“Trump’s Ballroom Design Has Barely Been Scrutinized” is the headline of a New York Times analysis about Trump’s obsession with a huge ballroom he’s building near the White House. “Architects say it shows.”
You probably won’t be surprised to learn that a building designed by someone who doesn’t know much has also been built by people who don’t know much.
The New York Times says the building has fancy stairs that don’t lead anywhere, fake windows with bathroom stalls behind them, columns that block views from inside the ballroom, and it’s unnecessarily big.
The White House driveway, which was planned by the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, will have to be moved to make room for this huge structure.
This will break the original symmetry of the design, all to fit a southern entrance that the architect admits is more about looks than usefulness.
“Is it an absolutely essential part of the design?
I would say no, it’s not,” said Shalom Baranes, the architect. “Really it’s an aesthetic decision to have it there.”
This is a big issue because Trump is trying to get the building approved and built before he leaves office.
That means we’ll be stuck with a $400 million waste of money, and it will cost even more taxpayer money to fix it so it doesn’t look terrible.
The National Capital Planning Commission is set to vote on the final designs on Thursday.
The designs were even changed recently in October to make the space bigger.
“The timeline never made any sense to me,” said Thomas Gallas, a former member of the planning commission and an architect.
“A building on this scale might take architects and engineers 18 months to two years to go from the initial idea to finished construction drawings,” he said.
This building was announced in January.
Like everything else Trump is involved with, this is becoming a huge disaster—and like everything else Trump touches, we’ll be left to fix the mess.
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