User:Found5dollar/List of replica Oval Offices

There are 28 replicas of the Oval Office in the United States.

8 - presidential libraries 19 - private institutions 1 - "lavish $250,000 garage conversion in Longview, Texas, constructed by Ron Wade for his private collection of presidential memorabilia."

21 built between 2000 and 2015 new ones?

3 permanant whitehouse sets: - Castle Rock set - 1995 for "The American President", "Nixon" "independence Day" shot on it - "Dave" set - 1993 Warner Brothers, used by over 25 films "Absolute Power", "The Pelecan Brief" "Clear and Present Danger - Warner Brother's Prop House - "West Wing" set pieces

temporary: "Not to be outshone, Ikea recently built their own copy within Washington's Union Station to promote the adaptability of their products" You Tube Studios NYC and LA

First at Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in 1957. "designed according to the strict instructions of the former president to look exactly as it did when he was in office."

3 kinds: 1) hollywood 2) exacting. "preserving the space of a specific administration and by extension a specific president down to the very last detail." 3) "communicating the container, or architecture of this power" Presidential. "referent is not the office of any one com- mander-in-chief but more the Oval Office in general; the idea of the space as much as its physical actuality"

"all replicas feature some version of the three bowed windows, the pair of flags and a copy of the Resolute desk"

One in every presidential library since Gerald Ford(still true)? Marks the style of the time and the personal taste of the person

Distinct from these official presidential libraries are the replicas found in private venues. Here, without an administration to commemorate, the space is more a totem to the concept of presidential authority, built merely for the sake of 'bringing the White House closer to the people'. And unlike the duplicate libraries, which are often roped off to preserve a somehow untouchable image of the White House, the success of these reproduc- tions derives from the visitor's experience of not only occupying the president's office but of being, for a moment at least, the president himself. While a great deal of effort is often made to recreate the space of the Oval Office, the rooms are in this sense pure fantasy. Of course, there are also copies that make no attempt at faithfulness, and whose only raison d'être is to generate profit. Found in wax museums as well as shops specialising in political memorabilia, these can be unasham- edly crude. At Madame Hissauds in Washington dc, for example, the scuffed linoleum floor is rectangular - this is an Oval Office that isn't even oval. In Las Vegas the copy gestures towards an elliptical shape, but still lacks any walls. The one in New York is slightly more convincing, in that it sports a Resolute desk, though the only items on it are a generic dossier and red telephone, fabricated emblems of power implanted in the American psyche by the James Bond movies. Yet somehow, for all their glaring inaccuracies, these implausible copies manage to communicate the essence of the Office. Poorly constructed sets and shoddy props matter little in the end, because all that is required is the name and a sense of the space. The imagination of the visitors takes care of the rest

ter). After the completion of wyeth's design, a series of adjustments and reproductions saw the first true copies of the Oval Office sited within the White House itself. For example, after a fire on Christmas Eve in 1929, Herbert Hoover rebuilt the office in the same location. Five years later, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, he hired architect Eric Gugler to redesign the West Wing and move the Chief Executive Office to the ground floor. The result was grander and more opulent than before - 'neither a gothic tower, nor a factory building, nor a replica of the Kremlin nor of Potsdam's ornate Neues Palais', reported Time Magazine. The oval had reappeared, 'like the old one but, by [Roosevelt's] order, two feet wider, two feet longer. Handsomest room in the building. It is decorated with the great Presidential Seal set in the ceiling, has indirect lighting simulating daylight. All the furniture is old except a new duralumin lamp upon the desk. The President found it all just as he had planned it.' In recognition of this apparent harmony and handsomeness, the architecture of the office has remained the same ever since.

In the late 1980s the National Park Service made an exhaustive study of the White House, measuring all of its interior and exterior spaces to ensure that at any point it would be capable of restoration. Of course, these measurements • have also facilitated its duplication, and the many reproductions now distributed across the country suggest that for Americans the Oval Office is less important as a specific location than it is as a symbol for an idealised vision of national identity. Indeed, the us is known for its fond reverence for architectural copies: the Parthenon in Nashville, the Leaning Tower of Pisa in Nile, Illinois and no less than six Eiffel Towers - in Mason, Ohio; Doswell, Virginia; Lake Buena Vista, Florida; Paris, Texas; Paris, Tennessee and Las Vegas - are all emblems of gleeful fakery that Umberto Eco exposed in his famous travelogue of American hyperreality.

The same motivation to see the White House without ever having to go to Washington has long fuelled the proliferation of Oval Offices, even those sanctioned by their real presidents. For example, Lyndon B Johnson once asked his architect Gordon Bunshaft to 'reconstitute' the Oval Office 'as nearly as possible' in his own presidential library: 'I would like for them to see just where we work'. Yet it is clear that Johnson also understood that even a reproduction at 7/8 scale would communicate the same message: 'I don't say it's got to be 18 feet high or 14 or got to be 38 feet long. It might have a little card on the door that says "this is not an exact reproduc- tion" or something?

Today's replicas go one step further, allowing visitors to experience something long denied them by the original: to actually enter the president's office, to interact with it, to sit behind his desk for a couple of minutes and in this brief occupancy to be potus himself. Simulation is now an integral part of the display, even in the library replicas once cordoned off from sightseers. Signifi- cantly, the George H W Bush Presidential Library did not contain an Oval Office replica when it first opened in 1997 but acquired one ten years later due to public demand. In the replica, it seems, one can believe in the power of democracy, not to mention that uniquely American idea that anyone could conceivably be elected leader of the free world. Both assumptions hang on the necessity that America be experienced first-hand, even if what is at hand is not necessarily authentic. Under these conditions, what is real and what is fiction - what is truth and what is truthiness - blend seamlessly together

More recently still, The Washington Post reported that the us secret service had requested $8 million to build a replica Oval Office within a replica White House, complete with surrounding gardens, shrubs and gatehouse buildings, in order to better train its operatives in counter-terrorism. Umberto Eco once wrote that 'constructing a filli-scale model of the Oval Office (using the same materials, the same colours, but with every- thing obviously more polished, shinier, protected against deterioration) means that for historical information to be absorbed, it has to assume the aspect of a reincarnation'. What he somehow didn't anticipate was that in the subsequent duplication of this model, and the profusion of ever shinier Oval Offices, the second coming of America's historical reincarnation has merely been a prelude to a third, fourth and fifth


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