At the ballroom construction site on August 26.
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These are Corinthian columns,” President Donald Trump tells me as he sits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office in late August, a stack of printed renderings spread before him. The images show aspects of the ballroom he is building on the site of the now-demolished East Wing of the White House. “That’s your highest level,” he continues. “There are levels of columns: Corinthian, Doric. And to be honest with you, the White House should have used Corinthian. It’s a luxury house, a house of luxury, and they used Doric, which is not as nice. Maybe I’ll fix that, too.”
The White House exterior actually has Ionic columns, but the extent of the president’s architectural ambitions is clear enough. The ballroom is set to be a gold-adorned Roman temple of a building with 40-foot ceilings and 22,000 square feet of space, big enough to hold around a thousand guests. (The structure overall will occupy some 90,000 square feet, nearly twice the size of the main White House building.) The printouts include close-up shots of the ornate carvings — dense layers of leaves guarded by two open-mouthed lions — meant to top the building’s formidable colonnade. Trump says the ballroom shares design aspects with the Palace of Versailles but is in many ways going to be “more beautiful.”
