Last week’s announcement of a new ballroom for the White House will be, and already has been, criticised on political or economic grounds. We still don’t know who exactly is funding it; the lack of transparency, a law professor has argued, is “completely outrageous”. The matter of the ballroom’s aesthetics, meanwhile, has been somewhat neglected.
The design is gaudy and neoclassical, which are characteristics that have significance beyond the immediate matter of the ballroom itself. Aesthetics, after all, are about more than appearances. Eccentric rulers have created some of the world’s most famous (and most visited) monuments: Versailles, Neuschwanstein, Pena Palace, or even the Pyramids of Giza. Each of these, in their own time, represented a colossal redirection of funds toward what may have seemed like the private ambitions of a powerful individual. In the long run, however, all these monuments have been an economic boon for their regions. And, even more importantly, they have become beloved symbols of identity and belonging.
The President’s new ballroom is not likely to be ranked among those monuments. Though, perhaps, that is not its purpose. What is its purpose? To hold state dinners and suchlike. The White House has limited capacity and, more often than not, presidential occasions are hosted in tents erected on its lawns. In some sense, there may be a need for it. Let’s agree on that. In which case the next question is: what should it look like, and have McCrery Architects, commissioned by the White House, come up with the right design?
The most obvious aesthetic criticism would surely be its incongruity with the rest of the White House. First: it will upset the symmetry demanded by classical architecture. The ballroom’s portico has been given an odd site, hanging off the south-eastern corner of the complex. Further, its floor-to-ceiling windows are ill-proportioned, and introduce a totally different tone to the one set by the White House’s other windows.
Second: the ballroom’s abundant, pseudo-Baroque ornamentation is not in keeping with the White House’s otherwise sober, Palladian appearance. There is a hint of Versailles in the proposed ballroom; the White House is not, and never was supposed to be, Versailles. In this sense, the ballroom is more in keeping with Trump’s golden penthouse than the building it will adjoin.
So what? Well, all forms of classical architecture are defined by their adherence to a strict set of rules — including the proportions and shapes of every single element, plus their decorations — laid down long ago. That is why most neoclassical buildings look very, very similar. Still, I’m not sure these are convincing aesthetic complaints. Many of the world’s most beloved neoclassical buildings play fast and loose with its rules; too often, classical architecture and its fans descend into pedantry. Symmetry, if we look at the world’s most beloved buildings, is not much of a virtue — they are all palimpsests, added to and modified by succeeding generations.
The next most obvious aesthetic criticism is gaudiness. Of all the different subgenres of neoclassical architecture, it is a peculiarly American kind, a resort-ified Rococo, a Disneyfied Baroque, that will define the new ballroom. This is the architectural equivalent of a gilded labubu; it is the highest form of what we should probably call the consumerist neoclassical.
But worse than its overuse of gold, and worse than its incongruity with the rest of the White House, is that all its decorations will be utterly without meaning (other than the expression of power) or purpose (other than to impress people). The mock-ups provided by McCrery show your typical, thoroughly generic Baroque styling: prominent dentils, endless cavettos, ceiling roses, fluted shafts, a coffered ceiling, and suchlike. This is the same conventionalised ornamentation you get on every neoclassical building, everywhere in the world, regardless of regional tradition or heritage. It is the neoclassical version of AI slop.
Compare that to (for example) Augustus Pugin’s laborious decoration of the Houses of Parliament in the 19th century. He designed each of its myriad details, from door-hinges to chairs, differently — each element of the Houses of Parliament is wholly unique to that building. Of all the criticisms you can fairly make of Pugin’s work, that it is generic or meaningless is not among them. He also gifted it a decorative motif which has since become an official symbol of Britain’s Parliament: the portcullis. That is the power of meaningful, purposive design — an opportunity that should have been taken with this proposed expansion to the White House.
A really beautiful ballroom would have relied, above all, on the beauty of the materials required by its construction, and by the free, freshly-inspired enrichment of those necessary elements. And it is in the enrichment of those elements — a fancy way of saying decoration — that the enduring value and useful beauty of this ballroom would have emerged: murals on the ceiling to depict episodes from American history; statuary to portray noteworthy Americans; reliefs to show the life of modern Americans; motifs to symbolise those things that define the 21st century. These may sound like odd suggestions, but such are the decorations that adorn most of the world’s historic and beloved buildings, from across the ages. Even art depicting the Avengers would be better (more meaningful, more interesting, more representative of our times!) than cold, conventional, essentially thoughtless Baroque imitation.
This new ballroom will feature the Corinthian Order (the most ornate of the classical orders, of course), and its capitals (those decorative parts at the top of columns) will have stylised acanthus leaves carved on them, as the rules of classical architecture dictate. To the Ancient Greeks these acanthus leaves meant something, hence their use of the leaves as decoration. What do acanthus leaves mean now, and why are we putting them on our buildings? Think of the famous Darth Vader Grotesque at the Washington National Cathedral. That is a meaningful bit of decoration, and one that represents the spirit of Gothic Architecture (beloved by Pugin and rightly preferred to the classical) whereby artists were empowered to embrace the imagination and culture of the age they lived in. The new ballroom could have been similarly inspired.
And yet, despite all this, the truth is that those who don’t oppose the ballroom on political grounds will likely welcome it on aesthetic grounds. Why? Because it is, even if in the vaguest and most ostentatious way, somewhat “traditional”. Statistics and surveys bear out the patent truth that, overwhelmingly, people prefer “traditional” architecture. The word “traditional” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here — it encompasses everything from pre-industrial, thoroughly vernacular, peasant-built cottages to post-industrial, partly mass-produced megastructures like the Palace of Westminster or the Chrysler Building.
Still, there is clearly something that unites all these buildings — a something which separates them from the kind of modernist design, whether bland or playful, that has defined almost all architecture for the last seventy years. In so many ways, Trump has rejected modern liberal orthodoxy; here is another. Elite architects, to whom neoclassical design is, at best, kitsch, loathe the Trumpian decree that new government buildings be neoclassical in style. Indeed, critics sometimes call such decrees fascistic. MAGA, on the other hand, often uses classical iconography to signal its taste for what it sees as timeless aesthetic nobility — educated liberal elites be damned. In design and architecture, then, we see a physical embodiment of Trump’s populism.
None of this is to say whether modernism, so-called, and traditionalism, so-called, are good or bad; it is only to say that there is a difference, and what most people prefer, all around the world, is clear.
That this procedurally generated cube of supremely generic, supremely American Baroque will (if it is built) represent one of the most landmark and obviously “traditional” works of public architecture in recent decades is a shame. In fact, it is a sign of our present imaginative barrenness that this ballroom hasn’t really prompted an aesthetic discussion whatsoever. Had Trump’s proposed extension to the White House been in keeping with the kind of architecture otherwise filling the world’s cities, there would have been an aesthetic discussion. But, because people generally like this sort of thing, the issue is purely political and economic. Were his proposal to have added a Post-Constructivist ballroom it would have been shut down. Not because of the other concerns, of funding or perceived monarchical behaviour, that have accompanied this announcement, but because it would have been almost universally condemned as aesthetically inappropriate.
And so we must confess the awkward aesthetic truth that this ballroom represents a step in the right direction, however piddling and generic, and that it will (in the long run, in the minds of the majority) be a more beloved building than most other things built in this or the next decade. In which case it should be a wake-up call, primarily because we can (as history and the fabulous buildings we have inherited attest) do so much better.
“We must confess the awkward aesthetic truth that this ballroom represents a step in the right direction.”
In the end, this ballroom will be no worse than something like Buckingham Palace — which, viewed with unprejudiced eyes, turns out to be an awfully bland bit of neoclassical architecture. Its appeal and magic derive from its age, reputation, and familiarity rather than from its design. And it’s worth remembering that the White House has been rebuilt twice: the first after being burned down in wartime, and the second when it was believed to be on the verge of collapse in the late 1940s. Under President Truman it was gutted internally and totally reconstructed, apparently without much sympathy for historical character. So we are talking about the modification of a building which isn’t even as old as Brutalism.
Still, this is an important moment. Because, ultimately, an “aesthetic” is the expression of a person or people’s emotional, psychological, and spiritual health. And what the aesthetic of this proposed ballroom tells us is that America, and the world more generally, is in dire need of genuinely meaningful architecture.
