Is the White House building a triumphal arch outside Arlington National Cemetery?
In Washington, D.C. a new triumphal arch may be built across the Potomac River in Arlington, Virginia, to commemorate the country’s 250th anniversary. The proposal by architecture firm Harrison Design appears to be the same height—if not taller than—the Lincoln Memorial, which it would face.
News of the arch circulated yesterday after Jim Watson photographed 3D-printed scale models of Harrison Design’s proposal at a meeting in the Oval Office between President Trump and Finnish Prime Minister Alexander Stubb. Reporting in The Washington Post said Justin Shubow, president of the National Civic Art Society, presented the idea to Trump earlier this year.
Watson’s photograph showed the Lincoln Memorial facing the wrong direction, and the model quickly garnered comparisons to Albert Speer’s unbuilt German Arch of Triumph.
The proposed arch echoes that of Grand Army Plaza Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Memorial Arch in Brooklyn, and of course Paris’s Arc de Triomphe. It would have a gold winged angel and two white eagles. Its tentative site is Memorial Circle—a traffic roundabout across the Arlington Memorial Bridge from the Lincoln Memorial.
Eric Jenkins, an architect and former educator at the University of Maryland and Catholic University, said the arch stands to “disrupt a symbolic connection” between “the Lincoln Memorial and Arlington House and Arlington National Cemetery’s ‘most hallowed ground.’”
Jenkins, who has taught studios in Rome, and recognizes the virtue and importance of learning from Greco-Roman architectural history, called “contemporary classical architecture” an “oxymoron if there ever was one.”
“Connection is the key—linking, bridging, reconciling. That’s what the Memorial Bridge does. It unites Lincoln’s legacy with Arlington, once home to Robert E. Lee, now a site of national mourning. The arch would more than likely obscure John F. Kennedy’s eternal flame that can be seen from the Lincoln Memorial on dark nights,” Jenkins elaborated. “Inserting a grand, false monument into that axis and space breaks that symbolism. It risks replacing subtlety with spectacle, solemnity with show. Instead of healing, it imposes.”
…
moar…
https://www.archpaper.com/2025/10/trump-triumphal-arch-arlington-national-cemetery/
Jenkins elaborated. “Inserting a grand, false monument into that axis and space breaks that symbolism. It risks replacing subtlety with spectacle, solemnity with show. Instead of healing, it imposes.”