A Huge Arch

Source: The New York Times

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A federal panel approved early designs for Trump's 250-foot-tall triumphal arch yesterday. The decision was hardly a surprise: The committee members were all appointed by Trump. It doesn't make the structure inevitable -- a group of Vietnam veterans has already filed a lawsuit against it, and Congress might get involved -- but the vote started a process that could dramatically change the skyline of the nation's capital. The arch, and its height, are meant to commemorate America's 250th anniversary.

The Commission of Fine Arts didn't rubber-stamp the plan. One member suggested that it lose some lions (which are not native to the United States), the golden eagles on the viewing deck and a winged angel on top. There'll be another vote down the line.

But the tone was largely laudatory. Before the vote, the panel's chairman called the president's idea "beautiful." On the table in front of him, there was a black baseball hat reading "Make Design Great Again."

A critic's view

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who presented the plan, said it "embodies American freedom, American unity, American strength and the American dream."

I asked Michael Kimmelman, our architecture critic, about that. He was blunt:

If it really involves a human architect it's the closest thing I've seen to someone purposefully trying to simulate A.I. slop. It's an insult to veterans, blocking views of Arlington National Cemetery. It is what you come up with if you're designing a monument to excess and narcissism.

Michael's not a modernist snob. There's nothing the matter with reviving the ideals of ancient Greek and Roman art, he told me. But "size is not the same thing as scale. Classical architecture isn't a bunch of acanthus leaves and columns on a building." It's about proportion and judgment. "The expression of those principles is what conveys dignity and strength, not size and glitter," he said.

He's not alone. There's been a lot of pushback on the design, including from the architecture critic who proposed it, The Times reported. And before yesterday's vote, the panel received nearly 1,000 messages from the public. "One hundred percent of the comments were against the project," one commissioner said.

Compare and contrast

One of the inspirations for the arch is the Arc de Triomphe, the neoclassical monument in Paris that Napoleon commissioned in 1806. Trump has said the goal was "to top it by, I think, a lot." In fact, as my colleagues report, Trump's arch would be bigger than nearly every other monumental arch across the globe.

Michael remembered another ambitious triumphal arch, also meant to outdo the Arc de Triomphe: the one that Adolf Hitler planned to raise in Berlin. It would have been more than 300 feet tall, covered with the names of the nearly two million Germans who died in World War I.

In 1941, construction began. The massive concrete cylinder at the monument's base was so heavy that it sank into Berlin's soft, sandy soil, and the project had to be abandoned unfinished. "The idea for the arch collapsed under the weight of its own megalomania," Michael said.

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