You know what? Let's class things up around here.
Dude, this looks surprisingly good. So let's get to it — why
is the Oval Office an oval? "As the office and home of perhaps the
hardest working executive in the land..." "We're in the Oval Office — in the oval
office — this is the president's office." "Since we couldn't play golf
together, I thought we ought to visit and talk about golf and other things together.
"People feel a certain reverence for the space." The history of that weird beautiful room in the
West Wing has a practical answer, but there's also a bigger answer that says something about America.
Do you like the, uh, funk music by the way? Decided to choose funk
music for the least funky place in the world. So let's start with this — this is inside the
white house during renovations in 1950. It is stripped to the bone like a rotisserie chicken.
Now this isn't the West Wing, but look at this thing. The West Wing
and the White House and the Oval Office are ever evolving, ever changing things.
But let's start by tracking it backwards. You can see where the Oval Office is today.
It's the, you know, curvy walled thing right here. The phrase Oval Office actually didn't show up
in the New York Times until 1955, so it is kind of a newish idea.
It's been in its current location since 1934, when FDR expanded the West Wing and moved the
Oval Office from the middle. Doesn't it look awesome
in black and white by the way? I feel way more presidential in black and white.
This is all after a straight up fire gutted the West Wing in 1929.
Those are the big changes after the Oval Office's creation. President
William Howard Taft was the first person to use the Oval Office in October, 1909.
Here he is signing a bill there in 1915, and here it is in that general era in all its ovally glory.
Though Teddy Roosevelt built the West Wing earlier, he worked in this office,
which — wow, gotta be honest. At first I thought the Oval Office was a bit over the top,
but then I see this thing I'm kind of like, yeah, we need an oval office.
So that's the capsule history — but why is this thing oval?
That is where things get a little complicated. Almost all the sources say that the design of
the Oval Office shape was based on the Blue room — a state room in the White
House proper — or the Yellow Room, which is also an oval and sits just above it.
The Blue room was used for meeting people. Here it is in 1904, in a picture that I
chose for its extreme blueness, and the Yellow room was used as an office,
as you can see during this 1886 picture. The Oval Office is kind of a mash-up of both of
those functions: the state room and the office. But i realize this is kind of an unsatisfying
answer. Yes, that's why the Oval Office was oval, because
of those rooms, but why were those rooms oval? And i think there are actually two key answers.
What? I'm already a
guy in his basement with an Oval Office taped to his wall, you don't think i'm
going to go full Presidential? So why were these rooms oval?
The common reason you'll see is that George Washington wanted it that way. Here's a diagram:
see, as first President, he had these meetings called levees.
They were meetings with the public, a holdover from the monarchy.
Washington would be at the center and people would stand around him waiting to be talked to.
An oval made it so that people could be equidistant from Washington.
I'm not saying this is untrue, but i kind of don't think it's enough.
Here's the queen's levee room circa 1816. Notice its non-oval nature. And here is Martha Washington
holding a levee in a not oval room. So i think there's a bit more to it than
George Washington's personal preferences. James Hoban, an Irish-born architect,
shown here in this weird wax bas relief, designed the White House and was
responsible for the oval Blue and Yellow rooms. So yeah, he was taking direction from George, but
he was also responding to architectural trends. This is the state house in Charleston,
South Carolina that Hoban worked on. See the White House similarity?
At the time, the architecture world in England and Europe was enthralled with
Andrea Palladio's work. Palladian architecture was in itself a classical revival featuring
a lot of stuff like an emphasis on symmetry. England loved it, Jefferson loved it, Europe loved
it, and architect James Hoban loved it too. Leinster house, in Dublin was cited as
particular inspiration, and you can see the semi-circular room in the floor plan right here.
Architects like Hoban strove to adapt that to their work in America. It was trendy and elite.
So in addition to levees being tied to that culture, the elite in architecture in Europe
was the reason those Blue and Yellow rooms were oval, and by extension the Oval Office, too.
But why care?
This is where i do my Kevin Spacey impression, if it were like 2015.
I've been trying to wrap my head around the bigger meaning of this video. On the one hand,
you've got this procession of Oval Offices: Oval Office, Oval Office, Oval Office, Oval Office.
All different, constantly changing. On the other hand, you have this clear
progression of architecture and culture. How does this add up to something meaningful?
I keep returning to that image from the beginning, one that i'd never seen before researching
this topic: the one of the White House as just a shell, but a shell that they bothered to preserve.
The Oval Offices of the 20th and 21st century were about showing continuity with the Taft Oval
Office, and that Oval Office was about showing continuity with the White House ovals — the
Yellow and Blue rooms — and those rooms themselves were about showing continuity with England
and with Europe, both through the design of the rooms and the rituals that happened inside them.
The Oval Office, like the country itself, is about projecting continuity,
whether that continuity is there or not. Sometimes that continuity looks like a flag,
or a Constitution, or an oath that every President takes. And sometimes it looks like an oval.
All right, that's it for this video. Let's shift to a more dramatic angle here.
If you saw my video a while ago, Why the Pentagon is a Pentagon,
uh that's where the idea for this came from. Part of my new series called why the thing is a thing.
Let me know if you have an idea for other things that i should explain...why they are those things.
You know what i mean. Let's get some drama here.
Thank you for watching this video today. If you liked it,
please drop a like and smash that subscribe button, or leave a comment with your favorite
tidbit of history about the Oval Office or the White House's construction. Until next time,
goodbye. Goodbye?
I guess. I don't know, is that how these presidential addresses end? Okay. Bye.