"Trump is not necessarily being pathological, he is simply being American"

As a certain prominent American grabs headlines with his home renovation works, Julie Lasky considers why people in the US often make ill-advised choices about residential architecture.

Of all the comments about Donald Trump's assault on the East Wing of the White House, maybe the punchiest was a cartoon showing the president with his innards bared in an MRI scan and a tiny penis poking down à la South Park. Neither testicle was in evidence. The caption read "Giant Ballroom".

At least I think that was the caption. When I looked for the cartoon preparatory to writing this essay, it seemed to have disappeared from the internet.

Who but Americans insist on living in houses with significantly more toilets than rear ends?

Still, the point remains and has been echoed in many memes and late-night talk show jokes: Donald Trump's plans for a 90,000 square-foot ballroom can be understood as a salve for feelings of inadequacy.

Is it too easy to blame Trump's ballroom obsession on a personality disorder? If we stop to consider that the average house in the United States is 2,430 square feet (226 square metres) – two and half times the size of the average house in the United Kingdom – we may conclude that Trump is not necessarily being pathological when he sets out to build a gargantuan annex to a historical building. He is simply being American.

The idea of manifest destiny – conquering and colonizing every square foot that unfurls to the edge of possibility – is part of our national character. It's why our country extends "from sea to shining sea", as we sing in "America the Beautiful", and why Trump has taken to referring to Canada, which lies beyond an imaginary line, not an ocean, as the 51st state.

Equally, grand acts of wreckage are baked into the American vision of a new world. In 1914, the poet Carl Sandberg wrote about a city, Chicago, that embodied America's self-actualization when it was still basically a toddler country, lyricizing heroically about the gleeful destruction that fuels a metropolis's birth: "Shoveling,/ Wrecking,/ Planning,/ Building, breaking, rebuilding".

In this country, size matters. Who but Americans (and not just the really rich ones) insist on living in houses with significantly more toilets than rear ends? Who but Americans would make the sports utility vehicle their default automobile in an age of climate change?

Who but Americans demand that their refrigerators have a shelf on the door wide enough to hold a gallon carton of milk? (I learned this from a Turkish manufacturer who exported kitchen appliances.) Danes, Brazilians and Americans all have produced chairs. Guess which country invented the Barcalounger?

Recently, a design editor in London asked me why American houses, on the whole, are ugly

The luxury of crushing annoying obstacles, not to mention of expanding one's living quarters, is aspirational, and no one embodies a human excavator more than our current president. John R O'Donnell, who co-wrote the 1991 book Trumped! The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump, described how his subject once punched a hole with his fist through a ceiling tile in one of his casinos because the room height was too low for his taste.

Size matters to this president not just as a metric of alpha-male dominance and prom-queen popularity, but in giving him room to maneuver. Anyone who flies economy class can identify with that.

Recently, a design editor in London asked me why American houses, on the whole, are ugly. You would think those would be fighting words to a woman born in Chicago (yes, I come from the City of the Big Shoulders, as Sandberg's poem called it). I could toss out so many examples of hideous British architecture that my interlocutor would be crushed under the weight of post-war council flats alone. But I laid down my truncheon and thought about it.

Part of the differential comes down to charm, a concept that is typically at odds with scale. The US has a fair number of adorable cottages, quaint row houses, appealing farmhouses, sweet ranch houses and virtuous net-zero passive houses, but mine is an automobile-centric country where huge tracts of land are developed at a time. The quantity of homes with curb appeal pales in comparison to the many sprawling colonies of cookie-cutter bungalows and obese McMansions.

That the US cannot compete with Britain in delightful residential building styles was recently acknowledged in the Netflix series The Diplomat. At the beginning of the third season, the American ambassador to the UK, referring to a British citizen in danger of being assassinated in her home country, instructs the CIA station chief to offer the woman asylum.

"Tell her we'll find her a cottage in Vermont, and it will look just like the Cotswolds," the ambassador says. "No, it won't," the CIA agent replies.

What needs to be emphasized in this debate is that big can also be beautiful

Even within American cities that have unique character, anodyne six-story apartment boxes have become so prevalent that they have been accused of making Denver, Nashville and Seattle look almost indistinguishable.

Historic preservation policies go only so far in protecting small houses from the wrecking ball. More potent are the forces of development, which lead to the replacement of Craftsman cottages and mid-century bungalows with bigger, more profitable buildings.

The market for these new hulks is encouraged by a culture that celebrates atomization, the containment of everything believed necessary for comfort under a single roof. Even Americans with easy access to neighborhood gyms, cinemas, wine bars, spas, bowling alleys, pet groomers and grocery stores behave like homesteaders in the wilderness. Whole rooms in their single-family houses are dedicated to imbibing, film watching, food storage and dog cleansing.

Because the quality of much new construction is inferior to what it replaces, shoddiness gives ammunition to supporters of small-scale, single-family neighborhoods in their fight against those who want to address the nationwide problem of unaffordable real estate with bigger buildings providing greater housing opportunities.

What needs to be emphasized in this debate is that big can also be beautiful. Look no farther than the 2025 Dezeen Awards shortlist for examples of multi-family buildings that increase density without destroying neighborhood aesthetics. In such cases expansion is thoughtful and strategic, not the culturally approved, emotional reaction of a manifest destinarian swinging a sledgehammer.

Julie Lasky is a journalist and critic based in New York specialising in design, architecture and urbanism. She was previously deputy editor of The New York Times' weekly Home and Garden section, the editor of Change Observer, editor-in-chief of I.D. magazine and editor of Interiors magazine. She is also a part-time assistant professor at Parsons School of Design.

The photo is by Sizzlipedia via Wikimedia Commons.

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