January 2010 » book review

People's Palace

Dream House: The White House as an

American Home
by Ulysses Grant Dietz and Sam Watters
Acanthus Press, New York, NY; 2009
312 pages; hardcover; 350 color and duotone images; $75
ISBN 978-0-926494-65-7

Reviewed by Lynne Lavelle

Speaking at a tribute to Robert Frost in September 1963, John F. Kennedy expressed his hopes for the preservation movement: "I look forward to an America that will not be afraid of grace and beauty, which will protect the beauty of our national environment, which will preserve great old American houses and squares and parks of our national past, and which will build handsome and balanced cities for our future."

There was no better advertisement for this sentiment than the recently refurbished White House, which the American public had toured with Jacqueline Kennedy via a CBS television broadcast on Valentine's Day, 1962. The first lady was instrumental in reshaping the interiors, and rejecting Modernism in favor of the house museum movement – a polarizing viewpoint at the time. Though by the Kennedy era the White House was essentially a museum with a private apartment for the first family, it now resembled a Colonial-style palace, evocative of an "imagined American past."

The Kennedy presidency is one of many pivotal moments in the evolution of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue explored in Dream House: The White House as an American Home. Though functionally and aesthetically each element developed at a different pace, the book broadly defines the house's incarnations in six chapters: "Country House," "Villa," "Mansion," "Palace," "Suburban Home" and lastly, "Shrine." All but the earliest and latest key design themes reflect sweeping shifts within American society; while the Great Depression called for restraint, Reagan-era prosperity was characterized by high style and opulence – as begun by Jacqueline Kennedy.

That the White House has remained a shrine to Jacqueline Kennedy's taste is no accident. Rather, the way in which her restoration was organized ensured that no first family could wield such influence again. Mrs. Kennedy clearly defined the designations of offices, state room and family quarters, creating the tripartite system that exists today. And the formation of an upper class arts committee in 1962 supplemented the restrictions placed on the first lady's role by first Fine Arts Committee in the 1920s and the Commission on Fine Arts in 1941. Since then, presidential wishes have been usurped by history, authenticity and official notions of "good taste."

Aside from the wishes of first families and changing social climates, the White House has always been influenced by contemporary great houses, works of art and available horticultural specimens. Dream House puts each architectural and landscaping development in context: In Roosevelt's White House, Schloss Schonbrunn in Austria and Chateau de Compiegne, France, were strong influences on the south parterres and topiary on the first-floor terraces. And later, the ballroom garden at the Governor's Palace in Williamsburg, VA, a 1930s re-creation of an 18th-century Colonial garden, was one of several inspirations for the Kennedy Rose Garden – "The president shared with his colonial predecessors the Enlightenment belief that nature guides sound judgment."

Kennedy's assassination in November 1963 ended the Camelot presidency. But like those presidents who preceded and followed him, the White House still bears the Kennedys' stamp. Today, the Rose Garden is under the care of a team of curators, architects and the National Park Service, and other gardens have been completed in his memory.

Dream House illustrates how, through triumph and tragedy, the White House has endured but never shied from change. "If George Washington were to visit Washington D.C., today he would find that the White House and its garden have been developed with ongoing respect for the defining Potomac view, despite the complexity of 21st-century urban life. A consistent and protected vision of pre-urban America has ensured that today's capital city map remains much as L'Enfant envisioned when he presented his plan to the first president two centuries ago. At the heart of the city, for the pleasure of the public and the president, remains the city's Reservation No. 1, the president's garden and park."  

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