President’s House is politics over architecture — and everything else

An article published some years ago in the AIA Journal asks: Should architects step into the political ring?

The writer, Chris Bentley, recalls the “March for Science” that was supposed to be non-partisan but which wound up being a protest of President Trump. He asks: “Can a March for Architects be far behind?”

The March for Architects may not be here but architectural woke culture is alive and well. One has only to look at the city of Chicago to get wind of current trends. Keefer Dunn, a Chicago architect who calls himself an “architectural worker” (a Marxist with a bricks and mortar accent), writes, “Architects must reach beyond the profession and locate their activism in the context of mass movements.” Dunn adds that “There is no such thing as an activist architecture, only activist architects.”

Philadelphia’s President’s House, which opened in 2010, is a perfect example of activist architecture. 

Not only does the “building” resemble a half-constructed modular home, but this skeletal tribute to Presidents Washington and Jefferson also might also double as a transit subway stop. The structure’s minimalist frame, while pretending to take smart cues from the (nearby) Robert Venturi–designed Franklin House, is a disaster on all fronts.

The $10.5 million design tragedy, which incited an eight-year ideological war between the National Park Service and various African American community organizations, could have been a success if political squabbling had taken a back seat to architecture. But it did not. The current President’s House is what happens when ideology trumps architecture and design.

This Kelly/Maiello Architects & Planners structure should be demolished and another architect, like Robert A.M. Stern, brought in to redo the project. Stern, who has designed buildings in the classical tradition for the University of Pennsylvania, could at least be counted on to deliver a substantive building that would give Philadelphians and tourists alike a “real” President’s House.

In 2011, an Inquirer columnist by the name of Annette John Hall took the New York Times to task for its bad review of the house. The Times found the house to be an “ineffectual mishmash that has reached new lows.” The Times continued: “Here, though, we get neither a sense of the place, nor a sense of the issues (and much of the year, the open air will be inhospitable). We don’t learn about the differences between Washington and Adams. We don’t learn much about the pictured events. There is no real narrative. ..” 

Hall countered that the present site’s focus on slavery is justified because of the slave artifacts found in the building’s foundation.

“A narrow little inconvenient truth surfaced as plans were made to build a president’s house memorial,” Hall wrote. “Something conveniently omitted from my history books: Washington unapologetically owned more than 300 Africans, nine of whom he shuttled back and forth between his Virginia plantation and his presidential home in Philadelphia.” 

To judge eighteenth/nineteenth-century behavior by twenty-first-century standards is both irrational and self-righteous. The present structure — with its nine cluttered, open-air slave reenactment videos and grade school-like “teaching” storyboards fastened on the brick and granite walls — is an intellectual embarrassment. Visitors get quick Reader’s Digest–style sound bites about the lives of presidential slaves. Call it the President’s Slaves’ House, but mixing oil and water like this comes close to false advertising. 

The only “presidential vibe” we get to see is the under glass-enclosed archaeological dig showcasing the foundations of the real house built sometime between 1790 and 1800 (but demolished in 1833). While the framed “dig” works well as a centerpiece, everything else on the ground floor — the representational door, window and fireplace frames of the original house — points to a curious flip-flop as the slave narrative snuffs out the story of the presidents.

In August of this year, about 100 protestors rallied at Independence Park to protest President Trump’s executive order to remove exhibits that disparage America or its founders. That order included language directing the Department of the Interior to allocate funding for the restoration of Independence National Historical Park in time for the nation’s 250th birthday. So-called inclusive storytelling will also be affected in the restoration, meaning that the “hit me over the head with a hammer” slavery messages in the President’s House will be removed. 

While the history of slavery should never be forgotten, it should not be interwoven in the “design message” of the President’s House, which is nothing less than a towering judgment of nineteenth-century proslavery views by “enlightened” twenty-first-century standards. Build a slavery museum if you want to tell the story of slavery, but as things stand now every visitor to the house leaves without knowing anything about some of the important people who lived there, such as Benedict Arnold and Robert Morris.

If the mission of the activist architects was to cast aspersions on the presidents the house is supposed to honor, then they succeeded in equating the Founding Fathers with the Ku Klux Klan. 

The evangelical zeal with which this message is delivered is like getting hit on the head with a hammer. I’m thinking of the billboards placed around the house, especially the one entitled, “The Dirty Business of Slavery,” which seems to be in the running for the Captain Obvious Award.

We don’t need to be reminded like first graders that slavery was “dirty.”

As Robert Tracinski of The Federalist wrote, “This is modernism’s desperate bid, in the twenty-first century, to regain some degree of relevance to the culture. Empty of any discernible content or value, it fills that artistic vacuum with political sloganeering.“ 

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.