GEOFF BENNETT: Yesterday, a coalition of leading cultural and architectural preservation organizations asked the Washington, D.C., federal court to stop the Trump administration from carrying through with its quarter-billion-dollar Kennedy Center reconstruction project.

It's the latest development in an ongoing fight over the very look and architecture of the nation's capital and a referendum on the power of the Trump presidency.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports for our Art in Action series, exploring the intersection of art and democracy as part of our Canvas coverage.

JEFFREY BROWN: A bulldozer pushing dirt and debris onto a growing manmade mountain, an ordinary enough urban scene, but this is what's left from an extraordinary demolition.

Last October, the East Wing of the White House was torn down to make room for a new ballroom, a project President Trump had announced just three months earlier.

The speed and scale, says architect and architectural historian Neil Flanagan, rocked this city and beyond.

NEIL FLANAGAN, Heurich House Museum: The demolition of the East Wing was definitely the wake-up call for everyone.

Suddenly, the building was no longer there and the whole sense of the world was torn down as well.

It came down with the roof.

DONALD TRUMP, President of the United States: That's an interior of the ballroom.

JEFFREY BROWN: The ballroom and its latest planned 90,000 square feet and larger than the executive residence and West Wing combined, is just one among a number of projects that would change the look and feel of the capital.

Those include a 250-foot arch near Arlington National Cemetery, a new championship caliber golf course on public land where East Wing rubble is now being piled, painting over the granite exterior of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and the possible demolition of historic federal sites like the Wilbur J. Cohen Building, renowned for its iconic New Deal era murals.

Projects like these typically go through two expert panels created by Congress, the Commission of Fine Arts and the National Capital Planning Commission.

Typically staffed by architects, engineers and preservationists, both are involved with evaluating design, site selection, public input and the broader impact on the city before construction begins, experts not in charge but with influence.

NEIL FLANAGAN: The norm that has been in place for about 100 years has been that there are bodies of experts on these panels and then also outside who are just advisory, to whom the president has deferred.

So if they were to say that a building should be placed one place or there should be a certain size or certain style, the presidency has typically deferred to them and reached some kind of understanding.

JEFFREY BROWN: Today, both panels have been reshaped.

President Trump appointed all seven members of the Commission of Fine Arts and named his assistant and White House staff secretary, Will Scharf, an attorney, as chairman of the National Capital Planning Commission.

NEIL FLANAGAN: What we see is Trump realizes that he does not need to abide by an elite that he seems to feel someone aggrieved by in general.

CATESBY LEIGH, Co-Founder, National Civic Art Society: I'm grateful for the executive order.

JEFFREY BROWN: For some, part of Trump's focus on the Capitol's look is welcome.

CATESBY LEIGH: Trump's populist instinct to stick it to the status quo isn't entirely irrational.

JEFFREY BROWN: Architecture critic Catesby Leigh, who met us at the site of the proposed art, writes about public art and building, and is a co-founder of the National Civic Art Society.

He favors an executive order issued by the president last August declaring: "Classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for federal public buildings in the District of Columbia."

But the arch, for Leigh, is complicated.

On the one hand: CATESBY LEIGH: Every major Western capital has an arch and it's an archetypal monumental form.

JEFFREY BROWN: And, as a capital city, Washington should have one, is what you think?

CATESBY LEIGH: It should.

It should.

We should put a temporary arch at the Rotary Circle, which is rather bare.

JEFFREY BROWN: But then the president presented his vision.

DONALD TRUMP: We're building an arch like the Arc de Triomphe, and it's something that is so special.

It will be like the one in Paris, but-, to be honest with you, it blows it away.

JEFFREY BROWN: The site, just across the Arlington Memorial Bridge, visually connects the Lincoln Memorial to the Custis-Lee Mansion atop the hill, a symbolic unobstructed line meant to represent reunion between the North and South after the Civil War.

Trump's proposal, unlike Leigh's original idea, would be 250 feet tall, dwarfing landmarks like the Lincoln Memorial, 99 feet tall, and the Jefferson Memorial at 129 feet.

And that's a problem even for supporters of the idea.

CATESBY LEIGH: That's way out of scale.

JEFFREY BROWN: That's too high?

CATESBY LEIGH: Way too big, in my opinion.

If the president wants to build a really big arch, there are other parts of the city where he could do it.

The Rotary Circle is not the place.

JEFFREY BROWN: There are also legal issues.

The president has said the arch would be made in time for the nation's 250th anniversary this coming July.

But construction hasn't started, no plans have been formally approved, and lawsuits have been filed, with what happened with the East Wing of the White House very much.

WENDY LIU, Public Citizen: I think it shows that an unlawful plan, if not stopped, can be a fait accompli.

And so that's why we have gone into court to ask for a preliminary injunction to halt the construction of the arch before it's too late.

JEFFREY BROWN: Wendy Liu is a lawyer with the nonprofit advocacy group Public Citizen, whose clients include three Vietnam War veterans.

For them, stopping the arch is about preserving a symbolic view and something more personal.

WENDY LIU: The thought of their fallen comrades being interred, the thought of themselves being interred in Arlington National Cemetery in the shadow of what they have described as a vainglorious arch, a personal vanity project, is deeply disrespectful to the service of all of the veterans who are buried there.

JEFFREY BROWN: More urgently, Lou says, it's against the law.

WENDY LIU: Nobody, including the president, can just unilaterally erect a monument.

JEFFREY BROWN: The White House did not respond to "News Hour" requests for comment about the proposed arch or other projects.

Other changes to the capital city are also being challenged in court, including the renaming of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to include President Trump and its upcoming renovations.

And the president's name isn't the only thing appearing more throughout the city.

A giant banner with his image now hangs from the Justice Department building.

CARA FINNEGAN, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: President Trump is interested in circulating images of President Trump.

And he's done that in ways that are unusual for the presidency, but perhaps not so unusual for him.

JEFFREY BROWN: Cara Finnegan is a communication professor at the University of Illinois and author of the book "Photographic Presidents: Making History From Daguerreotype to Digital," which examines how presidents shape their public image, what she calls their symbolic power.

CARA FINNEGAN: What I mean when I talk about Trump communicating his symbolic power is that he is asserting a kind of leaderly role visually that is unprecedented.

JEFFREY BROWN: In what sense?

CARA FINNEGAN: In the sense that he wants to be visually associated with everything in the government.

JEFFREY BROWN: It's a visual assertion that continues to grow.

CARA FINNEGAN: So he's really kind of using his visual image to colonize other elements of the federal government in ways that assert, not just a symbolic control, but I think that really echo material control.

JEFFREY BROWN: Where is all this headed?

That, says architectural historian Neil Flanagan, is also a question of politics, citing the ballroom project and more.

NEIL FLANAGAN: Congress is the only body that can truly constrain the president at this point.

If the project is delayed and Congress changes hands, I think the project may very well be dead.

And I think that's true of all the other ones.

JEFFREY BROWN: So, at this moment, we really don't know how much Washington's look is going to change?

NEIL FLANAGAN: I think we have no idea.

So, we're really in unprecedented territory, and there's a ton of uncertainty.

And it seems like it gets more uncertain every day.

JEFFREY BROWN: For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown in Washington, D.C.