President Trump slapped his name on the US Institute of Peace headquarters yesterday, where it stands as a perfect monument to both the President’s megalomania and one of the silliest-looking buildings in Washington, DC. The building is a hulking pile of nonsense near the National Mall and feature s a roof meant to invoke the wings of a dove. That’s a symbol of peace, in case your grasp of the incredibly obvious has dimmed. In that sense, the building is a “duck,” as the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour called structures that are a symbol for what they contain. Think the Longaberger Basket Building in Ohio, or the Dog Bark Park Inn in Idaho. It’s as if the saying “A bit too on the nose” had splendid conference rooms and a fabulous view of the Lincoln Memorial. (Me, I’ll always treasure the building because it’s nominally dedicated to peace, and yet Ryan Grim and Jesse Watters once got into a fistfight there.) Washington Post architecture critic Philip Kennicott called the DC duck a “low point” in architect Moshe Safdie’s “long descent into repetitive corporate architecture” when he reviewed it in 2011. He didn’t have much praise for its interior, either: Although the institute will have public areas, where museum exhibits would justify and explain the work of the institute, the building feels closed off from the city. The executive offices, which also face the Lincoln Memorial, are down a long corridor, Versailles-like, making them remote from general circulation. The boardroom is exquisite, high-end everything, and opens on to the Mall-view patio. This is the locus of power, the place hardest to reach but blessed with the most spectacular vistas. The public is kept to the ground floor and the basement, where the exhibition space will expand after funding comes through. The perfect digs for the institute’s policy experts, Kennicott wrote, would instead be “the cheapest, most serviceable office space with the lowest overhead.” Trump’s monument to his cherished image of himself as a peacemaker is only the latest insult to the institute this year. Elon Musk’s DOGE project invaded the building in March, fired most of its staff, and installed a 28-year-old as its president. The institute, an independent agency, got its building back in May following a lawsuit by the institute and many of its board members. Control of the building has see-sawed between Trump and the institute ever since, and the battle is not over yet. For now at least Trump’s name is emblazoned below a cartoonish symbol of peace that’s only slightly less laughable than the fact that this weekend FIFA will almost certainly present Trump with a “peace prize” it invented for him after the Nobel Peace Prize he desperately covets went to someone else. That ceremony will take place at the nearby Kennedy Center—another building Trump took over and would love to have named for him. He’ll host the Kennedy Center Honors there on Sunday.The post Trump’s Name Is a Perfect Match for the Ridiculous US Institute of Peace Building first appeared on Washingtonian. ...read more read less