‘Its Stairs Lead Nowhere’: Trump’s White House Ballroom Design Trashed By Architects in Interactive NY Times Feature

Image via White House

Days before President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom faces a final vote, architects are warning that the project’s rushed timeline could prove disastrous — as they say they design has undergone little scrutiny “and it shows.”

In an interactive feature published Sunday by The New York Times, writers Junho Lee, Larry Buchanan and Emily Badger — all of whom have backgrounds relating to architecture, urban planning and the fine arts — took an in-depth look at the ballroom ahead of Thursday’s final vote by the National Capital Planning Commission (NCPC) to approve the project.

“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,” Lee, Buchanan and Badger wrote. “And the ballroom will be worse off for it, architects warn.”

The article leads with an interactive drawing pointing out — what architects believe to be — numerous design flaws. They call out “fake windows on the north side,” columns which “block interior ballroom view,” and an “unnecessarily big” rooftop area.

“Critics warn it still has many issues — its portico is too big, its stairs lead nowhere, its columns will block views from inside the ballroom,” one of the piece’s captions read.

The authors note that “in the sprint to complete it before the end of [Trump’s] term, the addition appears to have compressed the normal design evolution for any project.”

“As recently as October, the president was still increasing the ballroom’s capacity, the kind of decision needed at the concept stage,” they wrote. “And the White House has said it plans to begin building in the spring, a timeline that would mean construction documents would have to be prepared even as the design was still under review.”

Will Scharf, who serves as chair of the planning commission and White House staff secretary, said the ballroom could not be done without Trump moving quickly to try and bypass the kind of red tape that often impedes large-scale government projects.

“If not for President Trump, his desire to move quickly, and his raising the money to fund this, a project like this could languish for years with no decision or action,” Scharf told the Times. “And we could still be debating it at NCPC meetings 20 years from now.”

But critics argue the new East Wing demands that kind of scrutiny — as it stands to be more than three times bigger than the West Wing and disrupt the symmetry of the White House.

“The ballroom is literally an imposition between two branches of our government,” architect David Scott Parker — who serves the board of the National Trust for Historic Preservation — told the Times.

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