Architects are warning that President Donald Trump’s ballroom vanity project has disastrous design flaws.
The National Capital Planning Commission, which Trump has stacked with loyalists, is expected to take a final vote on the ballroom on April 2. But the president has already entirely demolished the East Wing to make way for the new event space.
Ahead of the vote, the New York Times published a piece on Sunday by a trained architect, fine arts expert, and urban planning writer who warned about serious flaws in the ballroom mockups.
The authors warned that the ballroom has “fake windows on the north side,” columns that “block interior ballroom view,” and an “unnecessarily big” rooftop area.
The Times story also warned about “its stairs lead nowhere,” as several of the staircases from the ground appear not to be connected to a way into the ballroom.
The ballroom, as it stands, is set to be more than three times the size of the White House, which will disrupt the historic property’s symmetry, the experts also noted.
“The hurried reviews, with construction cranes already swiveling above the White House grounds, are an abrupt departure from how new monuments, museums and even modest renovations have been designed and refined in the capital for decades,” the Times wrote. “And the ballroom will be worse off for it, architects warn.”
The scale and scope of the project have changed since the Trump administration first demolished the East Wing, once home to the Office of the First Lady and her staff. The White House has maintained that the new ballroom’s $300 to $400 million price tag will be “privately funded.”
The president’s vanity project has been met with immense public pushback. Around 98 percent of 32,000 public comments are against the construction of the ballroom, according to a review by the Times.
One comment said in part, “I grew up near Washington, D.C. I visited the White House many times as a child. I wept when I saw the rubble where once stood the beautiful East Wing...”
“The White House is not a palace. It is not a tsar’s residence. The National Trust oversees this building because it belongs to us, the people, not to any president,” another public commenter wrote. “I know that taste is subjective, but we all know what it is to be modest. A ballroom that dwarfs the White House is not modest, and I would say it is tasteless and tacky.”
“I am totally disgusted with the administration’s plan to build a ballroom to replace the Eastwing of the White House. We don’t need another ugly display of tone deaf actions by this president,” another person wrote in a public comment.
Kate Schwennsen, former national president of the American Institute of Architects, said, “If any of my previous students had submitted the proposed Ballroom addition to the White House as currently designed, I would have given them a failing grade.”
