s if truffling thuggishly in pursuit of the Nobel peace prize wasn’t enough, the spectacle of bulldozers ripping into the White House is yet more evidence of Donald Trump’s unstinting quest for epic self-aggrandisement. Having decreed the East Wing not fit for purpose – namely, his purposes of swank and show – he plans to replace it with a faux classical bulletproof ballroom, capable of seating up to 650 partygoers.
Renderings show a vast, glacially white aircraft hangar of a structure embellished with an ornate coffered ceiling, gilded Corinthian columns and drooping gold chandeliers. Nero, who conceived the original domus aurea, would feel right at home. Costing $250m (£187.5m), a sum to be extracted from sycophantic donors, Trump’s ballroom is one of the most grandiose White House projects to be implemented in more than a century, as he strives to bend the building – and US architecture more generally – to his will.
On re-assuming the presidency, one of his first executive orders – under the title Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again – mandated that “traditional and classical architecture” should be the preferred style for all federal public buildings, with Trump having the final veto on designs. A similarly prescriptive order was enacted during Trump’s first spell in office, only to be rescinded by Joe Biden.
