Inside Trump’s push to keep architects firmly in line

Long before he first ran for president in 2000 or became a reality television star with "The Apprentice," Donald Trump generated a lot of discussion with his work as a real estate developer. Trump's detractors often used words like "ostentatious," "flashy," "pretentious" and "gaudy" to describe his hotels and casinos in Atlantic City — adjectives that are now being used to describe his architectural proposals in the Washington, DC area, from a White House ballroom to a 250-foot "triumphal arch" near Arlington National Cemetery. In The Nation, however, journalist Kate Wagner details Trump's ability to make sure architects give him what he wants.

"One of the less remarked upon reverberations of Trump's disastrous rule of this country is that he has turned its architectural critics into exegetes of his sleazy plans for Washington, DC's built environment," Wagner explains. "Instead of writing about the burgeoning, and often life-affirming, shifts in today's architectural culture — from adaptive reuse to beautiful, functional affordable housing — we critics keep getting yanked back into the slopworld of ballrooms, arches, and faux gold leaf."

Wagner continues, "It goes without saying that the proposed 250-foot-tall triumphal arch — one foot for every year the United States has existed! — is absurd and tacky. Modeled on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, it boasts gaudy gilded lettering and a 80-foot cake-topper statue — Trump can't help but cheat, even on the height of his own precious arch. His McMansionized conception of what is monumental and 'historic' is, much like his culinary penchant for McDonald's itself, one of his most idiosyncratic qualities."'

Wagner argues that Trump is a "true son of the 1980s" who "believes in spectacle over quality."

"As Trump waits out the pause on the ballroom construction," Wagner observes, "his toadies in the Commission of Fine Arts — including his now-fired ballroom architect, James McCreary — are pretending that their actual vision and opinions on architecture matter…. The Faustian bargain the so-called neoclassical movement within architecture has made with Trump in order to secure access to basically unlimited control over what gets built in the nation's capital comes with the caveat that they are now beholden to someone bereft of taste. Not only that, they are and will forever be pariahs in their own field."

Wagner adds, "Their complicity in the wanton destruction of DC will all but kill the nigh-50-year project of reviving neoclassicism in architecture. And for all their populist bloviating about speaking to the true aesthetic preferences of the American public, 58 percent of Americans do not approve of Trump's changes to the White House. Art of the deal indeed."

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