White House Redux

Photo by Marty Hyers

Juror Elizabeth Diller of Diller Scofidio + Renfro reviewing the submissions

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It must have been the most conspicuous design competition in New York City that day, visible from 10 blocks away. Thousands of white rectangles had been taped up inside the tall glass windows of the newly constructed 7 World Trade Center, like a new form of interior design. Arranged in neat rows and columns, the unexplained grid even showed up on the popular real-estate blog Curbed. On May 29, a short, quizzical post appeared referring to “the sudden appearance of a ring of white paper” on the 45th floor of the building. “New tenant in 7 WTC?” a perplexed reader asked.

But they were asking about the wrong building. Seen from within by myself and the six other jurors, those 4,000-plus sheets of paper documented the astonishing range of submissions for the White House Redux competition. Jointly sponsored by New York’s Storefront for Art and Architecture and the technology firm Control Group, the competition asked how architects might reimagine the seat of US power for the 21st century. The late-Georgian design of the original White House was itself created in response to a competition held in 1792; what might it look like if that competition occurred today—and why? The answers reached beyond mere style—should the new White House be baroque? Bauhaus? Green? Or simply cost-efficient?—to shed light on the political implications of architecture itself.

Of course, a new White House would presumably not be called a White House at all, and many contestants took this as their point of entry. There were half a dozen proposals to simply paint the White House black. In the most polemical of these, graphic photographs of bombed Iraqi civilians were set beside doctored images in which the Black House sat, brooding and slightly evil on its lawn at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

There were also proposals for abandoning the White House outright, to form a crumbling ruin at the heart of the national political imagination. As a new Rome, would this inspire a progressive sense of departure from an earlier era? Or would it sentimentalize a lost vision of the past? There were airborne White Houses, a Dr. Strangelove White House on the International Space Station, a White House green screen for instant video streaming, White House as giant computer server, White House as ice-cream sundae (for better PR), and portable White Houses at sea, mounted on the decks of aircraft carriers. Across the designs, produced in the spring of 2008, Barack Obama was Photoshopped-in more often than any other presidential candidate. Ultimately, then, this was less an architectural design competition than a way to push the narrative genre of the architectural proposal toward the status of overt political commentary.

One project offered a rather brilliant take on the troubling imperial air of the White House as home to one leader (think Napoleon as painted by Ingres) rather than the reality of the vast executive branch office spaces. Why not build something that would allow US citizens to see the actual scope of the executive branch, thus reducing the cult of personality? The proposal was a large, modern office complex. While its design was less than thrilling, it demonstrated the expressive power of architecture to either pile on, or minimize, delusions of grandeur.

In some cases, recognizable buildings were done away with altogether, and the landscape of the urban environment itself was augmented. A public park for example, or an overgrown sci-fi jungle of genetically modified plants that would envelop the center of DC—questioning how certain landscape designs might embody (or even defeat) a national political project. Could this be the US’s own version of the gardens at Versailles, in an age of “terminator genes” and Monsanto?

What we ultimately chose as the winning entry was perhaps the most abstract and least architectural submission of them all: a computer animation work—by J. P. Maruszczak and Roger Connah, with Ryan Manning—called Revenge of the Lawn, presumably titled after Richard Brautigan’s 1971 collection of short stories. As the hallucinatory video suggests, when that well-trimmed symbol of middle-class economic health and environmental control reasserts itself at center stage, it will take the form of insectile invaders rising up from a deep hole in the White House green. One reading is that all the little secrets our government has tried to shove aside will someday return, buzzing around and threatening the bastion of US power.

At the end of the day, the competition was less about how a particular building can be enlisted to serve (or critique) nationalism, and more about how architecture as a genre can be used to communicate and propose radical ideas. Architecture is not just a way to assemble new types of space; it’s not just about schools of design or mere buildability. Architecture, here, serves as its own sort of literature— something between a graphic novel and a scenario plan. And when architecture is allowed to express plots and story lines, complete with sparks of political diagnosis, its true potential is revealed.

"White House Redux" originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Modern Painters. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Modern Painters' October 2008 Table of Contents .