What Does a Civilised Society Choose to Build?
The White House ballroom debate raises a larger question about architecture, beauty, public priorities and the human suffering we learn not to see.
Civilisation is measured not only by the monuments it builds, but also by the suffering it refuses to ignore.
A ballroom at the White House might seem an unlikely starting point for a discussion about civilisation.
Yet perhaps buildings tell us more about societies than we realise.
They reveal what we value, what we preserve, what we celebrate and what we want future generations to remember.
The controversy surrounding the proposed new White House ballroom has therefore become about much more than architecture.
The project, originally announced by the White House in July 2025 as a privately funded addition intended to provide a permanent space for major state functions, was initially presented as an approximately 90,000-square-foot ballroom accommodating around 650 seated guests. The administration argued that such a facility would remove the recurring need to erect temporary structures for large official occasions.
Since then, however, the project has grown in cost and controversy. The East Wing was demolished, the estimated price rose substantially, questions were raised about approval procedures and funding, and preservationists challenged the project in court.
On 7 August 2026, a federal appeals court ordered above-ground construction to stop, ruling that such a fundamental alteration of the White House requires congressional authorisation. The administration has said it intends to appeal to the Supreme Court.
The dispute raises legitimate questions about presidential authority, historic preservation, public consultation and the stewardship of a building that belongs not to an individual president but, symbolically and institutionally, to the American people.
But there is another question worth asking.
Even if the ballroom were entirely lawful, beautifully designed and privately funded, what does its construction tell us about the priorities of our age?
The case for building beautiful things
There is an easy argument to make against grand buildings.
It is also an incomplete one.
Human beings have always built things that exceeded immediate necessity.
Temples, theatres, libraries, gardens, universities, concert halls, monuments, museums and public squares were not created simply because people needed shelter.
They were created because human existence involves more than survival.
Architecture can express memory.
Art can give meaning to suffering.
Music can cross boundaries that politics cannot.
A public building can become part of the identity of generations who had nothing to do with the government that commissioned it.
UNESCO regards culture and heritage not as decorative luxuries but as elements that enrich societies, strengthen communities and contribute to sustainable human development.
There is therefore nothing inherently immoral about spending substantial resources on beauty.
If previous generations had concluded that no cathedral, library, museum, concert hall or public garden should be created while poverty existed somewhere in the world, humanity would have inherited a much poorer civilisation.
The question cannot simply be:
Why build this when somebody is hungry?
Taken literally, that argument would eventually prohibit almost everything beyond subsistence.
The harder question is one of proportion.
The uncomfortable arithmetic
The current estimated cost of the White House ballroom has been reported at around $400 million.
Numbers of this scale easily become abstract.
So do numbers describing human suffering.
The United Nations launched its 2026 global humanitarian appeal seeking $33 billion to assist 135 million people affected by wars, climate disasters, epidemics, earthquakes and other emergencies. Its immediate priority alone requires $23 billion to reach 87 million people in the most desperate circumstances.
Meanwhile, the World Bank estimates that hundreds of millions of people still live in extreme poverty, with progress in reducing poverty slowing sharply. Conflict-affected and fragile countries now contain a growing share of the world’s poorest people.
None of this means that $400 million spent in Washington could simply be transferred tomorrow and solve these crises.
It could not.
The ballroom has been presented as largely privately financed. Humanitarian assistance involves governments, international organisations, logistics, political access and enormously complicated systems of delivery.
A comparison between one construction project and global poverty is therefore economically simplistic if treated literally.
Morally, however, the comparison remains uncomfortable.
Because money is not the only scarce resource.
Attention is scarce too.
Political energy is scarce.
Public imagination is scarce.
And perhaps compassion can become scarce when suffering is sufficiently distant from us.
”The problem is not the ballroom”
It would be convenient to turn the ballroom into a symbol of everything wrong with wealth.
That would also be unfair.
A nation may legitimately want an impressive place in which to receive foreign leaders, hold state dinners and conduct ceremonies of diplomacy.
The White House itself is not merely an office building. It is a historic and symbolic structure whose architecture carries meaning far beyond its practical functions.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation, while challenging the present project and the process through which it proceeded, has itself acknowledged the usefulness of a larger meeting space.
The serious argument is therefore not between people who appreciate architecture and people who care about poverty.
A mature civilisation should be capable of caring about both.
It should be able to build beautifully and feed the hungry.
To preserve monuments and protect refugees.
To support orchestras and hospitals.
To construct libraries while providing clean water.
To celebrate human creativity without becoming indifferent to human misery.
Perhaps civilisation begins precisely when we refuse to accept that these values must always compete.
Omelas
This is where Ursula K. Le Guin’s extraordinary short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas becomes difficult to avoid.
Omelas is a beautiful and apparently joyful city.
Its people prosper.
There is music, celebration, abundance and happiness.
But their happiness depends upon something terrible.
Somewhere beneath that beautiful society, a single child is kept in misery.
Everyone eventually learns that the child exists.
They are told that the happiness of the entire city depends upon the child’s suffering.
Most remain.
Some cannot.
They walk away from Omelas.
Le Guin’s story endures because it does not provide us with a comfortable moral instruction.
It gives us a question.
How much suffering are we prepared to accept when our own comfort depends, directly or indirectly, upon not looking too closely at it?
Our world is obviously not Omelas.
There is no single imprisoned child upon whose misery global prosperity literally depends.
But the metaphor remains disturbing.
We inhabit a world capable of extraordinary technological achievement, breathtaking architecture and unimaginable private wealth.
At the same time, millions of people require emergency food, shelter and medical assistance.
Children still die from preventable causes.
Families are displaced by wars they did not start.
Entire communities live without reliable water, electricity, education or healthcare.
And those of us fortunate enough to live elsewhere become remarkably skilled at continuing with our lives.
What architecture says about us
Buildings are never entirely neutral.
The pyramids tell us something about ancient Egypt.
Cathedrals tell us something about medieval Europe.
Parliaments tell us something about the aspirations of constitutional government.
Factories tell the story of industrialisation.
Memorials reveal what societies choose to remember.
Prisons may reveal what they fear.
And palaces reveal something about power.
That does not make magnificent architecture morally suspect.
Quite the opposite.
The greatest buildings can become gifts from one generation to another.
But public architecture acquires its deepest meaning when it reflects not merely wealth or authority, but something of the society’s understanding of itself.
The controversy surrounding the White House ballroom therefore deserves more than partisan argument about Donald Trump.
The President will eventually leave office.
The building, if completed, may remain for generations.
That is precisely why questions of scale, design, preservation, legality and public consultation matter.
A president is temporary.
Cultural inheritance is not.
Private money and public meaning
There is also an interesting ethical complication in the argument that private donors, rather than taxpayers, are financing the project.
Legally and economically, that distinction matters greatly.
Morally, it does not entirely end the discussion.
Private wealth is entitled to support architecture, universities, hospitals, museums, research, sport, religious institutions or almost anything lawful its owners value.
Philanthropy has created extraordinary public goods throughout history.
But the choices of the wealthy also tell us something about the societies in which wealth exists.
What attracts enormous private generosity?
What struggles to attract it?
Which causes inspire prestige?
Which forms of suffering remain almost invisible?
The question is not whether donors should be prohibited from funding a ballroom.
It is why some projects capture imagination and resources so readily while humanitarian organisations repeatedly warn that life-saving programmes remain desperately short of money.
That question belongs not only to billionaires.
It belongs to all of us.
Beyond the old idea of the “Third World”
We should also be careful with the traditional language of a prosperous “First World” helping an impoverished “Third World”.
The world is more complicated now.
Extreme wealth and severe deprivation can exist within the same country and sometimes within the same city.
Fragility, displacement, homelessness, food insecurity and exclusion are not confined to distant continents.
Nor should humanitarian concern be understood as charity bestowed by fortunate societies upon unfortunate ones.
Human dignity is not geographical.
A child without food in Sudan, Gaza, Haiti or Afghanistan does not possess less moral worth because the child is far from Washington, London, Paris or Brussels.
Nor does a homeless person sleeping near one of the world’s wealthiest financial districts become less visible simply because the surrounding country is rich.
Perhaps a genuinely civilised society begins by refusing to divide suffering into the suffering that concerns us and the suffering that belongs to somebody else.
What, then, should we build?
We should build ballrooms.
And hospitals.
We should restore historic buildings.
And construct schools.
We should fund museums, theatres, libraries and orchestras.
And sanitation, vaccination, nutrition and emergency shelter.
We should create beautiful public spaces because beauty is part of human dignity.
But we should also ask uncomfortable questions whenever grandeur becomes easier to finance than survival.
The measure of civilisation cannot be austerity.
A civilisation stripped of art, architecture, music and beauty in the name of permanent emergency would itself become diminished.
But neither can civilisation be measured by magnificence alone.
The most beautiful palace in the world cannot compensate for indifference outside its gates.
Perhaps the question raised by the White House ballroom is therefore not whether it should exist.
The legal system will address the questions of authority and procedure. Architects and preservationists will debate its design and relationship to the historic White House. Politicians will argue about cost and funding.
The deeper question belongs to everyone.
Can we create beautiful things without allowing their beauty to make suffering invisible?
Omelas asks us to imagine a magnificent society whose happiness carries an unbearable moral price.
Our societies need not make the same bargain.
Perhaps the highest expression of civilisation is not choosing between beauty and compassion.
It is possessing enough imagination to insist upon both.
- Dinos Toumazos is a co-founder and director of Agora Dialogue.
- Isla Hera is an independent researcher and writer focusing on international affairs, migration, geopolitics and sustainable public policy, with a particular interest in the social, economic and humanitarian dimensions of global challenges.