A Top Architecture Critic Says Trump 'Will Destroy' Washington

Today on CityCast D.C., between the East Wing of the White House, the proposed arc to Trump,

and whatever is going to happen to the Kennedy Center, it is no secret that our first real

estate developer president is poised to have a big, big impact on how our city looks.

But what are all these individual projects, plus whatever else Donald Trump dreams up

over the next three years, going to do to the city as a whole?

According to one of America's foremost architecture critics, the answer is nothing good!

I sat down with Paul Goldberger, the longtime New York Times and New Yorker critic,

rude a blistering essay about the Trump effect on D.C.'s delicately balanced city-scape.

We went from talking about the shape of Washington to discussing the nature of cities in general.

I had a lot of fun, and I hope you'll stick around.

Today is Thursday, March 19th.

I'm Michael Schaefer, and here's what D.C.'s talking about.

Paul Goldberger, welcome.

Thank you. Good to be here.

So you spent years as the architect or critic of the New York Times and the New Yorker.

You have, I assume, because of that written about various things that were built in Washington over the years.

Oh, a lot. Over the years, yes.

Yes. I would reckon you've never written a column like you did this month when you wrote the quote,

Trump will destroy Washington if it's the last thing he does.

What do you mean by that? What's he doing?

Well, I didn't write the headline, although I don't object to it either.

What I meant is that I think Trump fundamentally misunderstands Washington.

He envisions it as a place of imperial grandeur because he envisions himself more as an emperor

than as a democratic president.

And he's trying to reshape it to be, you know, the seat of an empire.

Well, we are supposed to be a democracy, not an empire.

And he doesn't seem to quite understand that.

The way it's playing out in architecture is hardly as important as the way it's playing out in a lot of other places,

but it still, it means a huge amount because Washington has always symbolized the modesty and the openness

and the participatory nature of democracy.

And he's trying to turn that into something else.

So I think a lot of people would look at Washington and say, you know, these vistas and these grand avenues

is sort of imperial.

But you have a different understanding, both of Washington and I think of cities in general.

Yes, I do.

There is indeed something very grand about Washington and very moving.

This is a big country.

It was founded, wasn't as big when it was founded, but it certainly had big ambitions.

And it had ambitions to be a different kind of country, to be a place in which royal power did not govern a whole.

And it also began, you know, in a much more casual sort of way.

And I feel that the essential fact about any great city, Washington, New York, Paris, Rome, Tokyo, what have you,

is not pure and perfect order.

It's that amazing combination of random things, of energy, of life on the street, things like that,

with a certain amount of order and dignity.

And I think Trump understands none of that.

That's a really big part of the problem.

Well, I think you also read that he fears some of that.

I think he does fear some of that.

I think what dictators want more than anything is order.

And they, in fact, sell themselves to the public.

I mean, the idea that they alone can provide order and stability.

I mean, obviously a city cannot be about total disorder or the world is chaos.

And society is not functioning.

But one of the magical things about cities is that they combine order and disorder in a fantastic

and, I think, very life-affirming way.

And I think that's too subtle for Trump, we might say.

So in your piece, you mentioned a few projects that most people are pretty familiar with by now.

The New White House ballroom, the arch that people are calling the arch to Trump.

And whatever may happen to the Kennedy Center when they close it for quote unquote repairs

starting this summer in the face of plummeting ticket sales.

So like a lot, I'm a decent native.

A lot of locals might see these as important buildings.

But, you know, we're pretty familiar here with some ghastly federal architecture.

And a lot of people think of sort of the mall buildings, the official core,

as somehow at an angle to their neighborhoods.

Can you explain the relationship there?

Because I think that's a really fascinating thing you've worked on.

I think it is. You know, you're absolutely right, Michael.

And official Washington is not a neighborhood.

And it is something that stands for the entire country.

And much as I love Georgetown, say, and I love walking around Georgetown,

all of Washington should not look like Georgetown.

I mean, this is a country of 400 million people.

It needs a capital that has some kind of dignity and grandeur to it.

So I'm hardly objecting to that.

It's just that Trump is missing all the rest of it.

And most important of all, he's missing the importance of history.

The idea that the White House is some kind of piece of personal property that he can tinker with during his period of residency.

And do so essentially with no need for any formal approval.

He sees the process we're seeing right now is a joke because he initially said he didn't need anyone to approve it.

Then it turned out, in fact, the law did require that both the Fine Arts Commission

and the National Capital Planning Commission review it.

So he then proceeded to fire all the experts who were on those commissions,

to replace them with synchofants who will do whatever he says.

And so he can claim now that the legal process is being fulfilled because, or being followed,

because those organizations have reviewed it.

Well, sort of yes, but I mean, they're barely the organizations they were.

Right, so you've got this body with like a 26-year-old receptionist on it.

Yes, exactly.

I mean, put on your critic hat for a second.

But these folks miss that if you'd been on the board, would have seen.

Explain your critique of the ballroom.

With the ballroom is absurd.

It's insanely grand.

It will overshadow the White House.

The idea that you would expand the White House by adding a building that is bigger than the White House is a joke.

You're simply rendering the White House to be a trivial appendage to the ballroom,

which will also block the vista between the White House and the Capitol,

which was a key part of Pierre-Launfant's original design for Washington when he laid out Washington.

The idea that the Capitol representing the people and the White House

were the president whose job was not to determine the laws, but to execute them,

to live.

Putting this huge ballroom in front of it is a way of saying that the imperial side of the White House,

the emperor, the want to be emperor side of the White House,

is so important it's going to block the view of the Capitol where the representatives of the people presumably overlook the White House.

Well, so the symbolism is really actually, when you think about it, the symbolism is pretty bad there.

It's completely saying that imperial grander, no pun intended, trumps the people's view here.

And then, you know, since my piece came out, some other news appeared that is pretty shocking,

which is that the current chairman of the Fine Arts Commission said that he wants to propose that the columns

on the North Portico of the original White House be modified to make them more ornate,

to make them Corinthian because Trump apparently prefers that style of column.

And he said that they were going to, it was so that White House would match the ballroom.

So the White House would match the ballroom.

Effectively, the ballroom is dictating to the White House.

Precisely.

Something that somebody's logic is a little bit backwards here, I think.

That's a key problem.

But also, you know, the idea that at that point, you're literally tampering with what was done by the original architect of the White House.

The North Portico was not part of the original design, but it was added only a few years later by the original architect of the building, James Hopen.

So you really are tampering at that point with the original.

And there's something almost, even though that's a much smaller change compared to the ballroom,

there's something about it that's almost scarier in a way.

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I'm the CEO of CityCast, but I also have another job.

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And the other piece I'd love to hear your critique of is the art de Trump,

which you'll write about how it interferes with the relationship between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington Cemetery.

Yeah, I mean, the art de Trump, which we hope will never happen, is not only...

But if it does, let it please have that name.

Right, right, exactly. Is it, you know, gargantuan?

And remember, part of the other issue here is Trump's tendency to confuse size with quality.

Everything is about bigger, bigger, bigger.

So this, apparently, the architect Nicholas Sharpeno proposed three different versions.

Trump immediately went to the biggest one.

That this is the one we need to build.

And he wants to put it on the island, it's really sort of a traffic island,

just in front of the memorial bridge connecting Arlington to where the Lincoln Memorial is in Washington.

And it would not completely block the Lincoln Memorial, but it would change the vista of it considerably.

And from the Lincoln Memorial, you would not any longer see up the hill toward Arlington National Cemetery.

You would, in fact, see the arch. That would become the main thing you'd see.

It's the last thing in the world we need.

And it is not in any way scared. It would overwhelm everything else.

I worry that the, it would, in fact, make even the Lincoln Memorial seem trivial.

So I think there's been a lot of people who think the White House ballroom is a gaudy, tacky,

Isoar, and who think the art to Trump is insane.

What I thought was interesting about the essay you wrote was that you draw this quite elaborate comparison

to Benito Messolini and Rome.

Yes.

And this is not sort of a cheap reach for the fascist comparison.

Right. Right.

Because you talk about what Messolini did to the city and what he misunderstood.

How does that compare with what Trump is doing or may do to our city?

I made it because I think it is comparable.

You know, a lot of people have made comparisons to Albert Speer in Berlin, Hitler's architect,

which are not totally wrong.

They've begun to get a little common and almost trite.

I wanted to say something different.

I think it's a comparison to Mussolini's more relevant.

First because Speer wasn't architect.

Trump is not. Mussolini was not.

In Mussolini's case, you had a dictator essentially telling architects what to do.

And trying to remake the city in a different image, in his image.

And that's precisely what Trump is doing in Washington.

So the comparison is I think more apt.

And then as with Mussolini, you've had a lot of architects curing favor and running around trying to please him,

doing things that many of them lived to regret.

Thankfully, many of them did not come to be.

There's another irony in all of this, but it's sort of not that relevant to Trump,

which is that some of them were actually rather creative figures who did some kind of intriguing

and interesting modern things.

Because Mussolini did have a sort of obsession with imperial grandeur.

He also had this idea that, you know, he recognized it was the 20th century.

And he was trying to evolve a kind of modern version of it.

And in a few cases, some of that stuff turned out to be pretty good and is actually some of it admired today.

Trump has no interest in even that.

He simply wants to do grand things that look like they'd been there all along, which of course they're happy.

You have this great line about, in his attempt to make Rome imperial again,

Mussolini profoundly misread Rome.

Of course, everyone knows it's got these huge grand monuments,

but you're right about how they sort of come as a surprise.

Yes, for me, that's actually the great thing about Rome.

I said at one point, Rome is a city of monuments without monumental settings, at least most of them.

And actually, that sort of makes it more exciting and more wonderful.

You don't always want a great enormous vista.

You don't always want to have to walk half a mile to get from one thing to another.

And so you walk around and then suddenly, wow, this is incredibly cool thing that just sort of hits you in this accidental way.

I mean, Rome is a city full of surprise.

I'm working on a book that is going to be called the Imperfect City Design and Serendipity.

That'll be out later this year, that is about the way in which accidents and architecture and planning kind of connect in the making of cities.

And so a lot of my thinking about Rome came from the work I've been doing on this book and realizing that that's kind of the magic of it,

is this combination of brilliant design and total accident.

To extrapolate from that, your point is that the sort of authoritarian mind does not like Serendipity or accident.

That's the most important point of all that the authoritarian mind cannot grasp this idea that sometimes just letting it happen brings us some wonderful happy accidents that can make places very beautiful.

That doesn't mean we can totally let things happen or it becomes chaos, but that balance of authority and kind of stepping back and knowing how to fine tune that and how to manage that.

In a way, that's kind of the idea of democracy, is that governing government, but not too much government.

That was once a key part of the conservative ethos until Trump turned it into a kind of dictatorial authoritarian ethos instead.

So in sort of conservative mega intellectual circles and we've I've talked to some of these people and I think there's a lot of people who are quite sincere in this belief.

There's this real belief in how important it is to have a quote unquote classical style.

There's a revolution against some of the trends that were in there telling foisted on people in the 20th century.

You write that, you know, whether you think that or not, that is not Trump's motivation that he was just as happy to throw off a classical architect as he would be any other architect because he has another goal.

He has another goal. I mean, he thinks classical traditional classical architecture symbolizes money, power, and you know, a sense of connection to the larger forces of history.

But what he really wants more than anything is just size and grander.

And the first architect working on the ballroom withdrew when he and Trump could not agree on the size.

He wanted it to be relatively more modest and Trump just wanted bigger, bigger, more, more, bigger, bigger, bigger.

So he found somebody else who would do who would essentially take dictation from him and do whatever he ordered, which is where the current design is.

But, you know, a longstanding conservative critique in architecture is that people have been too deferential to the architectural profession and particularly to its elite members, particularly governments and universities and institutions.

People who don't actually have to live in the house that's getting made have said, you know, short thing you're genius at to their detriment.

That's what I think a lot of the conservatives think is going on here that like at good at last, we have a president who's acting like a client who's going to have their opinion instead of just deferring to these folks.

Look, there's no excuse for a bad building and there's plenty of bad buildings, both modern and traditional.

And ultimately architecture is about solving problems as much as it is about creating beautiful objects.

And a great work of architecture has to be able to do both. It can't be one or the other. It has to be both at the same time.

That's the challenge of architecture that indeed we might even say the paradox of architecture that it's trying to do two things that are often somewhat contradictory.

It's a practical thing and it's a work of art. And certainly there have been times when that balance has not been quite right.

More often, frankly, it's more wrong on the other direction. It's not a work of art at all. It's just an ugly thing.

But sometimes there are buildings that have been very self-conscious works of art that have not worked very well. And sometimes that's indeed the fault of the architect.

I don't think that that explains this particular situation because I don't see how this building particularly functions very well.

It's so gargantuan, not only does it overwhelm the White House from the outside and block this historically important vista.

It also is not going to work terribly well in the inside. I mean, one of the problems of a ballroom that seats a thousand people is that if you have even 500 people in it, it looks pretty empty and weird and uncomfortable.

So what are you going to do with this thing the other time? Are you going to like put a bunch of potted palms around in a little circle in the middle and have ten tables just clustered in the middle and all the rest of it is empty. That's going to be pretty weird.

The according to standards in the catering industry is far more space than you need even for a thousand people. And the kitchen is gargantuan.

I think some of the size is driven by the desire to have other things in this building, including underground bunkers and things like that.

So there's a lot of other aspects of it that are not that don't really meet the function test either. So I think I would say to somebody saying, well finally we have a president who's talking back to the architects.

No, we have a president who's actually just dictating a bunch of things that he doesn't fully understand that don't actually even meet functional requirements all that well.

And the idea of this grand portico facing south, you don't even go in or out, you know, it's an emergency exit with a grand scare going down to what used to be the gardens that have now been changed and redesigned as well.

Before I let you go, I want to get to talking about the future of this because there's almost three more years of the Trump administration. I thought one of the more interesting and undercovered things that has happened at that same meeting where the ballroom was rubber stamped the commission of fine arts gave us sort of tongue lashing to the District of Columbia public schools about the renovation of a small elementary school in Northeast Washington.

It's not beautiful enough. It's not whatever. Again, as a parent of DC public school graduates, I could tell you there's there's some pretty school houses and there's a lot of really ugly ones in DC like everywhere else.

Like everywhere else, but that level of like monkeying around with literally elementary school renovation is pretty amazing that federal boards have some power over local things here.

What else is going to be within Trump's and or his acolytes's target range?

Well, what I think is so extraordinary about the story you just mentioned is is the enormous contrast between the micromanaging of this poor little school.

And I'm not familiar with it enough to know whether what they're doing make sense or make or is right or wrong.

But being so obsessive about small details and giving them such a hard time while at the same time they kind of wave the whole ballroom thing through which is important to the whole country.

They were so eager to approve the ballroom that they did not even do what is standard in these situations which is approve a conceptual basic design concept now.

And then when the plans are 100% finished, which they're not yet, then review them one more time to give final approval to the final plans.

They said to the architect and to the president, you know, this is fine. And in fact, you don't need to come back.

We're waving you through the entire process right now.

So they gave this key building of enormous symbolic importance to the entire country, essentially, you know, a free pass through the commission process.

But at the same time, just to show that they really are rigorous and throwing they really pay attention to their mission, they then put all the attention on this poor little local school.

So there's a kind of hypocrisy to all of that really.

You know, laws can be undone criminals can get put in jail architecture when particularly when you knock something down is a lot harder to undo looking back at your study.

Rome is there a way for a city to recover from this like like what did like Rome is not exactly a horrible place today.

No, Rome's pretty wonderful place today. It's a fantastic city. It's a fantastic in part, as I said, at least to me because it's such an incredible layered mix of different things.

And of wonderful accident as well as wonderful intention.

A couple of things. First, the slower the process gets, the less likely it is that this project will be finished by the end of his term, which is a good thing.

There are still lawsuits pending. If they are successful, that could cause a reconsideration of the entire project, which is also a very a very good thing.

No, no, it's true that tearing down a building is not an easy or quick thing to do.

But it can be done. Indeed, you can tear down a building rather more easily than you can build one. So there is that.

I know Frank Lloyd Wright once said, you know, doctors can bury their mistakes. Architects can only plant ivy.

We could plant a lot of ivy on it too. Let's worry about that when we get to that point, I would say.

At this point, I hope that those who are trying to get this project either stop completely or radically reduced in size and redesigned are successful.

And the process still has to play itself out through the legal process and the legal challenges to the project.

Leaving aside the ballroom. Are there other things that you are worried about happening in the next two or three years?

Yeah, I mean, well, first, who knows what he may think of to distract people from the last thing that he did to distract people from the previous thing that he did.

I know that he's proposed painting the executive office building to the west of the White House white.

That would be turn that building, which is an interesting and complicated piece of architecture that some people dislike others love.

It's a grand second empire building of a whole different style architecturally than most of the rest of Washington.

Painting at white will turn it into a kind of frivolous wedding cake.

It also, those who know about building technology and materials and so forth say that in fact, you know, a building of stone like that should not be painted permanently.

It's actually not good for the stone. It will not help the long term health of that building.

So I hope that can be derailed.

But again, who knows what else he may come up with if he sort of feels empowered by all this.

And now I think part of the problem is that he thinks he's just warming up.

And who knows what he will think of that hasn't even come come before.

Paul, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you very much, Michael. I've enjoyed it.

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