Trump’s Ballroom and Obama’s Library: Critics Assess Presidential Architecture
An evaluation of Trump’s White House renovation and his predecessor’s “Obamalisk” in Chicago.
Donald Trump, for all his bluster, cares deeply what his detractors think—particularly those who comment on his buildings. In 2014, after Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin described the giant “TRUMP” sign on the developer’s Chicago skyscraper as a “wart,” Trump dismissed Kamin on the Today Show as “third-rate” and said on Twitter that the paper should fire him. In 1985, Trump sued another Tribune architecture writer, Paul Gapp, for libel after he cast doubt on Trump’s plan to build the world’s tallest tower in Manhattan. (The judge laughed the lawsuit out of the room, and the 150-story Trump City project never got off the drawing board.)
Barack Obama, too, values his architectural reputation. He’s said he wanted to be an architect as a kid and has taken an active role in shaping the design of the Barack Obama Presidential Center in Chicago. After Kamin expressed disapproval of early plans for the Obama Center in 2017, calling it “too heavy, too funereal, too Pharaonic, too pyramid-like,” Obama and his architects apparently took his notes and others’ into account while revising their plans.