A federal panel led by President Donald Trump’s employees will get its first look Thursday at precisely how the commander in chief plans to fill the blank space that used to be the East Wing of the White House.
Envisioned by Trump as a “magnificent big, beautiful ballroom,” the 90,000-square-foot behemoth known bureaucratically as the East Wing Modernization Project has until now remained underground in more ways than one. All structural work has been below grade, while the building plans have been largely kept out of the public eye.
All of which makes the midafternoon livestreamed hearing Thursday before the 12-member National Capital Planning Commission particularly crucial to commission members and the project’s critics and opponents alike.
“Commissioners should ask questions about ‘massing,’ as in the proposed ballroom’s ‘building mass’ and its being so inordinately out of scale with the White House itself,” former commission chair L. Preston Bryant, Jr. said Wednesday, adding that “the proposed ballroom’s gargantuan size is overwhelming. Its size is wholly inappropriate relative to the White House.”
