The founding fathers would have hated the ‘Arc de Trump’

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The biggest triumphal arch in the world would have been in Berlin. Albert Speer designed the 120-metre tall arch for a reimagined capital in a greater Germany. Events, of course, intervened. But the Nazis did get as far as erecting a huge concrete cylinder to test the ground conditions for its construction. The Schwerbelastungskörper, or “heavy load test structure” is still there, an ominous structure built by forced labour that proved too weighty to be demolished. Like many dictators, Hitler was fond of triumphal arches. The frustrated artist had already started sketching one out in his notebook in 1926.

The triumphal arch has no function except to commemorate some great victory. A massive classical structure with a hole in the middle, it’s all bombast with no purpose beyond aggrandisement. The original triumphal arches were built by the ancient Romans to celebrate the achievements of generals or emperors. They became central to the mythmaking of imperial invincibility.  

More recently, Donald Trump unveiled plans for a new triumphal arch for a traffic roundabout in Washington DC. Instantly dubbed the “Arc de Trump”, the designs show a vast structure, 250ft tall (by comparison the Lincoln Memorial over the river is 99ft tall). A monument, perhaps, to winning too much. 

Ostensibly, the arch is to celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence though the president slightly gave the game away when asked who it was for. “Me” came the slightly too-fast answer. The arch provoked the now-familiar outrage about a president with a taste for dictator chic. But you might argue the project is in keeping with the capital’s history of commemoration, at least in its visual language. It is, of course, classical and in Trump’s favoured colour scheme. Like the under-construction White House ballroom, it has the dazzling, artificial white of fresh dentures. And like the Trumpified Oval Office, it is decorated with shiny gold: a pair of eagles and four lions. 

The usual topping for a triumphal arch is a quadriga, a four horse chariot. Here it is a golden angel: a hybrid of the Statue of Liberty and Berlin’s Victory Column (celebrating Prussian victory over Denmark).   

Trump’s arch has inscribed upon it the phrase “One Nation Under God”, which sounds archaic but actually dates from the Eisenhower era, the revised pledge to the flag a consequence of cold war paranoia and the red scare, intended to distinguish the godly US from the godless USSR. The founding fathers, who are ostensibly being celebrated here, would have hated it, with their intense desire to separate church and state.  

It is not unreasonable to mark the 250th anniversary of independence. Washington DC, with its history of brilliant sugary classical memorials — an obelisk, a pantheon, a Greek temple — could accommodate one more. The problem is that the president lacks a sense of scale. Lincoln and Jefferson across the river would be dwarfed. In February, a group of Vietnam War veterans filed a lawsuit to block the arch, arguing that it would disrupt the line of sight between the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington National Cemetery.

Trump commented that DC was the only major city not to have an arch. Perhaps it bugs him that the world’s largest is in Mexico: the Monument to the Revolution. Completed in 1938 it stands at 220ft (about 20ft taller than the Arch of Triumph in Pyongyang, completed in 1982). There is one in Moscow, celebrating the 1812 defeat of Napoleon while London’s Marble and Wellington Arches also commemorate victory over the French emperor (one way or another Napoleon seems to have been responsible for almost as many arches as the Romans). And like Napoleon’s own Arc de Triomphe, many such arches, being otherwise useless, today serve as traffic islands.  

Closer to DC, there is, of course, the Washington Square Arch in New York, a commemoration of the first president, this one designed by Stanford White in 1891. White was embroiled in a notorious sex scandal, allegedly drugging and raping a 16-year-old model, Evelyn Nesbit (White was later murdered by the man who married her). That arch used to be a hotspot for the city’s drug trade, so it did serve as a useful marker of a kind. 

But the American arch that Trump’s new design most resembles is a marker of empire, the shortlived Dewey Arch erected in Madison Square in 1899 to celebrate the naval victory in Manila Bay over the Spanish the previous year. It was crowned by a quadriga pulling a ship. Built in timber and plaster, it crumbled and became soggy. It lasted two years. 

Perhaps the most moving modern arch is Lutyens’ Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in Thiepval. The furthest thing possible from a victory arch or a celebration, it commemorates the servicemen who died and whose remains were never identified. The names of more than 72,000 dead are inscribed on the inside of the arches. At its centre are a series of voids: a poetic memory of the missing. It is undecorated and sober and almost unbearable in its sad potency. That is the power of real symbolic architecture. 

Virtually all that is left of Hitler and Speer’s grand plan for Berlin is the Schwerbelastungskörper and a concrete bunker system. Trump already has his huge bunker being stealthily constructed beneath the overscaled White House ballroom. Perhaps his monument for posterity too will be the decayed foundations of a gigantic and unwanted arch.