My first impression of Donald Trump‘s super-sized, east-wing-of-the-White House ballroom, which will be constructed over the next two or three years, is that it’s distasteful in a grandiose, fascist–palace sort of way.
If you ask me the architectural envisionings vaguely resemble that gleaming, palace-like structure of emphatic pomposity — am I thinking of Vittorio Emanuele II or Benito Mussolini‘s Palazzo Venezia? — located just north of the Foro Romano.
Renderings suggest an oversized, overreaching quality — the ballroom seems to want to compete with the scale of the main White House itself. The East Wing is supposed to be an adjunct structure, right? It’s not supposed to be an architectural competitor.
