{"id":91547,"date":"2025-10-22T18:00:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T18:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/91547\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T18:00:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T18:00:10","slug":"what-other-architects-think-about-the-design-of-trumps-white-house-ballroom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/91547\/","title":{"rendered":"what other architects think about the design of Trump’s White House ballroom"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my previous diary<\/a> I wrote about the companies that are involved in Trump\u2019s disastrous demolition of key parts of the White House and the building of his disgusting White House ballroom. One of those companies is McCrery Architects<\/a>, led by James McCrery, which designed the ballroom.\u00a0There\u2019s an interesting piece in Punch List Architecture Newsletter<\/a>, a publication geared to architects, that offers more background on McCrery (he\u2019s a wingnut) and on what the architecture community thinks of his ballroom design (they don\u2019t like it).\u00a0<\/p>\n

It will surprise nobody here that McCrery specializes in religious architecture.\u00a0His portfolio includes cathedrals in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas, as well as a Carmelite monastery in Wyoming. Punch List notes that McCrery describes his career arc in religious terms.<\/p>\n

\u201cGod helps people understand what it is that His will for them is,\u201d (McCrery) said in the Bentz interview. \u201cI truly believe that. It\u2019s most efficacious when the person is open to that help, that guidance.\u201d He has similarly dismissed modernist architecture as \u201cungodly\u201d: \u201cIt\u2019s exactly not created. It\u2019s counter to God\u2019s creation, in every aspect and in every detail.\u201d<\/p>\n

The broader architecture community does not have much nice to say about McCrery\u2019s White House ballroom design \u2014\u00a0or about how he was chosen. Punch List notes that the American Institute of Architects\u00a0sent a letter<\/a> to the Committee for the Preservation of the White House in which it raised alarms about several aspects of the ballroom plan. <\/p>\n

Though it is couched in diplomatic language, the letter calls out the administration for choosing McCrery without an open public process and raises questions about what it calls the design\u2019s \u201cscale and balance\u201d: \u201cWe urge careful consideration of adjustments that would align the proposed additions more closely with the White House\u2019s historic character.\u201d<\/p>\n

McCrery\u2019s former mentor, famed architect Peter Eisenman, was less diplomatic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

(Eisenman) called McCrery\u2019s ballroom design \u201cbonkers\u201d before adding, \u201cputting a portico at the end of a long facade and not in the center is what one might say is untutored.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ouch.<\/p>\n

The author of the Punch List piece, Christopher Hawthorne, agrees with the criticism:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t disagree with the growing consensus<\/a> that the ballroom design, a big-footed architectural presence stomping toward the southern edge of the White House grounds, violates the very standards of beauty and proportion that McCrery loves to rhapsodize about in interviews, to say nothing of the protocols long in place to guide changes to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. I\u2019m also of course reminded of the heavily gilded architecture that Viktor Orba\u0301n\u2019s autocratic government coaxed from the typically more subtle Sou Fujimoto in Budapest…<\/p>\n

Hawthorne goes on to say \u2014\u00a0even more pointedly \u2014\u00a0that\u00a0what McCrery\u2019s ballroom\u00a0design suggests is \u201cnot so much a bloated classicism or an effort to turn Washington into Mar-a-Lago north, although it is both of those things, as a blueprint for making concrete the notion that the White House has turned in some fundamental sense into a retail outlet, a place where access and influence are nakedly bought and sold.\u201d<\/p>\n

If you want to let James McCrery know what you think of his involvement in destroying the People\u2019s House, his firm\u2019s general email is info@mccreryarchitects.com). He is also a professor at Catholic University<\/a>: Mccrery@cua.edu.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In my previous diary I wrote about the companies that are involved in Trump\u2019s disastrous demolition of key…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":["post-91547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}