"... a conflict between architectural norms and Trump’s grandiose aesthetic, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversations."

I'm trying to read this WaPo article, "Trump wants a bigger White House ballroom. His architect disagrees/The president and James McCrery had argued in recent weeks over the project’s size, with Trump pushing him to expand the ballroom" (free link).

I wonder who the 4 sources are and how intensely Trump and the architect have disagreed. Is it a friendly back-and-forth about proportion and aesthetics or is there raging and threatening to stomp off and tell all?

And I wonder what size the architect thinks is right. We're told Trump wants a 90,000-square-foot building but not what the architect has been arguing for. We are told there's a "general architectural rule" that an addition shouldn't "overshadow" the main building and the executive mansion is 55,000 square feet. But what's the specific position the architect is taking? 90 is so huge, but what is the proposed ensmallment?

Fault me if you like, but I went over to Grok and prompted: "Assume I want to write a fancy-schmancy essay interweaving the Trump and the architect story with ideas from the Ibsen play 'The Master Builder.' Help me out!"

From Grok's answer (which spoils the ending of the play):

In Ibsen’s The Master Builder, Halvard Solness clings to his eminence by refusing to let younger men rise, yet he is haunted by the desire to build “castles in the air” — homes for human beings that are also monuments to himself. In the end he climbs his own fatal tower to place the celebratory wreath, driven by a mixture of vanity, guilt, and erotic compulsion.

Donald Trump’s proposed 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom is the contemporary equivalent of Solness’s impossible tower-with-a-spire: a structure that must be the largest, the most gilded, the most talked-about, even if it crushes the modest, symmetrical mansion it is meant to serve. James McCrery, the neoclassical architect Trump himself crowned as master builder, now plays both the cautious Brovik and the admonishing Hilda Wangel — warning that the addition will “overshadow” the historic house the way Solness’s pride overshadowed every human relationship. The drama unfolding in the East Wing blueprints is nothing less than a late-act reprise of Ibsen’s tragedy, complete with hubris, a vertiginous height, and the lurking possibility of a fatal fall....

ADDED: Here, watch the whole play: