Trump’s new ballroom architect, Shalom Baranes, is a self-described “refugee” who publicly challenged the president on immigration

The news that Donald Trump has hired a new architect for his controversial and ever-expanding White House ballroom project, squeezing out former Punch List headliner James McCrery II, likely came as no surprise to anyone familiar with the president’s track record in dealing with design professionals, some of whom claim he still owes them money. 

What might turn a few heads are these details: The new architect in question, Shalom Baranes, is a self-described refugee who was born in Italy to Jewish parents who had fled Libya, and who arrived in New York with his family at age six. During Trump’s first term, Baranes published an op-ed in the Washington Post that delicately, but unmistakably, challenged the administration’s policies on immigration, taking aim at the Muslim travel ban in particular.

“I came here a refugee. And then I renovated the Pentagon,” the headline on the 2017 piece read. The subhed? “My work would be impossible without my fellow immigrants.”

“To this day, I remember the excitement of my father’s first glance at the Statue of Liberty as our ship sailed into the harbor,” wrote Baranes, who would later earn citizenship. “I was only six at the time and still mourning the loss of the red two-wheeled bike we had to leave behind.”

He went on to describe how, after studying at Exeter and Yale, he made his way to Washington, D.C., where he founded Shalom Baranes Associates in 1981. The firm’s long list of federal commissions includes work on the Pentagon, the Treasury, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Cannon House Office Building.

“The journey from that ship in New York Harbor to Yale defined my life,” Baranes wrote in the Post, adding: “The anti-immigrant sentiment I feel today is nothing new to me. When my Jewish parents arrived in the United States just a few years after fleeing persecution in an Arab regime, it was as difficult for them to be accepted here as it is for Muslims now.”

He concluded, “My hope is that the Trump administration will take actions to ensure that the travel ban is indeed temporary, so that good, hard-working individuals fleeing tyranny can find a new home as I did—and that each of them will be given the same opportunity to help build this great nation that I had.”

Unlike McCrery, Baranes is no neo-traditionalist, and from all outward appearances no ideologue. (The New York Times reported Thursday that he had donated to a number of Democratic campaigns and defended the preservation of some Brutalist landmarks in D.C.) Rather than style or philosophy, what characterizes the firm’s approach is an overarching focus on the D.C. area, where the firm is very much a known quantity.

“We’ve got the Capitol Region covered,” SBA’s website promises. Its “News” section did not as of Thursday night include any references to the ballroom or Trump; instead it was filled with accounts of Baranes’s ongoing campaign to reinvigorate the Federal Triangle section of D.C. “by converting its pre-World War II office buildings into residential spaces.”

The firm’s completed projects are inoffensively contemporary and almost relentlessly pragmatic. What seems to matter is getting the job and delivering the building. You know that line about how every design-review board in the country asks architects, no matter the nature of the project, to “break up the massing”?

SBA is happy to break up the massing.

That accommodating quality—and the careful, politic tone of the 2017 op-ed, for all its unyielding optimism about the role immigrants play in American life, in great contrast to Trump’s rhetoric on the subject—may offer the first clue about Baranes’s willingness to take on the ballroom job.

Neil Flanagan, a D.C. architect and writer who knows SBA’s work well, helped fill in some additional details:

“Shalom Baranes himself came out of the office of DC’s prince of PoMo, Arthur Cotton Moore, but eventually grew the firm into one known for delivering reliably attractive modernist buildings within DC’s challenging design-review system. But they also recently saw the departure of a group of staff including former principal Robert Sponseller (a great designer). Maybe he got out just in time.”

He added: “I can’t say I understand why a mid-sized local firm with a rock-solid reputation would take on such a disreputable project for a nightmare client. If they’re ever paid, they’re betting the farm that future administrations, the D.C. government, and review agencies let the past be past. If the bottom falls out of local work, they don’t have other offices or global reputation like AECOM to sustain them. They’ve struggled through previous downturns, and we’ll just have to see if they’ve just created one for themselves.”

And what of McCrery? He is reportedly staying on in a “consulting” role on the ballroom, though that may be little more than a face-saving euphemism acceptable to both architect and client. Sources have characterized the tension between the two men as having mostly to do with Trump’s desire to make the ballroom ever bigger, as well as the architect’s difficulty meeting the president’s headlong (that’s the polite word for it) timeline. According to the Post, which reported that McCrery stopped work on the ballroom in late October, “Trump’s selection of the firm raised eyebrows among architects and planning experts worried that a shop as small as McCrery’s couldn’t complete such a large project in little more than three years.”

As of Friday morning, it remained unclear whether Baranes’s charge is to shepherd a version of McCrery’s design to completion or rework the ballroom scheme in a more fundamental way. “I'm afraid I'm not at liberty to discuss any aspect of the project,” Baranes wrote in an email to Punch List Friday morning.

News & Notes

I’m grateful to Mark Lamster, Alexandra Lange, and Carolina Miranda for shouting out Punch List in their annual Architecture & Design Awards, which is always a terrific read.

In the Guardian, Oliver Wainwright uses the same adjective I did—“steroidal”—to describe the new JPMorgan Chase headquarters on Park Avenue, by Foster + Partners.

AECOM—the mammoth firm whose rise is the focus of Aaron Cayer’s excellent book “Incorporating Architecture,” featured in Punch List in September—has paid a reported $390 million to acquire a Norwegian AI startup called Consigli. The company’s founder, Janne Aas-Jakobsen, will become AECOM’s head of AI engineering. I asked my colleague Phil Bernstein, deputy dean at the Yale School of Architecture and a former vice president at Autodesk, what he made of the deal. His take: “(1) gets AECOM into AI at a price tag probably below what it would cost them to start something from scratch and get fresh talent and build, (2) the agent-based approach is, perhaps, extensible to other AECOM processes, and (3) I suspect there’s a lot of cash on the balance sheet looking for someplace to go. But I think they’ll find they paid too much, ultimately.”

Cayer, in an email, called the Consigli acquisition “entirely on brand for AECOM (originally AECOM Technology Corporation) when you consider the firm’s longer history. We should recall that as the company was growing, first as DMJM—well before becoming AECOM in 1990—it was investing in and accessing top-secret multiprocessing computers developed for the military, and doing so much earlier than most architecture and engineering firms.”

He added: “I think we should be paying closer attention not to the specifics of these deals—important as they are for labor conditions and employment across the professions—but to the broader circulations of capital that make them possible. Whether the surpluses used to acquire such tech companies originate in longstanding military commissions or in global redevelopment projects such as the company’s new proposals for Gaza or Ukraine, the pattern is the same: AECOM’s technical capacity, its management efficiencies, and its access to state and private capital continually reinforce one another. This is also why private equity firms are now studying A+E firms like AECOM. It’s not because they design better buildings, but because they operate as highly optimized machines for converting geopolitical upheaval, public spending, and professional labor into predictable returns.”

Along with Clark Construction, AECOM has been part of the White House ballroom project from the outset.

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