A Huge Arch

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The Morning

A Huge Arch

President Trump wants to build one, but he’s getting pushback.

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Marco Hernandez/The New York Times

By

Sam Sifton

I am the host of The Morning.

April 17, 2026,

6:49 a.m. ET

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A federal panel

approved early designs

for Trump’s 250-foot-tall triumphal arch yesterday. The decision was hardly a surprise: The committee members were all appointed by Trump. It doesn’t make the structure inevitable — a group of Vietnam veterans has already filed a lawsuit against it, and Congress might get involved — but the vote started a process that could dramatically change the skyline of the nation’s capital. The arch, and its height, are meant to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary.

The Commission of Fine Arts didn’t rubber-stamp the plan. One member suggested that it lose some lions (which are not native to the United States), the golden eagles on the viewing deck and a winged angel on top. There’ll be another vote down the line.

But the tone was largely laudatory. Before the vote, the panel’s chairman called the president’s idea “beautiful.” On the table in front of him, there was a black baseball hat reading “Make Design Great Again.”

A critic’s view

Image

Credit...

Marco Hernandez/The New York Times

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who presented the plan, said it “embodies American freedom, American unity, American strength and the American dream.”

I asked Michael Kimmelman, our architecture critic, about that. He was blunt:

If it really involves a human architect it’s the closest thing I’ve seen to someone purposefully trying to simulate A.I. slop. It’s an insult to veterans, blocking views of Arlington National Cemetery. It is what you come up with if you’re designing a monument to excess and narcissism.

Michael’s not a modernist snob. There’s nothing the matter with reviving the ideals of ancient Greek and Roman art, he told me. But “size is not the same thing as scale. Classical architecture isn’t a bunch of acanthus leaves and columns on a building.” It’s about proportion and judgment. “The expression of those principles is what conveys dignity and strength, not size and glitter,” he said.

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