Building plans for a White House in Minecraft

This Minecraft-adapted design was designed by me in December 2023, but it's based on the real thing. I've used satellite images on Google Maps (and its distance measurement tool), photos from various angles found on Wikimedia Commons (search page), and especially some of the Historical American Buildings Survey images. (The last are also on the Library of Congress website.)

Particularly useful were these drawings by the Historical American Buildings Survey (DC HABS DC,WASH,134-):

• sheet 30 of 83 (north elevation),
• sheet 32 of 83 (west elevation),
• sheet 33 of 83 (south elevation),
• sheet 34 of 83 (east elevation),
• sheet 70 of 83 (axonometric view of the ground floor),
• sheet 71 of 83 (axonometric view of the first floor),
• sheet 5 of 83 (plan of the first floor)
• sheet 4 of 83 (plan of the ground floor) (that site sucks, only the TIFFs work and you have to manipulate them yourself)

From the elevation drawings I've found that the building is 168 feet and 1.25 inches wide in the east-west dimension, or 51.24 meters. I also found that the main rectangular part of the building, disregarding the north-side portico and the south-side balcony, is 85 feet 5.5 inches, or 26.05 meters, long in the north-south direction.

As for height: the HABS drawings give the height of the top surface of the floors in feet and inches. The house is on a slight hill: the ground on the north side is higher than the south side. The plans have decided that what is called the first floor, which is the main one used for state occasions with the Entrance Hall, East Room, State Dining Room, and oval-shaped Blue Room, is at an elevation of 0, and the ground level below it is at a negative elevation. The numbers it gives are as follows, along with my conversions to meters:

• Top of roof: 55' 2½" — 16.83 m
• Promenade (outside walkway on the roof): 42' 0" — 12.80 m
• Third floor (sort of an attic, just under the roof): 38' 10" — 11.84 m
• Second floor: 20' 11½" — 6.39 m
• First floor: 0' 0" — 0 m
• Ground floor: −12' 8½" — −3.44 m

This gives a total height of ground floor to top of roof of 20.27 meters. My Minecraft approximation will be: ground floor at 0, first floor at 4, second floor at 10, third floor at 15, promenade at 16, and top of roof at 20 blocks. Thus, the usable floor-to-ceiling space will be 3 blocks on the ground floor, 5 on the first, 4 on the second, and at most 4 on the third.

The north portico is in reality 15.53 m wide (east-west) and I've had to guess it to be 12.97 m long (north-south, the plan has a mistake – it reads 92 feet, but I think it must be 42).

Given that the real building is 51 by 26 meters in reality, the question is: do we build the Minecraft building also as 51 by 26 meters, or do we round it to numbers with nicer divisors: 50 by 27, or maybe even 52 by 27?? My main reason for wanting to round the width is the north portico: in reality, it is 15 meters wide, and the two wings of the building on each of its side are 18 meters. However, it's not possible to build four evenly spaced columns in 15 meters; the closest we could do has gaps of 4-3-4 meters. If we widened the portico to 16 meters, we could have gaps of 4-4-4 between the four pillars, evenly spaced. Once the portico has been widened, we could either narrow the wings down to 17 meters (thus making the building 50 meters wide), or keep them both at 18 meters (more accurate, but making the building 75 cm too wide), or only widen one side (which would break symmetry very noticeably: window spacing is regular and identical on both wings). I have decided to make my rendition of the building 52 meters wide: I expand the centerline by one block, making the north portico 16 wide, and both the north center and south center doors two-meter-wide double doors. This widening actually only affects the north portico, the entrance hall, the center hall, the blue room, and the south portico; there was already an about 1.5 meter wide open unobstructed path from the north door to the south door, and we're just expanding it to two meters, with the slack space going into shifting bits of architecture to match the block grid. The one drawback with expanding the centerline from 1 block to 2 is that there is no longer a single centerline: there's one single lantern providing light in the portico, and it's hung right on the center above the staircase. This placement is no longer possible, so the lantern must either be omitted, or it has to be made two-wide.

The north portico can be made 12 or 13 blocks long; it's entirely up to preference. When I laid my approximately-meter-wide grid on top of the architectural plans, the northmost section of 4 columns start at 12.5 meters and end at 13.5, and so they can either be shifted down to 12 or up to 13. I prefer to shift down to 12, so that the side columns have a 3-2-3 spacing between them. This variability in the gaps actually reflects reality: the center two columns are noticeably closer together than they are from the ones at the edges.

Like mentioned previously, the north-side entrance is one floor above the south-side entrance. It's also in an odd way half-sunk into the ground, and it's a bit difficult to find good pictures of this situation, but the gist is that the driveway that cars drive on and park under the portico on is almost at the level of the first floor; visitors climb some stairs under the portico to get to the front door. There is office space on the ground floor under these stairs, under the portico; they have doors that open to either side to a depression that runs along the north face of the house, from which the front face of the ground floor is visible. There are some further spaces under the driveway on the other side of this ditch, but I can't find drawings of them, nor any pictures, so maybe they're some kind of Secret Service staging ground secret spaces.

I won't be providing plans for every possible Z-level (this won't have enough data for an automatically formed 3D model), because it's just not necessary for one to build a house in Minecraft.

Ground floor

Legend for blocks: . – outdoors, - – air, d – door, # – wall, 0 – window pane, s – staircase, * - assumed to be surrounding ground.

The 7-shaped staircase in the top-right corner goes down to the basement (which I don't have blueprints for). The staircase to tne north of the center hall goes up, but there's also one going down in the space below.