What Else Should Trump Tear Down?

Some buildings just plain deserve demolition. What are your choices?

The 1942 “East Wing” outbuilding of the White House complex was an inoffensive, hard to notice, hard to remember war-time quickie edifice

that is now getting hilariously overblown obituaries due to Trump Derangement Syndrome, such as this big headline:

The East Wing fell into the category of buildings that need to be flattened for opportunity cost reasons: land near the real White House is incredibly useful. So, while nobody had much of anything against the modest East Wing, there are much better uses for the land it was occupying. Here’s the White House statement issued back in July explaining the situation:

The White House Announces White House Ballroom Construction to Begin

The White House

July 31, 2025

Washington, D.C. — For 150 years, Presidents, Administrations, and White House Staff have longed for a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests than currently allowed. President Donald J. Trump has expressed his commitment to solving this problem on behalf of future Administrations and the American people.

The White House is one of the most beautiful and historic buildings in the world, yet the White House is currently unable to host major functions honoring world leaders and other countries without having to install a large and unsightly tent approximately 100 yards away from the main building entrance. The White House State Ballroom will be a much-needed and exquisite addition of approximately 90,000 total square feet of ornately designed and carefully crafted space, with a seated capacity of 650 people — a significant increase from the 200-person seated capacity in the East Room of the White House. …

The project will begin in September 2025, and it is expected to be completed long before the end of President Trump’s term. …

The White House Ballroom will be substantially separated from the main building of the White House, but at the same time, it’s theme and architectural heritage will be almost identical. The site of the new ballroom will be where the small, heavily changed, and reconstructed East Wing currently sits. The East Wing was constructed in 1902 and has been renovated and changed many times, with a second story added in 1942. …

The White House will continue to provide the American public with updates on this project at whitehouse.gov/visit.

But then … there are other edifices that need to come down because some buildings just plain need demolishing.

Consider, for example, the misanthropic eyesore oeuvre of octogenarian 1960s leftist radical architect Thom Mayne, who has been Sticking It to the Man One Battle After Another for generations.

As far as I can tell, Mayne invented the current architectural fad of sticking windows randomly on office buildings in order to shove a rigid digit in the face of Big Business and the Pentagon, as symbolized by their reliance on IBM punchcards.

Here’s Mayne’s celebrated CalTrans building in downtown Los Angeles for highway bureaucrats:

Granted, the last time I used an IBM punch card was 1981, but Mayne no doubt remembers them vividly from his campus radical days in the late 1960s. After all, celebrity starchitects, like Los Angeles’s two most prominent architects, Mayne, age 81, and Frank Gehry, 96, tend to be old.

For instance, here is Mayne’s 2009 building for Cooper Union in Greenwich Village:

because who hasn’t walked down the street in Greenwich Village

and said to himself, “What this neighborhood really needs is a giant, ominously deformed, unstable-looking stack of old IBM punchcards”?

In a 2003 article in Metropolis magazine by Adam Davidson, Mayne shared his feelings about 9/11:

In late summer Mayne was asked by New York magazine to propose a plan for the World Trade Center site. … Mayne read a sentence he had typed: “Jet(ison) the past, out of sync anyway (U.S. = bigness, power).” And then he laid out his thoughts about September 11 and Ground Zero. “It’s not just sobbing about three thousand people,” he said. “Thirty thousand people die in some avalanche in El Salvador. Think of the sacking of Rome. I have no empathy; it doesn’t make me weep. I could make a better case for justifying the terror than the other way around. I’m completely out of sync with America.” He explained that he saw Ground Zero as a thrilling opportunity to present a new vision of New York: “I want the systems of New York to collide, a reference to the heterogeneity of New York City. This will be a critique of Yamasaki’s isolated towers; our plan will be antithetical to the idea of Modernism.”

I told Mayne I was confused by all this. … It was fairly clear that the people of New York were not clamoring for a critique of Modernism in Lower Manhattan. Mayne’s answer surprised me. The average person’s understanding of his projects is “irrelevant,” he told me. “There’s layers and layers of ideas that go into a piece of work. It can be engaged at many levels. Probably most people are engaged at a very direct level: how it affects them. Others will recognize that there’s an organizational or conceptual tissue.” What matters, he says, is that the thing be built and that the people of New York interact with it and be provoked and altered by the space.

One obvious candidate for demolition for the sake of demolition is Mayne’s Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in San Francisco.

I haven’t been to the Pelosi Federal Building, but I have endured a visit to Mayne’s CalTrans building, which exudes palpable hostility toward the civil servants working inside and the motorists who must come to see them. For example, Mayne designed a grand staircase that twists around until — Ha-ha! Fooled ya, sucker! — it dead-ends into the ceiling.

The only other place I’ve seen such a staircase is the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose where an heiress to the Winchester rifle fortune is alleged (probably falsely) to have gone nuts worrying about being haunted by the ghosts of all the people killed with Winchester rifles, so her medium told her the only way to keep the ghosts aways was to always keep building her mansion.

Mayne carried on in his worker-hostile vein with the Pelosi Building:

Mayne designed it to include emergency pre-repairs of future earthquake damage to remind employees daily that they may be crushed to death inside his building when it folds up on itself and collapses during the next Big One along the San Andreas Fault.

From BeyondChron:

San Francisco’s Green Building Nightmare

by Randy Shaw on March 3, 2008

Few seem to care whether green buildings can be a nightmare for those having to work inside high-rise structures lacking heat or air conditioning. The new Thomas Mayne designed Federal Building at 7th and Mission Streets in San Francisco is a case in point. Lauded by the New York Times as a building that “may one day be remembered as the crowning achievement of the General Services Administration’s Design Excellence program,” what some believe is the greenest federal building in the nation’s history also likely has the worst work environment. While architectural [critics] describe the building’s “sense of airiness” as “magical,” employees view working in this heat and air-conditioning free building with the wavy concrete floors and ceilings as a nightmare.

Green but Cold

Thomas Mayne’s new George H.W. Bush Federal Building [it was renamed after Pelosi in 2023] now looms over midtown San Francisco. While people have sharply divergent reactions to its unique exterior design — I happen to like it — the verdict on the structure’s function as a office space for federal employees is nearly unanimous: it is a disaster.

Not that architectural critics care. Bedazzled by unusual design features and its focus on energy conservation, reviews of Mayne’s latest work seem to ignore whether it fulfills its functional role as a federal office building.

Based on what I have been told, it clearly does not.

The first fact about the building that may cause surprise is its lack of air conditioning or heat. … In the real world on the 15th floor of the Federal Building, workers seek to relieve the heat by opening windows, which not only sends papers flying, but, depending on their proximity to the opening, makes creating a stable temperature for all workers near impossible.

When I spoke with a Labor Department worker at the building (who noted that she is encountering the type of bad work conditions that her agency is supposed to enforce against), she confirmed what might have been an urban legend: that some employees must use umbrellas to keep the sun out of their cubicles.

The lack of internal climate controls has left some workers too cold and others too hot. A happy medium has proved elusive. And while the managers’ offices do have heat and air conditioning — a two-tiered approach fitting in a building named for Bush — the “green” design apparently has messed with the effectiveness of these systems, leaving these top staff as physically uncomfortable as the line workers.

Dysfunctional Elevators

According to my source, architect Mayne has stated that federal office workers do not get enough exercise. To address this, he installed elevators in the building that only stop at every third floor. This requires employees to walk up or down one or two flights of metal stairs.

Persons with physical disabilities who cannot use stairs can use a separate elevator that stops at every floor. The foreseeable result is that employees seeking to avoid stairs use the disabled access elevator, leaving this car crammed with people and making the ride to the top extremely slow.

From Wikipedia:

In 2010 the GSA commissioned a survey of employees in 22 federal buildings nationwide, to determine employee satisfaction with their workplaces. … the lowest ranked building for employee satisfaction was the San Francisco Federal Building, with a rating of just 13 percent; the next-lowest was considered twice as satisfactory, at 26 percent. The San Francisco building scored well below the median in the categories of thermal comfort, lighting and acoustics.

Donald Trump issued an Executive Order on December 21, 2020 stating:

While elite architects praised the resulting building, many San Franciscans consider it one of the ugliest structures in their city.

Joe Biden rescinded the order, but then Trump reinstated it.

Who knows? Implausible as it sounds, maybe Trump could win over San Franciscans by promising to tear down Mayne’s insult to the city and replace it with a federal building reminiscent of the type of buildings that San Franciscans really like, such as Coit Tower, the Palace of Fine Arts:

or San Francisco City Hall, which Tom Wolfe lauded as “this Golden Whore’s dream of paradise:”

Heck, Nancy Pelosi might appreciate the vanishing of this Nancy Pelosi Building.

Please submit to the comments section below your suggestions for buildings to demolish. Please distinguish in your comment between opportunity cost suggestions and buildings that just downright have it coming.

I’m going to throw in the paywall here so that only my paying subscribers can comment. Much as I appreciate comments from my free subscribers, I appreciate my paying subscribers’ payments even more.

Paywall here.