President Donald Trump floated a new and controversial monument in a wordless dead-of-night post to his social media account.
Trump has raised eyebrows with his remaking of the White House decor, the Rose Garden patio, and other ostentatious touches like a military parade.
The latest example is a proposed triumphal arch, an artist’s rendering of which Trump posted well after midnight Friday night:
The post follows a photograph that was taken this week of a model on the desk in the Oval Office that drew notice posted by AFP’s Danny Kemp:
On Trump’s desk in the Oval Office today was a plan for a triumphal arch on the other side of the river from the Lincoln Memorial
According to The Architect’s Newspaper, the project is controversial among architecture fans and others for a variety of reasons — some more sinister than others:
Watson’s photograph showed the Lincoln Memorial facing the wrong direction, and the model quickly garnered comparisons to Albert Speer’s unbuilt German Arch of Triumph.
The proposed arch echoes that of Grand Army Plaza Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch in Brooklyn, and of course Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. It would have a gold winged angel and two white eagles. Its tentative site is Memorial Circle—a traffic roundabout across the Arlington Memorial Bridge from the Lincoln Memorial.
Eric Jenkins, an architect and former educator at the University of Maryland and Catholic University, said the arch stands to “disrupt a symbolic connection” between “the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington House and Arlington National Cemetery’s ‘most hallowed ground.’”
Jenkins, who has taught studios in Rome, and recognizes the virtue and importance of learning from Greco-Roman architectural history, called “contemporary classical architecture” an “oxymoron if there ever was one.”
As the paper noted, the photo of the model drew social media comparisons to the work of Albert Speer, who designed many structures in Nazi Germany, including an unbuilt arch.
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