Corinthian is the highest order [of column], and that's what our other two branches of government have. Why the White House didn't originally use them, at least on the north front, which is considered the front door, is beyond me.
The plans call for a ballroom much bigger than the rest of the White House. So big, in fact, that it ruins the shape of the South Lawn driveway. Under the proposal, a new garden would cover the site of the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden, which was demolished alongside the East Wing last year, while a roughly 22,000-square-foot ballroom would jut out ever so slightly into the path of the looping driveway that encircles the most famous backyard in the U.S.
Gopnik's piece sent me back to John Ruskin, whom he cites as "the greatest of architectural critics." In "The Stones of Venice," Ruskin insists that buildings record not just the ideals of those who commissioned them but also the conditions of those who built them. The East Wing was grafted onto an original structure that was built in part by enslaved people. Its neoclassical form proclaimed republican ideals; its production betrayed them.