While President Donald Trump has been flexing America’s might overseas, he’s also working to impose his will on the nation’s capital.
Trump’s urban interventions in DC’s built environment have raised eyebrows and sparked lawsuits.
The changes to DC are already underway, from the bulldozing of the East Wing of the White House to make way for a ballroom, to a makeover of the White House Rose Garden, to the planned two-year closure of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for renovations.
And more changes could be coming soon: a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery, a plan to paint over the exterior of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and a sculpture park near the National Mall.
Past presidents have added to or modified parts of Washington DC’s historic core. But Trump’s disregard for design review processes has irked many preservationists.
Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram discussed these changes with The Washington Post’s longtime architecture critic, Philip Kennicott, who wrote a column about the threat Trump poses to D.C.’s architectural splendor.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Philip, you recently published a column about Donald Trump’s changes to Washington, DC in which you make a very bold argument. You say that Trump is the most significant threat to the city’s architecture and design since the city was burned down by the British in the War of 1812. Tell us how you justify that argument.
That sounds like hyperbole maybe, but, in fact, he really is turning out to be an amazingly influential force in terms of the design of the city. The War of 1812, the British come through and they burn the White House and they burn the Capitol, and they have to be rebuilt.
Donald Trump has torn down the East Wing of the White House, and he’s making major changes, major additions. He’s taken out the Rose Garden at the White House. He wants to build a new giant memorial triumphal arch at Arlington Cemetery. He’s talking about a Garden of National Heroes that would really change the kind of sylvan landscape along the Potomac River.
It goes on and on. And more important even than those changes is the fact that he wants to change how Washington manages change. He really wants to kind of force this through by personal fiat rather than go through a longstanding process of design review, which has been absolutely essential to keeping Washington the city we know today.
Essential to the argument you’re making here is that DC isn’t New York. It isn’t a city that was slowly built over time, that progressed and evolved with the times. The intention behind Washington, DC sets it apart.
Yes, it begins as a planned city. Very few American cities begin with a plan.
A designer named Pierre L’Enfant created what was called the L’Enfant Plan, and that was to take a typical city grid of streets, ones that run north-south, and east-west of big boxes that were generally for the neighborhoods, for commerce, for the daily stuff of life, and then lay over them these sweeping avenues that connect important civic nodal points. Maybe there’s a statue there, maybe that’s where the Capitol or the White House is. And these create a much grander architecture.
In some ways, the vistas of these avenues stand in for the ambition of the country — a sense of being far-seeing. And Washington has done an awful lot over the years to preserve that. Among the most basic things is: We didn’t build skyscrapers. We’ve kept a very low-slung skyline. And one of Trump’s changes, which is this giant 250-foot-tall memorial arch, would actually be one of the very tallest buildings in Washington and would fundamentally change that skyline.
[The public] voted this president into office twice. His hotels in New York are tourist attractions. People around the world go to his golf courses. If he plants an arch on the edge of Virginia in front of Arlington National Cemetery behind the Lincoln Memorial, is there a chance that people end up loving it the way they ended up loving the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, even though they might not have been clear wins when they were initially built?
Yeah, that’s a really interesting question. I wrestle with that all the time. One of the things that’s disturbing to me is that the impulses and the instincts that Americans had about the markers of monarchy — we used to be really allergic to that stuff. We used to really bristle at the idea of a president being in any way imperial or king-like.
Now, I think there’s less understanding of the connection between values and politics on one side and aesthetics and architecture on the other side. And so, in some ways, the story I’m writing is an attempt to introduce Americans to what is, in a sense, a hidden history and a hidden aesthetics in Washington that are very vital and very important. You may not get that just by taking a quick tour on a double decker bus of the city, but it’s there. And it was extremely important to the people who made Washington into the city that is greatly beloved today.
If he has his way, is he also suggesting to future presidents that you can have your way with this city, and its monuments, and its environs and then creating some kind of aesthetic seesaw for the nation’s capital?
Oh, I think it’s more than just suggesting. I think he’s laying out the roadmap.
I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation that one of the real victims in all of this is the idea of design review. There are these groups in Washington, including one that goes back to 1910, that have the ability to come in and look over plans, and they’re usually staffed by professional architects, professional designers, professional landscape artists, and they improve things.
Trump has stacked those committees with his own people, including his 26-year-old personal assistant, who, as far as I can tell, has no expertise in any of these questions. And they’re basically just kind of rubber stamping these things. So that’s a roadmap for any future president coming in.
If you want an unfortunate example, you might think back to the days of ancient Rome when new emperors would come in, and if they really didn’t like their predecessor, they wouldn’t just necessarily raze down the triumphal arch erected by the predecessor. They might even take the statues off and replace the heads with heads of their own symbolism, a kind of constant retrofitting of the symbolic landscape of Rome to represent the current person in power. And you can say, “Well, that’s just politics,” but that makes for a landscape that doesn’t have the historical gravitas and temporal lastingness that you would want and that we’ve had in Washington for a very long time.
