The real White House is inside: design, daily life and propaganda

If you think Donald Trump was the first to reshape the White House in his own image, think again. The demolition of the West Wing and the new ballroom are just the latest chapter in a much longer story. Since its construction was completed in 1800—too late for George Washington to see it—the White House has been a mutable organism, repeatedly rebuilt, expanded, and altered. After just 14 years, a fire destroyed it, forcing reconstruction. Then came Thomas Jefferson’s porticos, in that Palladian “style”—imported from Italy and filtered through England—that has long defined its architecture. The West Wing and East Wing are 20th-century additions, and between 1948 and 1952, Harry S. Truman ordered the building to be almost entirely gutted due to structural risks. And yet, the impression remains that the White House has always stayed the same, as if its institutional image were more powerful than any substantial modification. So what has actually changed?

The transformations have primarily concerned what we now see in news broadcasts, articles, and social media: the interiors of the most exposed house on the planet. It has evolved alongside its inhabitants—45 presidents and their families—each introducing changes in furnishings, rituals, and aesthetic choices with a precise aim: beyond personal taste, the expression of a clear and declared political vision.

It is within this ambiguity—between domestic space and institution—that “The White House. Domestic Propaganda” takes shape, an exhibition curated by Davide Fabio Colaci and Lola Ottolini with a group of students from the Politecnico di Milano. The project is installed in Dropcity, an independent center occupying renovated tunnels beneath Milan’s Central Station. “Today, this topic needs independence in order to be addressed,” Colaci explains. The goal is not a chronological narrative, but the opening of new questions.

The exhibition proposes a fundamental reversal: instead of treating the White House’s architecture as a stable symbol of power, it examines interiors as a privileged lens through which to read both past and present politics. “While monumental architecture has always been associated with the idea of eternity—from the pyramids to ancient Rome—interiors tell the opposite story: change,” says Colaci. “Furnishings, decorations, and domestic rituals thus become indicators of politics in action.” This shift is far from marginal. Every choice—from furniture arrangement to the management of domestic space—becomes a form of statement.

Politics requires “a communicative structure, a form of propaganda to express what it intends to do,” and the home is the point from which this communication unfolds. Donald Trump’s “goldification” is a striking example: inside the White House, the tycoon covered everything in gold. The Oval Office was filled with gilded surfaces and ornaments, and we can expect nothing different from the new ballroom, with “material and chromatic codes that evoke a monarch more than a president.”

The construction of image through domestic space is nothing new. The Kennedys had already turned the White House into a narrative device, crafting a familiar and accessible image. It is well known that social integration was central to John F. Kennedy’s agenda, and “the idea of presenting oneself through a very simple, everyday domesticity—like children’s parties with balloons—was clearly a stage for political communication.” Propaganda no longer operates solely through monuments or grand public architecture; it embeds itself in daily behaviors and family rituals, using the domestic sphere to build identification and belonging.

For Dwight D. Eisenhower as well, family played a key role. The creation of new spaces for service staff suggested the idea of an “extended family,” symbolically expanding the domestic dimension of power. This perspective is central to Deep America, one of the exhibition’s key installations: an investigation into the liminal spaces of the White House, inhabited by those who support and maintain it. Through a three-dimensional diagram and AI-generated reconstructions of workers, often invisible figures emerge—service staff, technicians, gardeners—challenging the exclusive centrality of the president.

The exhibition does not attempt a faithful reconstruction of the White House. Instead, it focuses on a single tunnel, introducing visitors through a semi-transparent curtain that immediately evokes the idea of a threshold, both physical and symbolic. Elements such as a reproduction of the Oval Office carpet or a table set for thirteen presidents become narrative maps, capable of recounting habits related to leisure and food. The installation Common Threshold focuses on the White House fence as both a defensive and symbolic device: slogans such as Black Lives Matter, Live by the bomb, Die by the bomb, and other powerful messages are reproduced as a recognition of the building’s significance for those who remain outside it.

Alongside space, objects also become storytelling tools. The exhibition features Nixon’s headphones linked to the Watergate scandal, the first telegraph—initially kept outside the house for fear it might “confuse the president’s decisions”—and an entire section dedicated to diplomatic gifts given and received by presidents. “A gift is a form of material diplomacy,” Colaci notes. Through objects, relationships, alliances, and tensions are constructed. The installation Gift Archive makes this dimension visible through AI-generated reconstructions. Likewise, seemingly marginal elements reveal deeper implications, such as the speech prepared for Richard Nixon in the event that the Apollo 11 astronauts had been stranded on the Moon.

It is through this accumulation of objects, gestures, and micro-narratives that the White House ceases to be a stable icon and becomes instead an archive of decisions, fears, and strategies. If architecture continues to uphold the illusion of continuity, it is the mutable, adaptable, performative interiors that reveal its fragility. And perhaps that is precisely the point: of the White House as an immovable monument of Western democracy, only the shell may remain. Everything else is narrative.

Opening image: President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan dine in the White House second-floor study while watching the news. Washington, D.C., November 6, 1981. © White House Historical Association