Trump’s wild new plan for DC leaves experts furious

President Donald Trump’s various Washington DC renovations have aroused tremendous controversy, from his destruction of the White House’s East Wing and West Wing Colonnade and failed Reflecting Pool renovations. Now a prominent architecture critic is warning that Trump plans on further changes to Washington DC — alterations that, despite being unpopular, will be very hard to reverse.

“The proposed ‘Arc de Trump’ in Washington is less a monument than a gaudy construction the height of a skyscraper — a travesty that, if built, would dramatically change the landscape of the nation’s capital,” reported The New York Times' Paul Goldberger on Sunday. “This is probably why President Trump is so eager to get it made as fast as he can. It would be an unavoidable monument to a presidency and a man whom many Americans would rather not honor so conspicuously, if at all. He understands that once it is there, it will be hard to for anyone to make it go away.”

Goldberger described how Trump’s administration is trying to revise Section 106, a statute which mandates public collaboration over changes in Washington DC's monuments. Instead Trump is trying to revise it through a board he has stacked with his supporters, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation.

“The Trump administration’s revised version of Section 106 replaces ‘the views of the public are essential to informed Federal decision making’ with a statement that says the government will have ‘exclusive discretion to determine the usefulness of public participation’ — in effect saying that federal agencies can do as they please,” Goldberger wrote.

He added, “The Commission on Fine Arts, the National Park Service and the National Capital Planning Commission received tens of thousands of public comments on the ballroom and the the arch, almost all of which were negative. The commissions approved both projects anyway.”

Proceeding to describe how Trump’s renovations have already done tremendous damage in America’s capitol, he explained that “the proposed arch will destroy the vista connecting Lincoln to the Civil War dead, a space that for more than a hundred years has been kept open as one of the capital’s most subtle acts of monumental beauty. There is also the wreck that has been made of the Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial and the bronze statues that have been painted in gold, using funds taken from the National Park Service budget.”

He continued, “And let’s not forget Mr. Trump’s insistence on painting the gray granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building a stark white to have it ‘match’ the White House. The building is arguably the greatest work of architecture of the Second Empire style left in the United States, but when the mansard roofs and columns and terraces are all bright white it will look cheap, and worse, it will be effectively ruined. Granite is not porous, so it does not hold paint. I doubt that you can find a single painted Second Empire building in Paris, and for good reason. Does anyone think the Paris Opera would look better with a coat of white paint?”

Ultimately he concluded, “If the Trump administration succeeds in making its proposed changes to Section 106, it will take a wrecking ball to the historic preservation movement in the United States. And its effects will be felt across the country for generations.”

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Trump’s renovation is his attempts to blame others for their failures. When his Reflecting Pool renovations failed after being assigned to the manager of one of his golf clubs rather than someone with engineering and architectural qualifications, Trump instead tried to blame vandals including Olympian David Hearn. The case against Hearn did not reach the court after prosecutor Jeannine Pirro admitted the evidence proved incompetence rather than sabotage explained those issues.