The McMansionization of the White House, or: Regional Car Dealership Rococo: a treatise

If you, like me, were putzing around on social media last night, you perhaps saw this post in which data journalist John Keegan claims to have found the original source from which Trump ordered the ridiculous gold-painted faux Rococo slop currently hot glued onto every visible surface of the oval office. In a separate blog, Keegan convincingly compared close ups of the Trump appliques with a set of polyurethane offerings listed by Chinese wholesaler AliBaba.*

The responses to this discovery were unsurprisingly gleeful: tariffs for thee but not for me! So much for a “trade war” with CHAYNAH etc. However, as we all know, hypocrisy does not work on Trump and his ilk; if anything, they bask in it like pigs in shit and leave the rest of us huffing the fumes. Beyond hypocrisy, for years the common interpretation of Trump’s longstanding romance with 18th century gilded kitsch has been that, Trump, like other practitioners of so-called “Dictator Chic” (most of whom, like Saddam Hussein, have since been deposed) wishes to fashion himself in the style of the late Bourbon kings who ruled tyrannically and absolutely over their immiserated French populaces. But this ressentiment towards democracy is only a psychological analysis, albeit with aesthetic undertones. For our purposes it is much more useful to consider what Trump is both communicating with this architectural hatchet job as well as its various precedents, most of which come later in history than one would think.

In my last McMansion Hell post, I deployed the phrase “Regional Car Dealership Rococo” (henceforth RCDR) as a joke, but I think it works well as a broader idea. We can define RCDR as the ad hoc revival of 18th century ornamentation that arose, perhaps inevitably, during a period of skyrocketing income inequality coupled with consolidated global supply chains that brought down the cost of architectural materials. Culturally, it is a weed in Postmodernism’s garden bed.

I use the term Rococo here as a catch-all, because that is how the practitioners of RCDR themselves see it, if they consider it in the first place. A victim of a long-standing anti-intellectualism, at some point, these details all just became one “classical” “ornament.” Technically speaking, RCDR is a hodgepodge of Late Baroque, Rocaille, and Rococo as well as their revivals. I choose to use Rococo instead of these other styles because, being associated with a pre-revolutionary opulence, it is more politicized.

If we want to get educational about it, the foam piecework in Trump’s office is technically called a margent – which is a strip of leaf and/or flower forms hanging downwards, in this case from a shell motif. Last night, I spent hours with various tomes and anthologies of ornamentation and could not find this specific form, though I am not a scholar of 18th century architecture, and such granular details are outside my wheelhouse. It is very possible that it’s completely made up by the manufacturer. I can say, however, that these particular margents are more Late Baroque than Rococo. Although they are florid in nature, they lack the asymmetry that typically defines Rococo ornament.

That Trump rotates these margents 90 degrees to have them work more as, I don’t know, scrolls or festoons is indicative of the RCDR imperative that ornament does not exist in service to some historical or architectural fidelity, but as a simple commodity to be used as one sees fit. It communicates architectural meaning shallowly through pastiche and juxtaposition, rather like a sticker book. This does not mean, however, that it shouldn’t be taken seriously as an object of architectural study.

Rococo and its Discontents

Commode decoration by Charles Cressent (1745–1749), Metropolitan Museum. CC0.

Let’s start at the beginning. Though it’s not my favorite style, the reputation of Rococo architecture suffers, I think, from its various afterlives. The use of the term in the 19th century, for example, is similar to how I’ve used it casually in the past: to denote something that is busy and overly ornamented. Originally devised by the French in the early 18th century, Rococo was a reaction to the heavy-handed classicism of the Louis XIV style, characterized by looming, imposing pediments and strict geometries. Bereft of mythical and antique motifs, Rococo was considered lighter and more frivolous than its predecessor. It is best remembered for its pastel colors, its introduction of the exotic, especially chinoiserie, and its use of scrolls on pediments and bandwork. The originator of the rockwork and fake grottos that would become even more popular in the 19th century (including in the castles of our King Ludwig II), Rococo expressed the beginning of what would emerge more fully in Romanticism: a longing for an idealized natural world that was becoming increasingly encroached upon by industry and urbanization.

The French Revolution swept away the original Rococo movement along with many of the despots who proliferated it. However Rococo’s death was short-lived, a premature conclusion. History has repeatedly shown that an architectural style is one of the hardest cultural life forms to kill off. As the Bourbon kings returned to power in the wake of Napoleonic rule, they brought their style with them as means of cementing soft political power. From then on, Rococo revivalism became a fixture of French nationalism. (Perhaps more important to our contemporary analysis is that the Bourbon Restoration was also a period of illiberal protectionism characterized by, you guessed it, high tariffs.)

Even after the July Revolution, this revival lingered for most of the 19th century, and sometimes even merged syncretically with the Romantic movement. Here it was inevitably a bourgeois reaction to not only the Revolution itself, but to emerging changes in society, technology and labor relations, all of which would result in major crises by the middle of the century. This ruling class nostalgia for times of absolute domination over the populace and its use as a conservative, if not nationalistic and imperialist signifier is a defining characteristic of Rococo Revivalism in all its forms, including RCDR.

In its Second Empire (1830-1848) iteration, the nouveau riche of the petit bourgeoisie gravitated in particular towards Rococo decorative arts as a way of legitimating their newly-obtained wealth and prestige, to say to the old aristocrats: we’re not so different, you and me. However, this bourgeois aesthetic pact with the Rococo was a Faustian one. The same techniques of mass production that made the bourgeoisie rich also made the style more accessible than ever, thereby diluting its power.

Early mass production techniques from Britain, such as the steam press, allowed Rococo motifs to be imprinted on thinner sheets of silver – no need for the hassle of silversmithing. Later, industrial mills churned out wooden balustrades and scrollwork at an unthinkable pace. Suddenly, the style of extreme ornamentation had fallen prey to mechanical reproduction. In the process, the original works of Rococo decorative arts, paradoxically, would only become more valuable, as they now retained what Walter Benjamin called “the aura” – i.e. the special, reified thingness imbued in an original work which has since been endlessly copied.

Photograph of a Rococo Revival parlor in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0.

Architecture, however, retained its aureatic power for longer, at least if we understand mechanical reproduction as a function of labor. Mature capitalism resulted in the transformation of both architecture and its labor into commodities. This, however, was a gradual process. While replicas of Rococo architectural ornament were commonplace, these replicas still required a certain type of craft labor (shoehorned, of course, into its new capitalist strata.) This was the labor of the stonemason or the carpenter, and even though it would later be armed with tools that sped up production, this labor was still put to use for the creation of a new, albeit aesthetically derivative building. In other words, ornament was widely reproduced from an “original” (and always has been in architecture since at least the Renaissance) but, at this stage, only partially mechanized.

While revivals aspired to creative deviations from a pre-existing aesthetic whole, they soon gave way to something else: eclecticism. Owing in part to the expansion of architectural vocabularies through the parasitic twins of colonialism and archaeology, eclecticism – in which this newly liberated piecemeal ornament could be detached from its original historical contexts and used to create new forms – dominated the mid-late 19th century. The disconnection of ornament from its whole and accelerated advancements in architectural fabrication gradually blurred the line between details and their respective origins, especially for laypeople.  

While bourgeois architects like Charles Garnier explored this mixing of classical ornament through movements such as Beaux-Arts, capitalism didn’t sleep. By the 1890s, vernacular buildings – company housing, industrial sheds etc. -- were mass produced wholesale in factories and assembled by day laborers. This marked the beginning of rapid deskilling in architectural production. Even the term vernacular, once denoting the common buildings that sprung up in response to local material and environmental conditions, became permanently attached to the manufactured buildings that spread indiscriminately across the landscape.

The development of early modernism in the late 19th century finally put the nail in the Rococo coffin, though the style would continue to play a conservative role in France until the late 1930s. Neoclassical revivals regularly popped up contra modernism in the Greek Revival pediments and county courthouses of the world, but fully gilded Rococo would not emerge again for a good forty or fifty years, and when it did, it wasn’t in the realm of high architecture. For the first time in its existence, the locus of the Rococo shifted away from Europe in favor of that capital of kitsch, the United States.

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Hollywood Days

Scan from Daydream Houses of Los Angeles.

Regional Car Dealership Rococo owes its primary loyalty not to King Louis but to Hollywood, where it found a home at midcentury. Hollywood, imbued with the artifice of set design and a very real glamour, was the dominant distributor of cheap spatial reproduction and ersatz images of the past. This was, you must remember, the era that spawned Disneyland, an institution that somehow managed to distill the kitsch of Neuschwanstein castle into something even more saccharine.

By the time Rococo hit the West Coast, the material processes of the 19th century were all but complete. Architecture, even in its most customized forms, became, at heart, an assemblage of commodities. Modernism employed stonemasons primarily in Carrera, for the purposes of making floors and wall panels, not columns, corbels, and pediments, and that’s only if said architects wanted to spend the money. Usually, they didn’t – or couldn’t. By the 1950s, concrete, millwork, stamped metal, and later polyurethane and other foams and plastics, would all be employed in the making and remaking of ornamentation.

The British architectural historian of Postmodernism, Charles Jencks, made several studies of California’s vernacular architecture in the 1970s. His small books for Rizzoli frequently explore the storybook cottages and New Formalist (in appearance only) entablatures that would later give rise to important McMansion elements like the oversized transom window above the front door. Jencks’ analytical penchant was for ever more granular taxonomies, a precedent for our internet-driven predilection for labeling everything an “aesthetic” – albeit with less and less intellectual rigor as the years go by.

In Bizarre Architecture Jencks called Hollywood’s panorama of cheap stylized castles, colonnades, and hobbit holes “fantasy eclecticism” – a mix of ticky-tacky make believe with the existing eclectic pantheon of architectural subjects --  all built with mass produced materials. His somewhat obscure book Daydream Houses of Los Angeles, provides more detail for the residential realm. It is also the original inspiration for this blog. In it, Jencks labels the most ridiculous examples with clever barbs like “topiary fascist” and “predatory mansard.” (I can only aspire to be this funny.)

Of these houses he writes more seriously: “As a type the Movie Star House displays two very definite aspects: power, as signified in a massive and conventionally bland front (like a provincial city hall) and a rambling, spread out informality (like a relaxed Texan with his boots off and his limbs spread akimbo over sofa, stool and coffee table.)” He continues: “Every star’s house has some equivalent to [a] screen rumpus room, where past triumphs are relived and the golden memories are kept alive. They bear some iconographic relation to the cemetery at Forest Lawn and the Movieland Wax Museum, being a quintessential attempt at earthly immortality.”

Trump, we must remember, was, in addition to being a developer, a product of this same showbusiness, for which he has seemingly endless nostalgia. This is, after all, the man who wished to replace the Kennedy Center’s programming with reruns of Cats. (He also has surprisingly developed takes on musical theater, a fact Adorno would have loved.) It’s not just Trump, though, who holds this sentiment. In the basements of many of the country’s McMansions, we will find this same movie room concept regurgitated by a population who did not make any movies but whose joyful memories are irrevocably linked with passive consumption, and who attempt to remake in situ the more contemporary sticky, exurban movieplexes they, as antisocial creatures, wish to petulantly control for themselves. In both cases, this is an architectural culture shaped entirely by mediation.

By Allan warren - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=10976476

The primary text of midcentury Rococo was, of course, the Liberace mansion in Las Vegas. I don’t have time to get into the biography of Liberace, who was decidedly a 20th century phenomenon incomprehensible to my generation, a kind of grindset kitsch pianist whose offerings mostly clog up space in flea market record bins. It is worth mentioning, however, that he was staunchly pro-capitalism and had an extraordinary fascination with both theming as a concept (think a piano-shaped swimming pool, which he invented) and with anything that could communicate luxury, extravagance, wealth, and frivolity. His Vegas abode, built in 1962, is, like many famous people’s houses from the time, a closely guarded mansard on the outside – except this time peppered with filigree scrolls and goofy cherubs. The interior is a pearl within an architectural clam – and it is pearlescent. With its mirrored walls, sunken columned bathtub (the contemporary version of the Rococo grotto), fake Sistine chapel ceiling (there’s our Baroque), and crystal chandeliers, the Liberace mansion is a Rosetta Stone for not only RCDR but the worst McMansions of the early 80s.

Postmodern Malaise

Jencks makes an important point about houses like these, which is that many of them began their lives as more architectural (read: modernist) offerings that were later modified with cheap ornament to conform to changing tastes in the late 60s and early 70s – tastes that were on the vanguard of what would eventually be called Postmodernism. It’s no coincidence that they, as well as the city of Las Vegas as an institution, would be the primary source materials for Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s famous theory-manifesto, Learning From Las Vegas.

I’ve written about this elsewhere, but I’ll just paraphrase myself by saying that for better or for worse (and often both!) this important book was both spirited and populist in nature. It explored the increasingly dire contradictions between form and function in what is often called Late Modernism, while pointing out that architects, in their pursuit of perfection and control had long ignored the desires of everyday people. In this respect, the language of vernacular rather than academic architecture could thus serve as a new avenue for creativity. In their words: “Main Street was almost alright.”

By now, all the parts were in place for Regional Car Dealership Rococo to proliferate widely. Beyond architectural populism, Postmodernism saw the inevitable synthesis of, well, a lot of concurrent phenomena emerging in art and culture, such as excessive mediation (tv brain), juxtaposition as a compositional tool, and pastiche. It was backed by a rich and extensive theoretical literature, some of which is more readable than others. However, an undercurrent of anti-intellectualism also ran deep in Postmodernism, especially in its later years. And there is no world in which RCDR gives a shit about A Thousand Plateaus or what a “simulacrum” is (even though it is itself a simulacrum: a copy for which no original exists.)

What began with ironical, historically informed, and largely ludic explorations of mixing old architectural elements with new methods of fabrication (think giant, cartoonish columns; simplified but oversized pediments; those neon-besotted displays at the mall) Postmodernism eventually either lost the (formal) plot or transformed into a culture war that lives on to this day regarding the primacy of traditional architecture over modern. The Postmodern Classicism of Leon Krier and Robert AM Stern fame was architecture’s last revival movement and it has never truly left us.

These debates transpired at a time when making traditional architecture without the now-depleted natural materials or craft labor was and remains a largely farcical endeavor. Doing so is either extravagantly expensive or ends up somewhere squarely on the McMansion spectrum. RCDR circumvented this problem simply because it wasn’t thinking of architecture as any kind of meaningful cohesive cultural or even aesthetic program but as a casual expression of personal taste, a desire to communicate what are, if we’re being honest, pretty simple desires. Then, as now, it was traditionalism sold off-label.

Chair by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown for Knoll, Milwaukee Art Museum. By Sailko - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63469461

By the time of Late Postmodernism (the late 80s or early 90s), one could sense a kind of ideological desperation in projects like Prince Charles’ goofy yet sad pseudo-Georgian town of Poundbury or Celebration, Florida, a kind of Disney company town but for the consumer side that posed the question: what if a theme park resort were a model for urban planning? Such a concept could only come from an flailing movement so subsumed by corporations, culture warring and media consumption it forgot that cities existed at all before Le Corbusier, all while retaining the old master’s distaste for organic urban life and democratic planning. It lives on to this day in the unvanquishable meme of “people like Disney World because they want walkable urbanism.”

At any rate, an unintended side-effect of Postmodernism was the semantic saturation of architectural ornament writ large, the spamming of the same imagery until it lost its distinction and historical meaning. In this respect, it is an acceleration of the eclecticist project. Commodified and sold first in catalogs like its 19th century predecessors, then online, Baroque became Rocaille became Rococo became Liberace became Dictator Chic. Beyond semantics, RCDR would not materially exist without the innovations of the plastic age and its resultant escalation of both pollution and fossil fuel production, or without the cheap labor and global supply chains that grant both Trump’s margents and the McMansion itself their (temporal rather than stylistic) immediacy. Within three months, the Oval Office was transformed from its more routine Biden iteration into a cathedral of gilded junk, all for the low, low price of $1 to $5. But most importantly, more than anything else, RCDR would not exist without the explosion of income inequality spanning from the 1970s to our current oligarchal predicament. It was this minting of new millionaires and billionaires that stimulated the old bourgeois demand for such imagery of wealth, albeit desiccated, at scales not seen since the dawn of capitalism itself.

It is a common misconception that the goal of Trump and other McMansion peddlers is to replicate in any way an architectural style from the past with any kind of fidelity, or that the true comedy lies in how badly this fails. In fact, there’s nothing funny about any of this, though the juxtaposition of extremely cheap commodities with the intention to communicate having lots of money is decidedly ironic. Trump’s margents are an architectural representation of the world he inherited in the 20th and 21st century, as much as the world he wishes to make: a world of paternalism and rule by mob, kingly, sure, but also a world of cheap artifice fabricated in miserable conditions soon to be imported from neoliberalism’s imperialist proving grounds into the domicile, with us footing the tariffs. In short, and to our detriment, Regional Car Dealership Rococo is underwritten by a politics as impoverishing as its imagery.

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*(The comments, however, dispute this comparison, offering instead a different posting from a Vietnamese wholesaler. I find this proposal somewhat unconvincing on a logistical rather than architectural basis, as a site such as Alibaba would be much easier and seamless to order from. The truth is probably in the middle – a similar listing we haven’t yet uncovered.)