The Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB) faces the White House. It’s home to 1,500 federal employees in the President’s executive office, including the Office of the Vice President, the Department of the Treasury, and the Department of War (previously Defense). The EEOB is where Elon Musk was rumored to have been sleeping on the floor, before his falling out with the President.
Soon, the EEOB will be given the Trump treatment with a new paint job, the President told Fox News this week. Trump said to Laura Ingraham the project entails “cleaning, pointing, and painting.” He first shared before-and-after renderings of this vision for the EEOB in August, and is now soliciting bids from painters for the project.
In the Oval Office this week, Ingraham asked Trump if he’s worried about turning the EEOB into a “big white blob.” Trump said no, and that the renovation is about “bringing out the detailing.”
The rehabilitation denotes the latest architectural project Trump has taken upon himself in Washington D.C. Recently, Trump gutted the bathroom flanking the Lincoln Bedroom. He has likewise emblazoned gold decor (from Home Depot?) on the walls of the Oval Office and Cabinet Room, paved over the Rose Garden, and knocked down the East Wing to make way for a $300 million ballroom.
Now, he has his sights set on the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
The EEOB was designed by Alfred Mullett in the Haussmannian, French Second Empire Style popularized under the rule of Napoleon III. (Think: houses with verbose mansard roofs, the Paris Opera by Charles Garnier, Philadelphia City Hall by John McArthur Jr. and Thomas Ustick Walter.) It touts a gray granite facade sourced from Maine, and fireproof cast-iron structural and decorative elements.
EEOB opened its doors in 1888, but not to very much fanfare. Mark Twain called the EEOB the “ugliest building in America.” President Harry Truman, the “greatest monstrosity in America.” And historian Henry Adams, “an architectural infant asylum.”
Twain, Truman, and Adams may not have liked it, but Trump does.
“When that building was built, people considered it to be a really ugly building, and I looked at it, and some other people [looked at it], and it’s one of the most beautiful buildings ever built,” Trump told Ingraham, while holding renderings of the proposed facade upgrades.
Despite its namesake, President Eisenhower was intent on demolishing the EEOB, but that never materialized. SmithGroup, together with the General Services Administration, later carried out an extensive renovation of building in the early 2000s.
An architect behind the latest EEOB renovation has not been named.
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