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Whatever he had contemplated (and we must take him at his word that he had), Jefferson accepted Latrobe’s idea for distant middle pavilion coach houses and stables. Making the pavilion’s upper floor level with the north grade would pose yet another grade-building height to conquer, especially with a steeper grade for horses and carriages. At the same time Jefferson affirmed what he had drawn in his wing plan, that the stables and coach house would be closer to the house, even if temporary. Latrobe raised a good question when asking how carriages and horses would exit through the southern colonnade.
Evidence for the Design of the Wings
These include a period drawing, personal and official correspondence, and physical evidence shown in photographs. The West Wing's three floors contain offices for the vice president, White House chief of staff, the counselor to the president, the senior advisor to the president, the White House press secretary, and their support staffs. Adjoining the press secretary's office, in the colonnade between the West Wing and the Executive Residence, is the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, along with workspace for the White House press corps. His six children and White House staff were crowded on the second floor of the White House. Congress appropriated $65,000 for the construction of a temporary, one-story office building just west of the White House. Most presidents have hung a portrait of George Washington – usually the Rembrandt Peale "Porthole" portrait or the Charles Willson Peale three-quarter-length portrait – over the mantel at the north end of the room.
Native Americans and the White House
Roosevelt's successor, President William Howard Taft, relocated the president's office in 1909 and changed its shape to oval. By establishing the Oval Office in the center of the West Wing, the president was able to work more closely with his staff. As a result 20th Century presidents became more involved in the operations of government. President Roosevelt held his first cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the West Wing on November 6, 1902.
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The mostly barren shell vacated by John and Abigail Adams was a tabula rasa, as were the grounds around the house, facilitating the amateur architect’s fertile imagination to produce remodeling solutions to the former and initial plans for the latter. If the White House is, as the historian William Seale has written, “an American Idea,”1 it includes one of Jefferson’s most tenacious architectural ideas— domestic service wings. Jefferson did not invent the concept but borrowed it from those seen attached to Renaissance villas in Andrea Palladio’s Four Books of Architecture (1570). Domestic service wings appear in Jefferson’s earliest drawings for his bookish Palladian- style home, Monticello, built in the early 1770s. Placing domestic outbuilding functions in wings gave order to what would have been the typical scattered backyard arrangement of necessary buildings; more important for Jefferson, it saved the space for ornamental landscaped gardens.
The new office space gave the president and his staff much-needed room to work and serve the American people. TheWest Wing houses the President's Oval Office, the offices of his executivestaff, the Cabinet Room, the Roosevelt Room, and the James S. Brady PressBriefing Room. Before 1869, the West Sitting Hall was little more than a staircase landing lit by an elegant half moon window, or a lunette (which has its twin in the East Sitting Room). The presidents and first ladies would descend to the Cross Hall below on state occasions. President Ulysses Grant had the grand stair remodeled, allowing sitting space by the window.
When the President meets around the large mahogany table with the Cabinet Secretaries, each is assigned a chair based on the date their department was established with the oldest Cabinet departments seated closest to the center. The President sits at the center of the table with his back to the Rose Garden doors and opposite the Vice President. In the Cabinet Room, the President meets with the Cabinet Secretaries, members of Congress, the National Security Council, and foreign Heads of State on topics ranging from energy efficiency to national security.
The President's Neighborhood
While it offers a distant comparative view in time, we know that President James Madison was determined to rebuild the house and wings as they were before the fire, a symbolic gesture that also implied the already iconic nature of the house. Hoban left a pretty good description of the extent of the main house’s standing walls but not of the wings. The wing’s masonry walls, partially in-ground, might have withstood substantial destruction just like those of the basement.
When Was the White House Built?
The terraces, as constructed, were used for household functions and didnot provide additional office space. The president continued to live andwork in the White House proper for the remainder of the century with hisexecutive offices taking up much of the second floor, the same floor asthe living quarters. Roosevelt moved the offices of the executive branch into the newly constructed wing in 1902.
The Walter plan thus serves as one verifiable measure in addition to other evidence when determining the original room usage and size for the east and west wings. On a cold March 11, 1809, Thomas Jefferson paid the ferryman $1 to take him and his carriage across the Potomac River at Georgetown and headed south toward retirement. What he left behind at the President’s House were unfulfilled dreams of remodeling the still-unfinished mansion and completing its partly built domestic service wings, which were entirely his idea. It is ironic, in retrospect, that these wings, with their zigzag roofs and flat terrace platforms, would become his physical heritage there, because they have been mostly forgotten. Since the 1940s Jefferson has stood in oversize bronze in the Jefferson Memorial, gazing north toward the White House.
The sheet metal used in the White House roof gutters probably lasted until the British torched the place in 1814, but another typical type of failure before that pre- vented President James Madison from strolling or sitting on the deck as Jefferson had. Latrobe wrote Madison in 1812 that the “platforms covering the gutters were rot- ten and must be replaced.”47 This message must have chagrined Madison, who had adopted one of Jefferson’s zigzag roof systems to create decks over the 1809 wings at his Montpelier. Whether they were replaced at the White House, or not, is hardly relevant because they would be burned in two years. Whether Hoban constructed the roof structure with Jefferson’s joist system or simply constructed a low pitch rafter roof is unknown. Jefferson’s third space, the necessary or privy, Seale indicates was for servants on this side whereas the east privy would be reserved for the family and guests.27 At 10 feet wide it might have been divided into two stalls but, one or two, was probably still “unisex,” as per the custom. Latrobe’s reference to cellars for “coal or dung,” mentioned in relationship to rooms 10 feet wide, seems to confirm a combined cellar space for the coal cellar and privy waste removal.
The Petty Feud Between the NYT and the White House - POLITICO - POLITICO
The Petty Feud Between the NYT and the White House - POLITICO.
Posted: Thu, 25 Apr 2024 17:17:32 GMT [source]
Next door to the White House, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (EEOB) commands a unique position in both our national history and architectural heritage. Designed by Supervising Architect of the Treasury, Alfred B. Mullett, it was built from 1871 to 1888 to house the growing staffs of the State, War, and Navy Departments, and is considered one of the best examples of French Second Empire architecture in the country. In bold contrast to many of the somber classical revival buildings in Washington, the EEOB’s flamboyant style epitomizes the optimism and exuberance of the post–Civil War period. President Theodore Roosevelt chose for a major White House remodeling in 1902 the new York architect Charles McKim of the famous McKim, Mead & White firm. McKim sought to bring Beaux-Arts order to the exterior by removing what he considered as unsightly the greenhouses that crept out from the house in a southwestwardly direction.
Hayes also relocated the billiard room to a space in the lower wing and reinstalled Jefferson’s prominent glass doors that let family or guests promenade from the dining room into the popular tropical plant splendor. Jefferson’s response to Latrobe’s critique contains the first mention of a wing extension. Jefferson wanted an immediate extension for a coach house 60 feet long with a north doorway for horses. Latrobe considered his own drawings the more accurate ones for Lenthall to follow while reconciling Jefferson’s ideal design regularity to the reality of wall thicknesses and the practical space in each room.
When President John Adams arrived in Washington to move into the White House in november 1800, there were no separate service structures except for simple brick stables two blocks away; the grounds held only workers’ sheds. It was up to him and Mrs. Adams to make the unfinished brick and stone interior shell habitable. The basement, containing work and chamber spaces for cooks, housekeepers, and servants, probably seemed more cozy and finished than the principal rooms above.
In 1927 the attic was enlarged and finished as a Third Floor while the White House roof was rebuilt. William Taft hired architect Nathan Wyeth to expand the executive wing in 1909, resulting in the formation of the Oval Office as the president’s work space. In 1913, the White House added another enduring feature with Ellen Wilson’s Rose Garden. A fire during the Hoover administration in 1929 destroyed the executive wing and led to more renovations, which continued after Franklin Roosevelt entered office. Hoban’s 1818 construction estimate for the wings reveals little about Jefferson’s original plans or departures from what existed before the fire. Hoban’s specification of copper for the wing roofs does not detail the roof construction or shape.
Latrobe complained about the president’s “calculations of his coal cellars” and that a few inches difference in size for the cellars, be they for “coals or dung,” did not matter. This reference seems to be linked to the one that immediately followed, referring to two spaces of 10 feet each. Jefferson apparently increased the size of the sec-ond room to 10 feet wide, a width that still worked with the exterior openings and made the adjacent necessary 10 feet wide. The Walter plan shows a much larger second room of about 20 feet wide, the combination of Jefferson’s two rooms, that in later plans is still labeled as wood and coal storage.
From early illustrations it appears that the roof had a low profile behind the low parapet and might still have served as a terrace walk. The roof was apparently flat enough to serve the first greenhouse added on top of the west wing in 1857. Hoban’s estimate for the wing’s ground-up construction provides some evidence of the extent of Jefferson’s west wing.
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