On August 1 the president announced plans for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom off the White House East Wing. The architect chosen is James McCrery, a neoclassical revival figure, a Trump 1.0 Fine Arts Commission appointee, and a Catholic University professor. AECOM will provide the engineering work. The small neoclassical "trad" network around the president includes architects experienced in large religious and Palladian-style projects. The American Institute of Architects issued a statement noting technical and procedural concerns. Exterior alterations to the White House are exceedingly rare and governed by the Committee for the Preservation of the White House, chaired by the National Park Service director and staffed by federal officials and presidentially selected members.
When it was announced on August 1 that the president was planning to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom off the White House's East Wing, I already knew what it would look like before even clicking the press release. When I saw who the architect was-James McCrery, one of the great warhorses of the neoclassical revival, a Trump 1.0 Fine Arts Commission appointee, and a professor at the Catholic University of America-I was utterly unsurprised.
There are not many architects working full-time to build Neo-Palladian churches in the nation's greenest suburbs, and the coterie of "trad" architectural thinkers who have inserted themselves in the president's orbit for the last 10 years is not very large. (Perhaps there is no other group in the field that punches so far above its weight.) McCrery, best known for huge religious buildings, is one of the few people in this select group feasibly capable of working at scales of 90,000 square feet.
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