Maybe a tad prematurely for a term that ends only in 2029, the Trump Organization has released a short video on Truth Social revealing, with a dizzying CGI fly-throughs, proposals for the Donald J. Trump presidential library.
Any great memorial should be both surprising and inevitable. The Donald J. Trump presidential library is neither, being woefully predictable in its crassness and feeble as a design
It’s not about Making America Literate Again: there’s not a book in sight. I could not even see a reference to Trump’s own great contribution to world literature: The Art of the Deal. By contrast, the Ptolemies’ great library in Alexandria had perhaps 700,000 papyrus rolls. But that was there-and-then and POTUS 47 is nothing if not here-and-now.
One of several personal indulgences allowed by the apparatus of US government is the creation of an own-brand library. Brought into law by the 1955 Presidential Libraries Act, they perform as memorials. But Trump likes to make his own memorials: the same day that video was released, the innocent Palm Beach Airport was renamed President Donald J. Trump International Airport. Would it be worth anyone’s while to explain hubris to DJT?
Any great memorial should be both surprising and inevitable. The Donald J. Trump presidential library is neither, being woefully predictable in its crassness and feeble as a design. Le Corbusier said good design is intelligence made visible. This building is stupid. Like New York’s Trump Tower (58 stories) which announced his ambitions, the library (47 stories) is swaggering, but mean and feeble and ill-proportioned too.
The architects, Bermello Ajamil & Partners, specialize in the design of marinas and proudly claim to be at the “forefront of cruise facility delivery.” For this library on the Miami waterfront, a gaudy aesthetic shared with Royal Caribbean will be employed to secure Trump’s legacy.
Eric Trump leads the team and declares it will become monument not to a great bibliophile, but to a “great developer.”
The library video will be treasured by amateurs of kitsch. With a soundtrack of martial music which might have been composed for a red-faced MAGA marching band, a swooping and adoring camera reveals a tower heavy with Trump branding. It appears to be night and the library is dramatically lit.
Like Trump tower, the immediate effect is of cheerless and insistent glossiness: the President has said, architecturally speaking, that he likes hard, shiny things.
Inside, there are lines of adoring visitors, some of them admiring a real (250 foot long) Boeing 747 in Air Force One livery. There are arcades and galleries and ramps. Gold seems to be the favored finish: never forget that for his first interview as President, Trump sat on a gold throne in the style of Versailles. There is a gold escalator and a gold statue of the Pres in the protective pose he adopted at the Pennsylvania shooting. Classy.
I am confident that Trump thinks art – except when it is attached to “deal” – is for losers, but, creatively speaking, the competition with libraries is tough. Think for a moment about Wren’s Trinity College library in Cambridge. Or Michelangelo’s glorious Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence. And what about Fischer von Erlach’s Hofbibliothek in Vienna? Or you could even take Ronald Reagan. His library in Simi Valley, California, was designed by the distinguished modernist, Hugh Stubbins, architect of New York’s Citicorp Building.
In the Library design, Trump seems to have excused himself from his own diktat that all new federal buildings should be in the classical style since, in his monocausal and simplistic way of thinking, classical means beautiful. But it’s futile to look for consistency here beneath the dyed thatch. Appearances can be faked, just like news. Trump’s admiration for the architecture of Vitruvius did not stop him taking a wreckers’ ball to the classical Ballroom of the White House.
The Library is not in fact a federal building, but a private one funded by no one quite knows who. Trump believes that grandiosity outranks a scrupulous approach to budgets. We may well hear more of this later.
Still, it’s appropriate that the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library resembles a glittering casino resort more than the Arts End of The Bodleian. The style, as the French say, is the man.
Vitruvius said that great libraries should be built “ad communem delactationem” for popular pleasure. I reluctantly concede that might even happen here. Visitors will be eager consumers of MAGA mugs, caps, P47 sneakers and T-shirts and perhaps, for all we know, an immersive experience in a replica Oval Office, greeted by an animatronic deepfake POTUS.
And they will do this not in an environment suggestive of patient study and quiet learning, but in an environment reminiscent of a novelty Las Vegas hotel.
There was a joke about the Reagan library: “something terrible has happened. It’s burnt down and both the President’s books were destroyed. And he had only finished coloring-in one of them.” How charmingly innocent that now seems. Alas, the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library may not be the very worst memory he leaves us.
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