White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt raged against a New York Times feature that trashed the design of President Donald Trump’s new ballroom.
On Sunday, Leavitt dismissed the opinions of three experts who contributed to a NYT story criticizing the design of the ballroom that will replace the East Wing.
“The New York Times had three random people who have ‘studied fine arts,’ ‘long written about urban planning,’ and never built anything to write an article criticizing the new White House ballroom,” she wrote in a social media post.
Leavitt was referencing two of the authors — Larry Buchanan, who has studied fine arts, and Emily Badger, who writes about urban planning — but had little to say about Junho Lee, who is a trained architect, the NYT says. All three have bylines on the feature.
“President Trump and his lead architect have built world-class buildings around the world, and they are ensuring the People’s House finally has a beautiful ballroom that’s been needed for decades — at no expense to the taxpayer,” she said.
The estimated $400 million ballroom is, according to Trump, going to be fully funded by private donations.
The feature that has Leavitt up in arms offered several concerns about not only the structure’s design, but also the timeline for the planned construction. It notes that “the White House has said it plans to begin building in the spring, a timeline that would mean construction documents would have to be prepared even as the design was still under review.”
It also quoted architect Thomas Gallas, who said that the presented timeline “never made any sense to me.”
Noting the building’s reported size, the story claims that, when viewed from the south, the ballroom will be the dominant building and will not only dwarf the White House — the ballroom is 60 percent larger than the residence — but also ruin the symmetry of the site.
It pointed to the building’s south portico, which was not part of its original design, and noted that its grand staircase actually leads nowhere, as there are no doors leading into the ballroom on that side of the structure.
The ballroom’s south face will also be lined with massive columns, which the experts argued would block both the view from the interior of the ballroom and inhibit light from entering.
According to the NYT, the ballroom’s architect, Shalom Baranes, noted during a planning commission review earlier this month that the south portico was more of an “aesthetic decision” than a functional part of the building.
It’s not the only facade. The east colonnade, which will connect the Executive Residence to the new East Wing and ballroom, will appear from the north to be lined with windows. In reality, these will be “masonry niches designed to look like windows,” the report says.
The National Capital Planning Commission is scheduled to hold a final vote on Thursday to approve Trump’s ballroom.
