He has already turned the Oval Office into a wrestler’s changing room. Now the president is building a place so gilded Nero would feel at home. Why did he pick an architect whose speciality is Catholic churches?

As if truffling thuggishly in pursuit of the Nobel peace prize wasn’t enough, the spectacle of bulldozers ripping into the White House is yet more evidence of Donald Trump’s unstinting quest for epic self-aggrandisement. Having decreed the East Wing not fit for purpose – namely, his purposes of swank and show – he plans to replace it with a faux classical bulletproof ballroom, capable of seating up to 650 partygoers.

Renderings show a vast, glacially white aircraft hangar of a structure embellished with an ornate coffered ceiling, gilded Corinthian columns and drooping gold chandeliers. Nero, who conceived the original domus aurea, would feel right at home. Costing $250m (£187.5m), a sum to be extracted from sycophantic donors, Trump’s ballroom is one of the most grandiose White House projects to be implemented in more than a century, as he strives to bend the building – and US architecture more generally – to his will.

With its shimmering ginkgo trees, tinkling pools and a rooftop garden, the Appleby Blue Almshouse housing complex for older people is a worthy winner of RIBA’s prestigious Stirling prize

Described as “a provision of pure delight”, Appleby Blue Almshouse, a social housing complex for older people has been named this year’s winner of the RIBA Stirling prize. With a vibe that has more in common with an Alpine spa hotel than the poky rooms and grim corridors usually associated with housing for elderly people, the building – by architects Witherford Watson Mann – reinvents the almshouse for the modern era as a place of care, shelter and social connection.

As a building type, the origins of almshouses extend back centuries, giving a semblance of dignity to the poor, the old, the sick and the marginalised. Sequestered from the outside world, with cellular dwellings arrayed around courtyards, they evoke a sense of pastoral benevolence.

A new exhibition in Liverpool tells the story of the grassy arenas, from churning tribal terraces to hyper-modern, wedding-cake-like structures with retractable pitches. And let’s hear it for the world’s first all-timber stadium!

Bill Shankly, a man so beloved by Liverpool that there is now a hotel in the city named after him, once famously observed: “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

Inevitably, Shankly pops up in Home Ground, a punchy new exhibition on the architecture and social culture of football stadiums. The legendary manager is pictured savouring the acclaim of an adoring crowd, part of a tableau on the farewell to the Kop prior to its metamorphosis from churning tribal terrace into a more sedate, all-seater stand.