section_path: History, 1789–1909/West Wing
section_name: West Wing
paragraph_text: West Wing
  
  The West Wing was the idea of President Theodore Roosevelt, brought about by his wife's opinion that the second floor of the White House, then shared between bedrooms and offices, should be solely a domestic space. Completed in 1902, the one-story Executive Office Building was intended to be a temporary structure, for use until a permanent building was erected there or elsewhere. Sitting the building west of the White House allowed the removal of a vast, dilapidated set of pre– Civil War greenhouses, which had been erected by President James Buchanan.
  
  Roosevelt moved the offices of the executive branch into the newly constructed wing in 1902. His workspace was a two-room suite of Executive Office and Cabinet Room, occupying the eastern third of the building. Its furniture, including the president's desk, was designed by architect Charles Follen McKim, and executed by A. H. Davenport and Company, both of Boston. Now much altered, the 1902 Executive Office survives as the Roosevelt Room, a windowless interior meeting room situated diagonally from the Oval Office.