Donald Trump’s Triumphal Arch and the Architecture of Autocracy
“When asked by a reporter whom the arch would be for, Trump said, “Me.”
The latest in the Trumpite series of proposed oversized buildings—the previous one being a ballroom where the East Wing of the White House once stood, a project that a federal judge temporarily halted last Thursday, until an appeals court put his preliminary injunction on hold on Friday—is a so-called triumphal arch, though exactly what triumph so needs an arch is unclear. Standing at two hundred and fifty feet high, presumably for the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it would be more than twice as tall as the Lincoln Memorial, views of which it would block from its proposed site, near Arlington National Cemetery—where it would also overwhelm the simple graves of the fallen soldiers.
The plans for the arch were preliminarily approved last week by the Commission of Fine Arts, which is now completely inhabited by Donald Trump’s appointees, the previous members having stepped down or been fired for the crime of competence last year. The arch, designed by Nicolas Charbonneau, who leads Harrison Design’s Sacred Architecture Studio, in Washington, D.C., will feature a Las Vegas-style overload of gilded iconography, including a winged Lady Liberty, eagles, and, unusually for an American monument, lions. (Why not Siegfried and Roy’s tigers?)“
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