The White House Could Have Looked Totally Different—If One of These Five Designs Had Been Approved

In 1792 George Washington held an open competition for architects to design what would become the White House. Many of the original submissions (some of which have never been publicly available) remain in the archives of the Maryland Center for History and Culture. Now, that institution has collaborated with HouseFresh in order to bring these 18th-century blueprints to life. Using an interactive split-screen, readers can toggle between aerial and front views of the presidential residence as we know it and the versions that could have been.