A New White House Entrance

By Wolf Von Eckardt

Tourists will use a gate that maintains both tradition and security

Members of the Commission of Fine Arts winced some two months ago when the National Park Service presented its sketches for a new visitors' entrance to the White House. The building will house electronic detectors known as magnetometers to screen the roughly 1.5 million tourists who traipse through the President's house every year. In the first sketches the architectural addition looked as forbidding as the lumpish guardhouses put up for the Secret Service in 1964.

The commission, which was established in 1910 to safeguard the capital against invasions of bad taste and urban barbarism, wanted something more appealing. It asked for another try from the Park Service, which is in charge of the White House grounds. The Park Service, in turn, commissioned architects Wiley & Wilson of Richmond. "Any new addition to the White House ought to look as if it had always been there," said Commission Chairman J. Carter Brown, 47, who is also director of the National Gallery of Art. "Like the mansion itself, it should have the feel of a historic Georgian country house. These 18th century Palladian houses were often surrounded by 'dependencies,' as their architects called them--orangeries or other small buildings."

And that is exactly what has now been designed. The visitors' entrance will look like a small white Palladian garden pavilion with floor-to-ceiling French windows between Tuscan columns. The doors and windows will be decorated with delicate grille work. It will be built into a heavily planted earth berm so that it is visible only from the street. The building is scheduled for completion next year, and the entire project could cost about $1 million.

The need for it is indisputable. The White House is not only the President's residence and office but also one of the most public of public buildings. On a pleasant summer day as many as 8,000 visitors line up along the east side of the White House. They now enter at the east gate, opposite the Department of the Treasury Building. They pass through metal detectors under the East Portico.

The Secret Service wants to expedite the daily flow of visitors through the security check. They also want to put unsightly security equipment under one roof and conceal it as much as possible. The only practical alternative to the planned new gatehouse was to enclose the portico or porte-cochere. But that seemed aesthetically incompatible with the work of James Hoban, the original White House architect, and McKim, Mead and White, the renovators of the historic building.

Hoban, an Irish-born architect who practiced in Charleston, S.C. and planned the South Carolina statehouse, was the winner of the 1792 design competition for the proposed new White House. One of those he triumphed over was Thomas Jefferson, who had submitted his entry anonymously. Hoban's vision of the President's house was influenced by one of the finest examples of the English Palladian style, the famous Dublin mansion of the Duke of Leinster.

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

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