WILL SAVARIN CATER STATE DINNERS?

Our President and a few of his well-heeled friends are putting up the money to put up a new formal dining room in the East Wing of the White House.  Long overdue, suggests Victory Girl Tori Williams.

Elementary schools generally have a multi-purpose room. That’s find when you are young. Flex spaces are fine for young families, but we are a world leader nation. We have been using the East Room in the White House as a multi-purpose room, but we are the world leader and we need a ballroom. Our 250th anniversary is next year, for crying out loud.

Yes, I attended such an elementary school, the hot lunches were prepared elsewhere and warmed up and served there, indoor gym took place there, as did concerts, PTA meetings, and Cub Scout gatherings.

What happens if there's a large crowd expected for a state dinner?  Well, you pitch a Big Top and call it a "specially built pavilion."  If the weather is foul, all those elegantly gowned women and their elegantly bought off escorts might have to schlop (Our President's words) through the mud to get there.

Pajamas Media's Athena Thorne has the renderings.  There are other sketches out there that give the same impression that the large attached garage gives of a McMansion.  (At least one of them is conjectural and wrong, putting a largish extension to the west of the curved South Portico.  Idiots.)  The version the White House released doesn't seem as overwhelming.

McCrery Architects rendering retrieved from Pajamas Media.

Inside, the formal dining room gives some commentators a Palace of Versailles vibe.

Unattributed Big Beautiful Ballroom rendering retrieved from Victory Girls.

Whether "Palace of Versailles" is a dig or a compliment might be an artifact of your political stance.

I'm seeing something closer to Our President's New York heart.

There are fewer pictures of the formal restaurant, originally the Corinthian Room and later the Savarin Restaurant, at New York's Pennsylvania Station, than there are of the Great Room and the Concourse.  The chandeliers in the White House version are different, and a prominent clock might be obligatory in a railway station.  The coffered ceiling, the pilasters using the orders, and the arched windows with keystones are pure Charles F. McKim.