An Arch in Search of Something to Celebrate

I dug out Peter York’s Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World's Most Colorful Despots the other day. Probably shouldn’t have. It’s one of those things that seems harmless enough until you start noticing it everywhere, and then you can’t really stop. York’s point, more or less, is that powerful men all think they’re expressing themselves, and somehow all end up buying from the same catalogue.

Which is how you end up looking at Donald Trump’s proposed triumphal arch and being told it’s to mark 250 years of American independence. And yes, fine, 250 years is worth marking. No argument there. It just doesn’t obviously call for quite so much… stone.

The arch doesn’t really sit on its own either. It turns up alongside the White House ballroom idea, all chandeliers and gilt and that slightly breathless feeling that if something’s worth doing it’s worth overdoing. You start to get the sense this isn’t a one-off, it’s more of a direction of travel. Once you’ve decided gold works, you tend to keep going back to it.

The awkward bit is the arch itself. It’s not a neutral form you can use for anything, like a statue or a plaque. It comes pre-loaded. The Romans didn’t build them because it had been a good 250 years. They built them because they’d just beaten someone and wanted to make sure nobody forgot. You marched through it, job done, story fixed in stone.

So when you borrow that shape, you borrow the voice as well. You’re not just marking time passing, you’re announcing a win. Loudly. It feels a bit like the car that’s been back to the garage three times and still isn’t quite right. It runs, but you wouldn’t build a monument to it.

None of that means you don’t celebrate 250 years. It just makes the tone feel off. Like turning up to an anniversary dinner in full military dress, only to find the dining room has been refitted in gold leaf while you were parking. You can’t say no one’s made an effort, but you do start wondering who it’s actually for.

And this is where it gets slightly more interesting, because there’s a bit of psychology lurking behind the taste. Call it narcissism if you like, but not in the pub sense. It’s the need to have importance made visible, just in case anyone was in danger of missing it. A plaque can be overlooked. A 250-foot arch rather less so. Add a ballroom full of chandeliers and you’ve covered the indoor market as well.

Timing doesn’t help. These things usually appear when everything feels settled, when alliances are solid and you don’t have to keep checking who’s still on side. At the moment it feels a bit more like everyone’s quietly doing the maths and keeping a few options open. Not collapse, nothing dramatic, just not quite the relaxed centre-of-the-room feeling you’d expect for this sort of architectural confidence.

Which is where York’s point comes back in. If the reality’s a bit messy, tidy up the signal. Make it big enough and shiny enough that it carries the message on its own. No need to get into the detail if you can just build something that says “important” from a distance.

You can picture how it got there. Someone suggests doing something for the anniversary. Perfectly sensible. Then it needs to be noticed. Then it needs to be significant. Then someone says it needs to be really significant. By the time the lions and eagles have turned up, along with another layer of chandelier somewhere else, the original idea has quietly left the room.

Washington hasn’t usually gone in for this. The existing monuments are serious but they don’t nag. Lincoln sits there and lets you get on with it. The Washington Monument just stands there, not trying to sell itself. They assume you’ll work it out.

This one doesn’t really leave you that option. It does the working out for you, in fairly large letters, and then adds a bit more just to be safe. It may never get built. There are committees for that sort of thing, and budgets, and the odd outbreak of common sense.

Still, if nothing else, it does solve the problem of how to mark 250 years. Not by explaining it, or reflecting on it, but by making sure you can see it from a long way off.