Trump plans to "TRUMP-ify" the "White House's iconic front entrance, which has stood for nearly 200 years"
Following the demolition of the White House’s East Wing to make room for President Donald Trump’s ballroom, the Trump administration has its sights set on another key fixture of the historic building, one that left architects and designers “baffled or even horrified,” The Washington Post reported Sunday.
Rodney Mims Cook Jr., who Trump tapped to lead the Commission of Fine Arts, is “proposing” to replace the columns at the White House’s front entrance – known as the North Portico – with more ornate-style Corinthian columns with a more luxurious appearance, a style of architecture Trump has “long preferred,” the Post reported.
“Corinthian is the highest order [of column], and that’s what our other two branches of government have,” Cook Jr. said in an interview last week, per The Post. “Why the White House didn’t originally use them, at least on the north front, which is considered the front door, is beyond me.”
The suggestion that the White House’s iconic front entrance may see its columns – which have stood for nearly 200 years – ripped out and replaced left several architects and designers floored.
https://www.rawstory.com/white-house-2676149587/
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trump's proposed columns are horrible. After trump dies or leaves office, these renovations including the oval office and if trump lives that long the ball room need to be torn down and restored. The East wing needs to be restored
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The head of a federal arts commission is proposing the more ornate Corinthian style for the nearly 200-year-old columns at the building’s front entrance.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/03/15/white-house-columns-ionic-corinthian/
Now the Trump-appointed head of a federal arts commission is proposing to replace them with a more ornate style favored by President Donald Trump. Those more decorative columns, a style known as Corinthian, are considered the most luxurious in classical architecture and appear on buildings such as the U.S. Capitol and the Supreme Court. They have long been deployed on Trump’s properties, and the president has handpicked them for his planned White House ballroom, too.
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....Many other architects and designers say they’re baffled or even horrified by Cook’s proposal.
“The Corinthian would be inappropriate for the Executive Residence,” said Steven Semes, a professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Notre Dame and an expert in classical architecture, warning that it would “harm” the original design of a building long known as the “People’s House.”
He added that the White House’s Ionic columns evoke “the character of dignity, grace and a kind of intimacy or domesticity,” whereas Corinthian columns are “used to express the height of formality and monumentality” for buildings such as the Capitol.
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.....Outside architects took a different view.
“Having buildings with two different classical orders next to each other isn’t that unusual,” said Matthew Bell, a University of Maryland architecture professor, arguing to keep the mansion’s Ionic columns. “Whether they were correct or not, in terms of their usage, that’s what Hoban put on the building.”
Carl Elefante, a past president of the American Institute of Architects and a critic of the ballroom — which he compared to a camel, or “a horse designed by a committee” — said he was troubled to think that it could reshape the White House, too.
“Why are we going to take the abomination of this ungainly design and start to affect the actual White House itself, rather than the other way around?” Elefante said.
I personally am hoping that trump dies before the construction of the ball room. No matter what, after trump dies or leaves office, this ball room needs to be demolished and the original East Wing needs to be restored.
