Theodore Roosevelt’s remodeling of the White House in 1902 transformed it from a crazy quilt of alterations over time into a cohesive statement of modern times. Of course the historic original house prevailed. That it be kept was central to the stated concept of “restoration” that architect Charles F. McKim laid before the president and first lady. The familiar White House image was to be the wrapping for a new package. The relic was to be refined outside and improved within. By such an objective, the modern needs of a presidential headquarters were met without compromising a revered symbol. Indeed, the symbol itself was probably more clearly defined after McKim than it had ever been before.
McKim and his colleague Glenn Brown, Washington architect and secretary of the American Institute of Architects, had studied the house from every angle.1 They appreciated its noble past—the house of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. In their minds’ eyes they pared it back to the original, removing added greenhouses on the west, old gas lamps installed on the columns, and other intrusions on the Georgian purity originally ordered by George Washington. With these things stripped away, they could build. They decided to leave the one of Jefferson’s wings that survived, that on the west, beneath the “unsightly” glass houses, and to rebuild the other on the east. Then McKim could say that with these chaste horizontal thrusts, “the cup had its saucer.”2 The renovation of the White House began at that moment.
If the exterior fit rather well into the definition of “restoration,” the interior was quite another matter. In many respects, except for size, the interior of the White House had been more an American house than the Georgian country house it seemed. The plan, much simplified from that of the original model, Leinster House in Dublin, Ireland, is only somewhat like similar houses in the British Isles; it is less complex, being without antechambers, an abundance of private stairs, small corridors, or ceremonial galleries, and it is much more open in the flow from room to room. Although protected during its construction by President Washington, the rising house had also felt the attention of committees. To save money, planned marble floors, for example, had been omitted in favor of wood. The basement groin vaulting that would have supported the marble was too far along to change, so it was built. When McKim first saw the arches, they were covered with layers of grease and whitewash, a canopy over a dark, alleyway hall between kitchens and storage rooms. At its worst it smelled of the butcher shop and fish market; at its best, toward the west end, it savored of spices.
