the white house actually used to look like this (this is not a joke)
photos instead of paintings (all this was later removed):
this is one of my favorite image parings to show people. in person when you swipe back and forth you can sometimes see it rewire something in their brain about america. same room in the white house, before and after:
if i were making a positive argument for the change (i am contrarian), i dug up two images of the red room from the same exact angle, before and after. you can notice the same doors, fireplace position, etc:
i will also plug the fact that most of the cool (imo) design work in the above images was done by louis comfort tiffany. here are a few random images from him (first two images are the same church in ohio)
these are some of my favorite sketches of his. part of my interest in his work is that american aesthetics, on some other alternate timeline, could have gone more down this road:
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