The White House has in recent hours received the Supreme Court’s green light for the 400-million-dollar ballroom with which Donald Trump wants to replace the traditional East Wing of the official residence of the president of the United States.
While the president on Saturday announced the overall cost of the project, the man directly overseeing it, the director of the White House Management and Administration, Joshua Fisher, has provided all the details according to US broadcaster CBS. (source in Italian)
Among those details is that the colonnade of the new ballroom will be sculpted “by some of the greatest artists in the world”.
It is not yet known who they are, but they are in Italy, where limestone of “the highest quality” has been sent, quarried in the US state of Indiana, according to a statement by Fisher cited by the broadcaster.
What will Trump’s new ballroom look like? It will have Italian columns
The project is lavish, as can be seen from the documentation that the US authorities have submitted to the Supreme Court, after a request to halt the works by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States.
The structure, of more than 8,000 square metres, is on paper set to be larger than the main White House building and designed to accommodate up to a thousand people.
The site is employing around 200 workers and is expected to use tonnes of steel and concrete as well as, of course, marble and gold, the trademark of Trump the builder (already transported into the Oval Office, as can be seen behind the president during his press conferences).
The White House has stressed that funding for the project is entirely private (around 355 million dollars of the planned budget has already been raised), for a mega-project more than twenty metres high that the former property developer has decided to complete in time for the end of his second presidential term.
The façade will be “virtually completed” by April 2028, according to Fisher, and this is where the stonemasons in Italy come into play. But who are they and where will they be working?
The long history of marble and Italian artists in US public works
The huge new ballroom will include air-raid shelters, medical facilities, rooms for top-secret meetings, a rooftop landing pad for drones and helicopters, drone-proof ceilings and bulletproof windows, the White House has said.
All this will stand behind a Corinthian colonnade that will echo that of the nearby Supreme Court and, above all, that of the Capitol in Washington, for which President Thomas Jefferson summoned craftsmen from Italy in 1815 to carve its capitals, later produced by Giovanni Andrei in Carrara, the marble city par excellence.
This time, no official announcement has yet been made on the companies involved, but some educated guesses can be made.
The Commission of Fine Arts approved a project last February with eight large columns in the main portico of the former East Wing, and the latest statements make it clear that the stone will not be Italian, but the labour will.
This inevitably calls to mind the ultimate master of white marble, Michelangelo, who stayed for long periods in the Tuscan city to supervise the extraction of blocks of white marble from the quarries of the Apuan Alps and personally select those needed for his masterpieces.
Carrara has already supplied decorations for Trump and for a ballroom, those that the current US president had made for the Trump International Hotel in 2010, several years before he entered politics.
MTStone Carrara S.r.l. states that it produced 150 m² of white onyx panels, a project showcased prominently on the company’s website, (source in Italian) even though the firm does not itself specialise in sculpture.
A bit of more recent American history could therefore suggest a possible alternative, Pietrasanta, a town twenty kilometres south of Carrara, which also boasts a previous public commission in the United States.
In 2008 the local sculptor Giancarlo Buratti created statues for the chapel of Thomas Aquinas College (source in Italian) in California.