The art of demolition
In “Appetite for Destruction,” published in Quillette, I trace a through-line from the vanished Bonwit Teller reliefs to the current transformation of the White House’s East Wing. Designed in 1929 in the Art Deco style, the Bonwit Teller bas-reliefs were originally promised as a gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but were destroyed in 1980 during the construction of Trump Tower—a moment that marked the ascendancy of branding over craftsmanship. Both that act and the recent White House remodel reveal a modern impulse to equate demolition with authorship, the rewriting of history as a declaration of power. The essay considers how architecture functions as both aesthetic expression and political gesture: what it means when the rhetoric of preservation yields to that of renovation.
