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.
“It is a completely inappropriate idea and at odds with universally held historic preservation standards,” said Bruce Redman Becker, architect and former member of the Commission of Fine Arts under President Joe Biden, speaking with the Post.
Steven Semes, an architect and professor at the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture, told the Post that Corinthian columns would be wildly “inappropriate” for the White House, calling the proposal on its face “completely absurd.”
“It’s like surgically adding or removing a couple of inches to one of your legs, thinking that you could still walk,” he said. “It becomes a very different animal. And it becomes a completely absurd animal.”
Two people close to Trump, speaking with the Post on the condition of anonymity, confirmed to the outlet that the president had “mused” about having Corinthian columns constructed for both new government buildings and at the White House. A White House spokesperson, however, told the Post that no plans currently exist to replace the White House’s existing columns at its front entrance, and that Cook Jr.’s proposal has yet to be presented to Trump.