Last week, the White House announced that James McCrery, the architect directing construction of the new East Wing, who had pulled back from day-to-day involvement after disagreements with President Trump, would be replaced by a new firm in overseeing the next phase of construction.
And while a White House official said that Mr. McCrery would serve as a consultant for the project, little is known about how or when the East Wing will be restored from its current state of demolition.
How do we make sense of this national icon reduced to rubble, with no end in sight? When we consider the context of its official explanation — that it was part of a needed “renovation” — it starts to feel less shocking, and more like an extension of our cultural DNA. This is somehow even more unsettling.
Our preoccupation with renovations goes beyond architecture.
We watch home-renovation shows, in which people merrily take sledge hammers to houses, as a staple of reality TV. We binge episodes of “The Gilded Age” that follow the construction of gargantuan mansions (with giant ballrooms) built by robber barons.
We love rags-to-riches stories, from Horatio Alger through “Pretty Woman,” “American Idol” and all the Cinderella remakes. All of these are essentially life-renovation stories with simple formulas: We lament someone’s impoverished beginnings and then cheer their rise to success and wealth.
Sometimes, we enjoy the schadenfreude that attends the opposite kinds of stories — those about the ignoble side of wealth, or about the downfall of powerful people as in “The Great Gatsby” or “Citizen Kane,” or “The Queen of Versailles” — the documentary-turned-TV-series-turned-Broadway-musical about a billionaire real estate developer and his beauty queen wife, and their quest to build America’s largest, most expensive home, a modern Versailles. (After the 2008 financial crisis, the home wound up an unfinished construction site piled with tchotckes — including an antique guillotine.)
We also love stories of bodily renovation, known as ‘makeovers’ or ‘glow-ups.’
This is standard fare in celebrity journalism, on social media and on TV. It’s the world of “before and after” photos and of “get ready with me” TikToks. It’s speculation about which stars have gained or lost weight, or who looks much older — and of course, of who looks much younger, and whether they’ve had “work” done.
That kind of work — plastic surgery — is our favorite form of renovation. And while it was once a matter that people tried to keep private, cosmetic intervention has come out of the closet, morphing from personal secret into public badge of prestige. Now, we admire impossibly taut new faces as testament to their owners’ status and extreme wealth. Kris Jenner’s candor about her face-lift offers a recent example of this phenomenon. (In the “Queen of Versailles” musical, the heroine, Jackie Siegel, undergoes multiple plastic surgery procedures, making her own body something of a construction site along with her new home.)
What has this to do with the White House? A lot.
The White House has explained the East Wing’s demolition as “renovation,” and the necessary prelude to a multimillion-dollar ballroom. This is the architectural equivalent of a celebrity-style makeover: a redo to admire as a luxury commodity, an old building rejuvenated, history erased.
Mr. Trump has described the planned ballroom as an “expensive, beautiful building” and “top of the line, as good as it can get anywhere in the world.” It is no coincidence that this sounds like language the president might use to describe one his own properties (as opposed to a federal building). Mr. Trump privately commissioned a similar project once before, when he added the “Donald J. Trump Grand Ballroom” to Mar-a-Lago, his club in Palm Beach, Fla., in 2005, with details modeled on the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Initial plans for the East Wing imagined a space with high ceilings and arched windows that would similarly echo the grandeur of Hall of Mirrors. (Dreams of pre-revolutionary France die hard.)
Of course, when celebrities go under the knife, we never see the surgery. Nor do we see the blood, bruising or scars. These aspects just get disappeared, before the eventual “reveal” of the transformation. This is why the honesty discourse around surgery is complicated: Think of it as a film with some segments edited out, making the transition seem magical, and free of any gruesome in-between stages. We have grown very accustomed to this process, happy to ignore unbeautiful reality in favor of the fantasy of painless and miraculous transformation.
But the photos of the East Wing demolition threaten our happy ignorance.
The Treasury Department has reportedly prohibited any further photos of the East Wing’s demolition site — we must not see the patient on the operating table. Instead, as is so often the case in our world of magical before-and-afters, we are expected simply to wait and then admire the change, without thinking too much about what happened in between.
Rhonda Garelick writes the Face Forward column for The Times’s Style section. She is the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Public Humanities at Hofstra University, where she is also the John Cranford Adams Distinguished Professor of Literature.
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