Pirate's Cove

It’s what type of threat that’s the funny part

Trump is the biggest threat to D.C.’s architectural splendor since War of 1812

A loosely circular driveway sweeps through the White House grounds, just below the beloved South Portico of the mansion. Its shape echoes a larger park, known as the Ellipse, which connects the president’s home to the National Mall. It also mirrors the curving pathways of nearby Lafayette Square, on the north side of the complex.

The simple symmetry of this modest roadway and the grace of the White House south grounds are no accident: They were the vision of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., one of the original members of the Senate Park Commission, which created the monumental core of Washington as we know it, more than a century ago.

The geometry of this driveway — a small but resonant element of Olmsted’s master plan for the White House campus — will soon be erased, now that a federal judge has allowed President Donald Trump to proceed at least temporarily with construction of his 90,000-square-foot, $400 million ballroom. The ballroom, which will be larger than the original mansion, is so gargantuan that the original curving road simply won’t fit. To make room for Trump’s entertaining and fundraising space, a large notch will be clawed out of the driveway, according to drawings released by Shalom Baranes Associates, the D.C.-based architecture firm overseeing one of the most unpopular projects of the president’s second term.

We’re still doing this? Still whining about the ballroom?

Trump is the most significant threat to the city’s architectural and design legacy since British forces burned the Capitol and White House during the War of 1812. He has already demolished the East Wing of the White House, which dates to the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He will replace it with a building that makes James Hoban’s neo-Classical executive mansion a mere appendage to a space meant to function like a hotel-convention-center-entertainment venue. He has proposed (but temporarily delayed) painting the next-door Eisenhower Executive Office Building a blinding shade of white, which preservation groups argue could irreversibly damage the stone facade.

He wants to build a 250-foot-tall memorial arch near the most hallowed ground in the country, Arlington National Cemetery. His “Independence Arch,” which he has said will honor himself personally, would dwarf the largest victory arches in the world, including the arch in Pyongyang, built in 1982 to honor North Korea’s murderous dictator, Kim Il Sung. Only Eero Saarinen’s slender ribbon of steel, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, would be taller. Although it would be built in a traffic circle on the Virginia side of the Potomac, the Trump arch would compete with some of the tallest buildings in Washington, including the Washington Monument and Washington National Cathedral, fundamentally altering a meticulously preserved skyline.

The president’s proposed “National Garden of American Heroes” would introduce a forest of quickly designed statues to the banks of the Potomac almost opposite the new triumphal arch. A sylvan space defined by monumental memorials to Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thomas Jefferson would be cluttered, wax museum-style, with hundreds of stubby tributes to showbiz stars, folk heroes and sports celebrities.

I mean, personally, a lot of the things Trump is doing and has proposed are kinda stupid, but, good grief, the WP’s Philip Kennicott is going pure batguano insane on this. Is this article really necessary, especially being web front page and pretty high on placement? Maybe they could spend some time investigating graft and fraud and waste in the federal government? Crime in D.C.? And this is not a short piece. It’s long.