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When President Donald Trump revealed the physical model of the sprawling ballroom that will replace the now-demolished East Wing of the White House, something just seemed off. The model, small enough to fit on a table, is supposed to be a representation of the design that the Trump administration had previously teased in renderings. But a closer look reveals some discrepancies, including a dead-end stairway and smooshed-together windows — the kinds of sloppy mistakes that have lately been associated with AI.
In addition to some clear structural issues, the model has glaring inconsistencies with the planned work. The New York Times discovered that the model has 11 arched windows on the west side of the building, while the renderings on the White House website show nine. There are two extra columns on the building’s south side, along with an additional window. Meanwhile, a blueprint presented by Trump features a single straight staircase leading up to the ballroom, as opposed to two staircases that meet each other, as shown in the renderings and 3D model.
The ballroom will be nearly twice the size of the White House itself. Photo: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images
At 90,000 square feet, the ballroom will dwarf the 55,000 square feet main White House residence and cost Trump’s private donors $300 million to build. For such a high-profile project, it’s a bit alarming to see that the Trump administration and McCrery Architects, the firm tasked with designing the ballroom, can’t even nail down a 3D model. And in this case, the sloppiness may not be attributable to bad AI — just to bad work by humans.
“I don’t think it can be offloaded to the nature of the prints, or using AI in design,” Paul Preissner, an architect and professor at the University of Illinois Chicago School of Architecture, tells The Verge. “There’s just no quality control because they don’t seem to care.”
The construction of the ballroom is happening unusually fast — and without the review process that major modifications to the White House typically undergo. This week, Trump fired everyone on the US Commission of Fine Arts, an agency that advises the president on the designs of government buildings, coins, monuments, memorials, and more. The lack of an oversight process and the rush to get the model out to the public might have led to more errors.
Preissner says that the 3D model shown off by Trump appears to be created using a powder-based 3D printer, which is used for architectural prototyping. That could lead to the model’s “grainy” appearance, but “it wouldn’t account for the inconsistencies in their work,” Preissner adds. “That’s on the humans doing it.”
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1 / 2 It looks like the stairs lead up to a barrier. Photo by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Preissner also attributed the stairways leading into a wall and colliding windows to the overall hastiness of the project. “I would guess the timeline that McCrery Architects is being asked to do is just super hurried, and so they’re just throwing stuff out,” Preissner says. “If you don’t take the time, you end up with those two windows that blur together.”
Issues with the ballroom design trace back to the initial renderings, which “were a bit ambiguous from the get-go,” says Priya Jain, a professor at Texas A&M University’s Department of Architecture and chair of the Heritage Conservation Committee of the Society of Architectural Historians.
When creating an architectural drawing of an addition, Jain says it’s “typical practice to show the addition in a slightly different shade or tone so that you can distinguish it from the existing building.” Since these renderings are monochromatic, it appeared as though the plans were for an expansion, rather than a completely new addition.
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1 / 2 The double staircase is at odds with the blueprint shown by Trump. Photo by Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images
“One could interpret those renderings as something that was going to be built on top of the existing East Colonnade,” Jain says. “The fact that it had to be completely torn down, at least for me, came as a big surprise.” And while Jain says “AI is very widely used now in the architecture field,” she similarly adds the model’s discrepancies appear to be errors that “could be attributed to the modeler.”
Kate Wagner, an architecture critic and creator of McMansion Hell, says that though she wouldn’t be surprised if AI were involved in designing the ballroom, the involvement of McCrery Architects may make it less likely. That’s because the firm’s founder, James McCrery, is a “traditionalist,” Wagner says. “Maybe it’s not AI if it’s coming from the architecture side, but it may be AI if it’s coming from the White House comms publicity side.”
Neither the White House nor McCrery Architects responded to a request for comment on who made the 3D printed model of the East Wing. But in recent months, the White House has filled its social media channels with AI-generated images, and the president has regularly posted AI images and videos to Truth Social. It is, clearly, a medium the current administration is happy to rely on.
“This is such a slipshod situation that normal architectural rules seem to not apply,” Wagner says.