Stalin
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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?
As 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
Specialising in the design of “traditional” Catholic churches, McCrery was appointed by Trump during his first term to serve on the US Commission of Fine Arts, an independent federal agency with the power to review the “design and aesthetics” of all construction within Washington DC.
Trump’s style edicts and building bombast exude a dictator-for-life megalomania vibe, as he barrels through his second term, with an unconstitutional third potentially in his sights. However, he is said to dislike the White House, finding it on the poky side, preferring to decamp to his Floridian resort Mar-a-Lago at every opportunity. The tone for his latest stay in the White House was set by his patio-fication of the Rose Garden, but he is now clearly aiming for a legacy more substantial than a bit of paving.
His record as a “patron” of architecture has been shaped by his rollercoaster career as a property developer. To him, buildings are simply extruded capital. He has an enduring fondness for Louis XIV bling, epitomised by his enrobing of a 1960s Manhattan skyscraper in golden bronze cladding to transform it into the gleamingly phallic Trump International Hotel and Tower. His more recent engoldening of the Oval Office, described by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt as a “golden office for the golden age”, has been unflatteringly compared to a professional wrestler’s dressing room.
‘Dictator-for-life vibes’: our architecture critic on Trump’s bulletproof ballroom bling
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?
comrade stalin
moscow
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