For months, President Donald Trump has shown off various prototypes of an arch monument he wants to build in Washington, D.C., and finally he’s landed on a concept: an extra-tall “Triumphal Arch” that he hopes will soon rise just outside Arlington National Cemetery overlooking the National Mall. Nearly a quarter of the arch’s 250-foot height is thanks to a gilded statue on top.
The Trump administration submitted renderings for the massive arch to the president’s handpicked Commission of Fine Arts on April 17. The renderings by Harrison Design, an architecture, interiors, and landscapes firm, show an arch and park that would stand in a roundabout between the cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial.
The design carries some of the hallmarks of Trump’s second-term federal buildings initiative with its oversize, gold-accented classical architecture, which would look right at home at Mar-a-Lago. Harrison Design did not respond to a request for comment.
The height of the arch is a hat tip to the semiquincentennial anniversary of the nation’s founding, which will be celebrated in July. But like a skyscraper that adds a spire or antenna for a few extra feet, it gets there with some help from its ornamentation: a 60-foot winged Lady Liberty-like gold statue flanked by gold bald eagles. The rendering also shows gilded lions at the base and the phrases “ONE NATION UNDER GOD” and “LIBERTY AND JUSTICE FOR ALL” inscribed on either side.
Trump wrote in an April 10 post on his social network that the structure would be “the GREATEST and MOST BEAUTIFUL Triumphal Arch, anywhere in the World. This will be a wonderful addition to the Washington, D.C. area for all Americans to enjoy for many decades to come!” Though he said the arch would be completed by Independence Day, construction hasn’t started.
Trump’s planned arch would tower above the 99-foot-tall Lincoln Memorial on the other side of the Potomac River. Architecture critic Catesby Leigh, who supports the idea of an arch monument in D.C. like those found in other Western capital cities like Paris, nevertheless told PBS that Trump’s proposal is “way out of scale” and “way too big.” Sue Mobley, director of research at the nonprofit public art studio Monument Lab, calls it “banal.”
“I believe it is traditional to have some sort of victory prior to erecting a triumphal arch,” Mobley tells Fast Company. “That said, one of the more exhausting traditions of authoritarians is to perform victory out of a loss, and to imagine that the aesthetic will overwrite the actual.”
As with Trump’s push to build a massive White House ballroom and add his name to any number of prominent structures (from the Kennedy Center to New York’s Penn Station), his proposal to build an arch has also drawn fierce scrutiny and lawsuits. Demonstrators marched on the site of the proposed arch during last month’s No Kings protest, and a group of Vietnam War veterans accused Trump of not getting the proper congressional approvals to build the arch in a suit filed in February by the watchdog group Public Citizen.
In their court filing, attorneys for the veterans said the arch, which would be roughly as tall as an 18- to 25-story office building, would obstruct “a line of sight” between Arlington National Cemetery and the Lincoln Memorial “that was designed to represent the unification of the Nation following the Civil War and that has existed for nearly a century.” The filing further states that the plaintiffs believe the structure would “dishonor their military and foreign service and the legacy of their comrades and other veterans buried at Arlington National Cemetery, and would degrade their personal experience when visiting Arlington Cemetery.”
Trump announced his plans for an arch last year, but if pushback to the project is anything like pushback to his ballroom, there could still be hurdles. A federal judge halted construction of the ballroom earlier this month.