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The most extensive exterior changes were made in 1902 by McKim, Mead and White, the famous architects of some 500 U.S. buildings, including the University Club in New York City and the Boston Public Library. Directed by Teddy Roosevelt to preserve the essence of Hoban's design, McKim, Mead and White limited themselves to extending the wings on the west side, but refused to make the wings two stories high for additional office space. Between 1949 and 1952, the White House, by then structurally unsound, was completely rebuilt from the inside using steel and concrete. But there were no important exterior changes. Wiley & Wilson, who have worked on restorations in Monticello and colonial Williamsburg, have been in charge of small alterations for three decades.
Their new security pavilion, which might be called a "magnetomerie," will be built just south of the East Portico. The architectural partner in charge, Warren Hardwicke, 53, decided to follow McKim's somewhat clumsy Beaux-Arts style, Tuscan columns and all, rather than Hoban's more cheerful and graceful treatment. The building is pleasantly proportioned. The only trouble is that it is all a pastiche poured in concrete.
Under the fading modernist ethos that believes in the spirit of the times and makes structural honesty its motto, this phony orangery would be declared beneath contempt. A decade ago, a fake orangery would have been considered architectural heresy. Walter Netsch, the architect of the Air Force Academy Chapel near Colorado Springs, Colo., an unrepentant modernist and a member of the Commission of Fine Arts, calls the security pavilion "aesthetic camouflage . . . like a gaudy lady with too much makeup."
But then, no structurally honest Netsch building would be comfortable at the White House gates. Is it more important to respect the spirit of our time or to respect the spirit of the place? As Hardwicke points out, "The building helps protect our President. If at some future time there is no longer a need for it, the building could be removed and the hillside returned to its natural there state." —By Wolf Von Eckardt