is a news writer who covers the streaming wars, consumer tech, crypto, social media, and much more. Previously, she was a writer and editor at MUO.
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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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