iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 1h

Unfortunately I actually kind of like this guy's stuff, especially the tiger rug. jonashejduk.com/crash-jpeg-G...

Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 2h

Interesting but it doesn't make that much of a difference, except that you have to be more careful about moisture control. I wonder if this is an LA thing. Their Oakland and SF projects are much simpler and more attractive.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 4h

If you zoom in, you can see two massive columns protruding above the nominal roof. From what I can discern, these will support a long truss down the length of the ballroom. Expensive design, but nothing remotely “hardened” for national security purposes

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 4h

Lot of work going on at Trump’s Ballroom today. Hanging primary steel, pumping concrete, and removing piles from the foundation shoring.

Concrete structures surrounded by four cranes and a concrete pump

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 19h

They also appear to be removing the temporary shoring from the foundations.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 19h

The state of Trump’s Ballroom this evening. You can see they are also cutting down a mature tree for the security screening center.

Concrete piers, from the south end of the building rise in front of the north vestibule structure, which has most steel framed out. An old growth tree is in the process of being cut down

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

There's an extremely cool looking program at NBM next week. orders.nbm.org/events/f9e1f...

• Wright Thompson Writer and journalist exploring the ties between place, history, and legacy.
• Carol Coletta Urbanist and civic leader transforming public spaces through community-driven approaches.
• Chris Cornelius Architect whose work draws on Indigenous knowledge and traditions to reimagine contemporary architecture.
• Ted Jojola Educator and practitioner working on culturally informed approaches to indigenous regional planning.
• Glenn LaRue Smith Landscape architect whose work centers on cultural landscapes and the spatial histories of Black communities.
• Tonika Lewis Johnson* Photographer and social justice artist documenting Chicago's neighborhoods.
• Carol Mockbee Designer, daughter, and steward of architect Samuel Mockbee's legacy.
• Kate Orff* Landscape architect connecting public space, ecology, climate resilience, and environmental stewardship.
• Damon Rich* Designer and artist working with organized communities on parks, buildings, and other shared spaces.
• Lily Song Activist-scholar and planner advancing reparative planning, spatial justice, and community-led practices.
• Amber Wiley Scholar advancing the work of historic preservation and design narratives in Black
communities.
• Camilo Jose Vergara* Photographer-ethnographer who chronicles the transformation of urban landscapes across America.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

The DC exurbs remain spectacularly American, for example this Islamic Cemetery, Vietnamese Buddhist temple, landscaper, and McMansion all on what looks like the same colonial land parcel. (Outside Frederick).

aerial imagery with a consistent rectangular plot of land with a railroad running through it

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Can't tell if this is the reporter misunderstanding brain mush or reliably reporting the mush but, I doubt there is a Magneto containment level in the upper bunker.

Behind him rises a bigger renovation project: the new White House ballroom, its concrete skeleton consuming the former East Wing. Lawsuits have followed the endeavor, alleging that Trump demolished the historic structure and began building its replacement without congressional authorization or the required federal reviews.
He kept building anyway. Trump points to the walls, calling them "nuclear concrete" (the sort, he says, used in nuclear facilities), and describes a military complex beneath the ballroom that will plunge six stories underground. There will be five separate floors, he says, with one side made entirely of glass, 6 or 8 in. thick. He holds his hands apart to demonstrate. "The steel goes up next week."

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

If your wife doesn't take your name they autoenroll you in DSA.

And the judge is a Trump hater, radical left Trump hater. His wife uses a different name. Said. "No, you can't do that. Well, why would I want to stick with something that's going to lose hundreds of millions of dollars, and I'm not even recognized? It's not me; it's the administration. So I have people. He works hard on it. I have people that work hard on that because it's a financial loser. Always will be. Always has been.
When I took it over, it was in extremely bad shape physically. The steel was rusted and rotted. The place was a dirty—like the White House. I fixed the White House, you know.
So, I get $550,000 a year as president. For the first term, I gave it. And I contributed to the White House renovation. I've done a great job. You would have come here a year ago, you would have seen walls that were falling off the outside of the White House. You would have seen beautiful ornamentation around the windows, where half of it was hanging off the window and the other half was up. Half of it, much of it, was actually gone. It was-it fell to the ground. It was removed. Fell to the ground, exploded, and it was removed. The place was in terrible shape. I made it beautiful.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

Not particularly convinced that nobody had thought of building a helipad before Trump, tbh.

Can you explain to people who say that these building projects don't have a connection to Americans who are struggling to pay bills? Why is this important for the American people?
So the White House is a very special symbol. It's a symbol of America. It's a symbol of our greatness. It's, I think, maybe the most important symbol that we have. The White House was a dump. The moldings were falling off the outside of the building.
It hadn't been painted in...it was just a disgraceful dump. The doors were falling off.
The locks were broken. And I said, I got to fix it. And I do that better than anybody else. Maybe I do it better than anything I do, and it's easy for me. It's actually relaxing. You know, for a lot of people, it drives them crazy.
For me, it's relaxing. You see...And then the generals came. They said, Sir, they have new helicopters. I didn't buy them. Stupid Joe Biden, but they're very big and very powerful. They ripped the shit out of the grass, and I said—and they didn't know what to do, so they're going to use the old helicopters just for this one stop because they land on the grass. And I said, "Did you ever hear of building a helipad?" And everybody said, "Oh, what a wonderful idea. I never thought of that." I said, "Why don't you design a helipad that's appropriate for these large helicopters?" And I built it. You see how I built it ahead of schedule.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

Great illustration of how massive this project is.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 01/10/2026

The board’s mismanagement of the CMAR is pretty bad though. No GMP? Not making the CMAR do estimates during design?? That’s the whole point of doing a CMAR! oig.federalreserve.gov/reports/boar...

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Figure-ground maps are always helpful for getting a sense of what cities felt like. You can see how small Old Downtown DC is and also how empty the area west of the White House. This map is dated 1923, but I the base survey is prewar, 1916 or so.

Map of buildings and streets in central DC in 1923. It's very open.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Herbert Hoover had such a sterling reputation in 1923 that you could flack well pumps off of his name.

Byron Jackson Deepwell
Turbine Pumps were selected
for the California ranch of Herbert
Hoover because of their guaranteed high efficiency and long established reliability. The accompanying letter is evidence that these pumps have justified the confidence imposed in them.
SINCE 1872
BYRON JACKSON CO.
Factories: BERKELEY, Los Angeles, Visalia, Calif.
Branches: NEW YORK and CHICAGO
San Francisco, Pertiand, Salt Lake, Tulsa, Dallas, Phoents

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Yes, Micah, I would say that. Condolences to your widow.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Defenders of classical architecture in 2026 are desperate to prove the relevance of their work, but do everything in their power to pick unpopular causes, propose irrelevant ideas, and refuse to grapple with historical guilt—but it's everyone else who's dumbing it down.

Rodney Cook's monumental initiatives are particularly valuable at a time when American civic art is being dumbed down—or worse—by reductive aesthetics and political fanaticism. Whether Tomochichi or another historical figure winds up crowning his column, Cook Park's western slope is well suited to a monument of this scale, and placing an observation deck at the foot of the crowning statue should make the column, as well as the park, a very attractive destination, perhaps providing leverage for the development of the acropolis complex that Cook envisions.
Working within a demanding tradition that imposes objective standards of achievement is a tall order. Cook has met the challenge with remarkable success. With the Tomochichi column's realization, he will have accomplished a monumental trifecta in his hometown-and that would represent a significant feat in the annals of American civic art.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Wow, if you really want to understand the mindset of the two people originally responsible for Trump's arch, you need to read these paragraphs. archive.ph/wgZKy

The memorial's many textual panels give the white-guilt theme quite a workout. Panels near the entrance to the memorial grounds say that Africans were "kidnapped" for enslavement-like Kunta Kinte in Alex Haley's famous epic, Roots
—without mentioning that the overwhelming majority were, as Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. noted in a 2010 New York Times commentary, "enslaved by Africans and then sold to European traders." As Gates continued: "The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred." A nearby panel states that the nearly 6 million blacks who migrated to the North between 1910 and 1970 "fle[d] racial terror as traumatized refugees" without mentioning economic motivations that were surely more important, especially after the mechanization of agriculture got under way in the 1930s.
The memorial, in short, is the centerpiece of EJI's larger commemorative agenda of drawing a line from slavery to lynching to systemic racism in law enforcement. The title of EJI's multimedia Legacy Museum exhibition in downtown Montgomery is From Slavery to Mass Incarceration. when you read about 104 people being shot in Chicago over last summer's long July 4 weekend alone—almost all the incidents taking place in black or Hispanic neighborhoods, with none of the victims shot by police (though two policemen were shot)you get to thinking that the Legacy Museum is missing something where the abuses suffered by today's blacks are concerned. The museum's overarching narrative-addressing racial injustice throughout the nation, not just the South —jibes to perfection with Black Lives Matter propaganda.

A cynic might say that the Millennium Gate's exhibit of Georgia history amounts to propaganda.
It includes dark incidents like Atlanta's horrific race riot of 1906 and the lynching a few years later of Leo Frank, an Atlanta Jew unjustly accused of murder, but it unquestionably emphasizes the positive. That's not the same thing, however, as indoctrination, and the interlocked themes of black victimhood and white guilt are so relentlessly woven into EJI's commemorative program that indoctrination appears to be the aim. And that program has been a success. Hundreds of thousands of people have visited the memorial and museum —a huge development for a city with a population of about 200,000.
Yes, simplistic narratives concerning white supremacy and systemic racism can have much uglier ramifications than a minimalist guilt memorial. A fitting synecdoche for 2020's plague, in the aftermath of George Floyd's killing, of statuary defacement by mobs of BLM and antifa enragés and statuary removals by spineless public officials pleading "public safety" might have been the once-majestic granite pedestal of the equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee on Richmond's Monument Avenue. A legally dubious state supreme court decision issued in September cleared the way for the statue's removal. But the obscenity-riddled pedestal remained in place until year's end, an open sore to delight the woke and distress many families living on or near the avenue.
Only after Governor Ralph Northam agreed to transfer the entire state-owned monument to the city of Richmond was the pedestal finally dismantled and hauled away. Lee Circle, once the crown jewel of one of the nation's finest streets, is now desolate.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Needless to say it's the wildly popular modernist memorials that are wrong.

The antithesis of Cook's monumental sensibility can be seen at the Peace and Justice memorial, perched on a low hill overlooking downtown Montgomery. Designed by Boston's MASS Design Group, it opened in 2018. The memorial is the brainchild of Bryan Stevenson, a Harvard educated African-American attorney whose Equal Justice Initiative and its staff of lawyers are credited with saving scores of Alabama prisoners from execution. EJI has exhaustively researched the history of lynching, identifying some 4,000 cases in the South between 1877 and 1950, a quarter of them previously undocumented. (Its findings appeared in a 2015 report that makes for disturbing reading.) EJI also has identified 400 other cases of lynchings of blacks in other states during that period and more than 2,000 cases that took place during Reconstruction. Each of the memorial pavilion's more than 800 blocks of rusting COR-TEN steel corresponds to a U.S. county where one or more lynchings occurred. Names of the counties and the victims and the dates when they were murdered are inscribed on each block.
The square, open-air pavilion rings a grassy, sloping courtyard and is itself situated within a grassy landscape. As you walk through its four galleries (one on each side of the pavilion) with their rows of steel blocks, the wood-plank floor under your feet gradually descends while the blocks, all suspended on poles from the ceiling, gradually rise from the floor and eventually hang above you.
A long inscription on a concrete wall at the bottom with a thin film of water cascading down its surface pays tribute to the unknown victims. Long rows of bleacher-like seating face it. In a plaza outside the pavilion, duplicates of the blocks are neatly stacked. EJI wants communities where lynchings occurred to claim them for public display, but the Montgomery Advertiser reported in late February that not a single one had moved.

The idea of descent to some kind of moment of reckoning became an anti-monumental meme, thanks to Maya Lin's chevron-shaped Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982). You descend along its wings to the vertex, where the walls reach a height of 11 feet. It is here that the quantity of names of the dead and the magnitude of loss inflicted by the war are intended to register most powerfully. At the deconstructionist architect Peter Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005) near Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, 2,711 gray concrete blocks, arranged in a grid, sprawl over five and a half acres. The uneven cobblestone pavement slopes downward as the visitor ventures into the grid. The blocks rise just a few inches from the ground on the memorial's perimeter but gradually morph into ominously tilting slabs as tall as 15 feet.
The Berlin Holocaust memorial's influence on the lynching memorial, with its minimalist plethora of hanging blocks, is obvious. Both are guilt memorials. And in both venues, quantity winds up displacing quality—displacing, in other words, the spatially compact, highly resolved symbolic resonance that makes classical monuments like Atlanta's athletes' monument and Millennium Gate tick. It's the same anti-monumental deal, mutatis mutandis, with the 9/11 memorial in lower Manhattan, with the titanic quantities of water falling into the gigantic abysses where the Twin Towers once stood.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

OK so he's not a good fundraiser either.

Not long after the Millennium Gate opened, Cook turned his attention to Vine City, where a great-great-uncle and onetime Atlanta mayor, Livingston Mims, had commissioned Frederick Law Olmsted's office to design a park extending over a full city block. Cook says that the park, which opened in 1899, was Atlanta's first racially integrated playground. Mims Park, located a few blocks from the Cook Park site, was replaced during the 1950s by a school. It was his father, Cook adds, who got the idea of re-creating it, though the original plan to name the new park after Mims was eventually scrapped because he served as a Confederate army officer.
In 2012, the NMF got the go-ahead from the city to build the park to its designs. But the foundation's fundraising efforts lagged. Four years later, the nonprofit Trust for Public Land was charged with overseeing, and raising some of the money for, the $45 million park project, which wound up being funded mainly by the city. The design was produced by a corporate firm, HDR, which had previously planned a somewhat similar park in another part of town. With its curlicued pond and wetlands layout and modernistic bridges and railings, Cook Park as built is a far cry from the more formal, traditional landscape that the NMF envisioned. What Cook is proposing amounts to a monumental overlay.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Arch Guy is happy to put arches anywhere, including in the middle of a stroad in a random part of Atlanta, and then come up with a reason for it to exist. archive.ph/wgZKy#select...

Cook subsequently attempted to sell Washington, D.C., on the idea of erecting a triumphal arch at Barney Circle, where Pennsylvania Avenue approaches the Anacostia River in the city's southeast quadrant, to celebrate the new millennium. It was an excellent idea because Washington lacks such an arch, and Barney Circle is a grassy nullity. The ambitious plan that Cook offered included the monument; roofed colonnades flanking the circle; a new, appropriately formal, entrance to the historic Congressional Cemetery immediately to the north; and elegant bastions on each side of the avenue where it meets the John Philip Sousa Bridge over the river, with fountain terraces and steps down to the riverfront. Cook says that the plan had the support of Senators Coverdell and Daniel Patrick Moynihan but that it was consigned to oblivion after 9/11, by which time Coverdell had died and Moynihan had retired from office.
So he took his idea home. The timing was propitious. On a brownfield site formerly occupied by a huge steel foundry, a tightly woven, 138-acre mixed-use complex of offices, shopping outlets, houses, and apartments was under construction in Atlanta's Midtown. The main artery through the Atlantic Station development is 17th Street, a six-lane avenue running east-west. Cook got his
101-foot-tall arch, the Millennium Gate, built just where the street swerves to the southwest, with eastbound and westbound lanes parting at the point where Tomochichi now stands. The arch's design originated with a Barney Circle competition in Washington and was refined by a British architect, Hugh Petter. As you approach the structure from the high-rise business district to the east, it presents itself at a cranked angle that makes its mass much more visible —much more monumental-than if you were approaching it

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

These ideas are a cross of creative class and city beautiful ideas, executed by someone who refuses to learn any lessons from their failures.

Eventually, Cook plans to transform a wooded slope at the park's southwestern corner into an acropolis harboring a "peace pantheon" and a peace institute. The former, a two-story, $10 million classical structure, would offer "think-tank incubation space" for international peace initiatives. It would be surmounted by an open-air circular shrine harboring statues of Nobel Peace Prize winners with Georgia ties: King, former president Jimmy Carter, Woodrow Wilson (who grew up in Augusta), and Theodore Roosevelt, whose wife, Martha, was a Georgian—as well as the Dalai Lama and the late South African bishop Desmond Tutu, on account of their professorships at Atlanta's Emory University. Behind it a much larger, $60 million building would house an institute for the pursuit of international peace named for Young, along with a noted collection of African-American art. Cook envisions the park as both anchoring a civil rights-themed historic district and rebranding Atlanta as a global center for peace. The National Park Service acquired the King family home, located a block from the park, in 2019 and is expected to open it to the public before long.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Not only does Trump's CFA chair have sympathies for Robert E. Lee, his vision of "positive" classical monuments involves not asking tribal leaders and then being defensive when they get offended by how you portray them. Compare this passage to the link: www.gpb.org/news/2022/02...

Another challenge that the junior Cook faces is that woke politics—as demonstrated by Montgomery's Peace and Justice memorial, whose centerpiece is a pavilion featuring hundreds of identical, six-foot-tall rectangular blocks of rust-tinted steel hanging from the ceiling—is apt to reinforce anti-monumental trends in commemorative design, and not just in the South. The impact isn't limited to what gets built, of course; it also holds for what gets vandalized or removed.
Cook's focus on cultural continuity in public art and architecture is decidedly countercultural.
One political threat to Cook's park plan at this juncture is Native American hostility to the Tomochichi statue, which the NMF commissioned at a cost of well over $400,000. Tomochichi has traditionally been regarded as a benevolent figure-Georgia's answer to the Plymouth Colony Pilgrims' loyal friend Massasoit, the Wampanoag sachem. Young has referred to Tomochichi as a forerunner of King and other Georgia civil rights leaders. But Tomochichi broke away from his ancestral Muscogee (Creek) tribe before entering into a pact with Oglethorpe, and Muscogee advocates have denounced him as a sellout who contracted to return escaped slaves to the colonists. Objections have also been raised to the youthful, muscular Tomochichi figure's seminudity, as though it were a degradation rather than a heroic attribute. Michael Julian Bond, a city council member and son of the civil rights leader, declared in February that the statue's inclusion in the park would have to be "reconsidered."

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Cool thing about the right wing make work jobs is that you can just talk about how handsome your buddy is. archive.ph/wgZKy#select...

Endowed with Southern charm, chiseled good looks, and a distinguished pedigree, the 65-year-old Cook Jr. is one of a kind—a monument impresario. He's into building classical monuments that lift the spirit, not the more fashionable, anti-monumental sites of mourning like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, the 9/11 Memorial at Ground Zero, or Montgomery, Alabama's new National Memorial for Peace and Justice, commonly known as the "lynching memorial. Cook took a passionate interest in architecture as a child. His interest flourished under the tutelage of another Atlantan, Philip Trammell Shutze (1890-1982), one of the finest classical architects the South has ever produced.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

"On one hand, the British cleared a lot of brush from DC's streets. On the other hand, they destroyed the city."

Summary
The burning of Maryland Avenue NE and the U.S. Capitol had a pronounced effect on the conditions of the cultural landscape during this period. The events of the War of 1812 altered the views and vistas available from the small park reservations, clearing away some of the vegetation obstructions in and around the small parks, but also destroying the most prominent landmark visible from the cultural landscape, in the form of the U.S. Capitol. There are no surviving accounts of circulation beyond the thoroughfare of the avenue itself. There were no buildings and structures erected in the small parks during this period, and there were no documented small-scale features within the reservations at this time.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Harold Ickes considered making Robert Moses director of NPS, but FDR talked him out of it. (from The Secret Diary of Harold Ickes vol. 3). 🗃️

make, and then I asked him what he thought making Robert Moses, of New York, Director the National of Park Service. He didn't react as violently as I had expected. He thought it over for a minute and then he said: "Well, Bob Moses would make a great park system. He would get things done. And in getting things done he would run over anybody or any law. He pays absolutely no attention to the law. You would get awake in the middle of every night and wonder what Bob Moses was doing and how he was doing it." All of which is probably true, and yet if Moses agrees with me on park policy, I think that I would be willing to run the risk, even though I realize that it would be turning a man loose who couldn't be headed after I had turned him loose. I am thoroughly persuaded that I cannot go along much longer with Cammerer. In discussing the campaign next

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Okay but has anyone tried to put a sukkah in a cargo bike?

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Better look at the rails in situ. I am a little confused about how much of the central power conduit is left. Did they already fill it with gravel?

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 26/09/2026

Some context from the former chair of the ACHP.

As Chair of the ACHP, I terminated consultation only one time during my tenure - for the Lava Ridge wind energy project - and only after years of consultation between the federal agency (in that case, BLM), the state historic preservation office, Indian Tribes, and others. Termination of consultation is reserved for situations where the parties have diligently worked to resolve adverse effects of federal undertakings on historic properties and failed to come to an agreement.
By prematurely terminating consultation on the Triumphal Arch proposed by President Trump, the ACHP and interim chair Travis Voyles are making a farce of the Section 106 process - enabling the National Park Service to fast-track an ill-conceived monstrosity that by its mere presence will disrespect the fallen heroes buried in Arlington National Cemetery and their families. True consultation has never occurred for the Triumphal Arch, and it looks like the Park Service and ACHP will bend over backwards to avoid it.
While consulting parties and others consider their legal options, it is important to note that if the Triumphal Arch is expanded to include national security infrastructure, as the President recently announced it would, the whole project would have to undergo reviews under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act all over again.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

They teach you Archigram in school when you should be Learning from Port Canaveral www.moma.org/collection/w...

Collage of an insectoid megastructure floating in the ocean

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Beautiful: AI is producing food trucks with vaguely threatening furry-adjacent auras

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Really interesting that the primary problem was the main exit rule (which applies only to assembly spaces). If McCrery did actually quit over this he did show a shred of professional responsibility. I think his denial could come back to hurt him.

McCrery informed the White House that Trump's ballroom design did not meet fire safety codes, which require the majority of guests to be able to quickly exit through the main entrance during an emergency, according to the people and documents.
The architect also pointed out that alternative emergency exit routes out of the building were insufficient, and that there was little in the design to prevent a kitchen fire from rapidly spreading into the event space on the floor above.

In addition to fire safety concerns, Trump's desired ballroom design did not include enough toilets to accommodate the structure's maximum occupancy, according to documents, and there were few options for adding more, as the event space occupied most of the building's footprint. One early ballroom design featured just seven stalls in the women's bathroom.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Now that is a man who’s in touch with the people.

One document features an image of a planned data center overlaid on a map of Manhattan, a mash-up that demonstrated the data center's massive size. "James," begins a note for McCrery at the top, an apparent reference to the architect's concerns about the size of the ballroom,
"And you think we are big"

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Uhm actually 🤓☝️, it’s a very subtle refefence to Otto Wagner’s unbuilt design for the Vienna Giro and Kassenverein.

Floor plan that looks like the millennium falcon

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The Arts of Peace are out from their shells.

Two gold statues against a cloudy sky and Rosslyn

Statue of a ripped lady holding a harp in front of a Pegasus

Statue of a ripped dude holding a book also in front of a Pegasus

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The google books copy of the "Burnham" Plan of Chicago was gifted to longtime DC Commissioner Henry McFarland.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Too bad they couldn't speak Portuguese.

Professor Licenciado e Mestre em Ensino dá Explicações de
GEOMETRIA DESCRITIVA
91 984 0727
- Ensino Secundário/Superior - Metodologia eficaz
- Experiência comprovada - Preparação para exames

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

The symbolism was more important. Prior schemes celebrated Union victory. Theirs connected Abraham Lincoln to a symbol of the Old South in the spirit of white reconciliation. They avoided the house's most famous resident—until 1955. www.thebirthofacapital.info/who-came-up-...

Calvin Coolidge and an elderly confederate veteran lay wreaths at the Confederate Memorial in Arlington Cemetery.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

For the McMillan Commission, symbolism proved more important. They wanted to bookend the Mall and also connect to the heart of the cemetery So they broke the axis and pointed it at an old plantation house on a bluff overlooking the city. www.thebirthofacapital.info/who-came-up-...

color ink wash plan of downtown washington, showing the McMillan Plan as adjusted up until 1914.

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

This makes sense. Very few people live in Arlington Cemetery. That is kind of its whole thing. The shift of Memorial Bridge's location was driven by a desire to restore Peter L'Enfant's "grand avenue" and clear out lower-class neighborhoods. Other ideas ran the axis straight across the Potomac.

black and white plan of the mall by Glenn Brown showing a bent cross-axis with some pretty haphazardly laid out buildings and really awful 19th century parks

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Neil Flanagan 🧱🗃️ @jgbollard.bsky.social · 21/09/2026

Trump's Triumphal Arch will be a traffic nightmare for Memorial Bridge—which crosses the Potomac in a very strange location. In fact, almost every plan to remake Washington before 1902 placed the crossing at the end of New York Avenue. www.thebirthofacapital.info/who-came-up-...

black and white drawing showing an alternative plan for Washington DC by Cass Gilbert. It features heavily clustered buildings at the Ellipse and between 14th and 8th street, a new white house at Meridian Hill, and a memorial bridge at New York Avenue

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