The dangers of Trump’s architectural vision (Opinion)

By Mark Lamster

The would-be architect-in-chief is at it again.

Late last month, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” which would effectively make classical architecture the default style of federal buildings to best “reflect the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American Government.”

A repudiation of modern design, the order would install exponents of classical architecture in positions of governmental authority — including a newly created “senior advisor for architectural design” — and require that architects competing for federal projects demonstrate experience in classical styles.

In its preamble, the order states that classical architecture reminds “citizens not only of their rights but also their responsibilities in maintaining and perpetuating its institutions.” Just how many classical columns and pediments are necessary to achieve this is an open question; the exuberant classicism of the Capitol building was clearly insufficient as an exemplar of those responsibilities during the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The order is the product of a January memorandum that called for the General Services Administration to develop policy guidelines to ensure federal buildings “respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.” That memorandum followed an executive order issued at the end of Trump’s first term calling for the promotion of classicism in the design of federal buildings.

The American Institute of Architects, in a response opposing the directive, said it would “replace thoughtful design processes with rigid requirements that will limit architectural choice.” But that group would appear to be among the targets of the order, which goes out of its way to dismiss the “architectural elite.”

In doing so, the order reflects the administration’s general attitude toward expertise, with widely respected professionals dismissed in favor of others whose fringe beliefs support the interests of the administration. In architecture, the idea that classical and traditional styles should be privileged over all others is far outside the mainstream.

Trump’s history as a builder suggests the goal is less a taste for classicism (and corresponding rejection of modernism) than the consolidation of political power. Trump Tower, his signature New York headquarters, is unapologetically modern (if glitzy), and its construction controversially entailed the demolition of the 1929 Bonwit Teller building and its sculptural reliefs (which he had promised to preserve.)

Over the years, Trump has commissioned a number of modern architects, among them Der Scutt and Philip Johnson. The 92-story Trump International Hotel + Tower, in Chicago, is a work of sleek modernism by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the non plus ultra of modern skyscraper design.

In a recent editorial, The Dallas Morning News lamented the Trump administration’s economic policies, describing them as fundamentally anti-capitalist. “American capitalism disdains centralized, state-directed economic planning and state-owned enterprises,” the editorial board wrote. “The government should not try to directly mandate prices, production targets or interest rates.”

Similarly, there is something profoundly un-American about the administration’s mandating of architectural style, a move typical of authoritarian regimes. Both the Nazi state and the Soviet Union made classicism the de facto language of their building programs. In federal buildings of the postwar period, American architects responded with modern architecture of glass and steel that literally and figuratively represented the nation’s transparency and openness to free thinking.

The embrace of classicism by governments of differing ideologies — be they fascist, communist or democratic — shows that the meanings we assign to style are neither implicit nor static. There was a time when Victorian architecture was dismissed as fussy and old-fashioned. Now it is beloved. Classicism, too, fell out of style, its austerity and formality at odds with progressive ideals and the pressures inherent in a capitalist economy. How many buildings have we lost in the pointless, destructive convulsions of development?

The suggestion that classical architecture hearkens back to some halcyon age is likewise a matter of opinion. For some, the classical architecture embraced by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson — the paradigms of American architecture, according to the Trump order — represents the apogee of Democratic idealism. Others may see it as emblematic of a period of slave-holding and white supremacy. Both views are legitimate. History is complex and contradictory. To suggest there was some ideal but lost period that must be recovered is a counterproductive fantasy.

The executive order’s stated antipathy toward modern building, and especially toward brutalism and other concrete architecture, is particularly galling. Dallas City Hall, though imposing, is a masterpiece of sculptural design and a fitting symbol of the city’s ambition. It is rightly in the process of designation as a city landmark. Anyone who believes brutalist buildings are not capable of beauty should be sent to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, arguably the most ethereal work of architecture in the United States.

If the president is serious about beautifying federal architecture, he can begin with the restoration of the White House Rose Garden, recently wiped away for a hard-scaped terrace, and kill the plans for an enormous ballroom inappropriately tacked onto the East Wing. (As architect Peter Eisenman told the newsletter Punch List, “putting a portico at the end of a long façade and not in the center is what one might say is untutored.”) Trump might also do something about the unsightly proliferation of mechanical and security paraphernalia disfiguring the roof of the building, all of which could and should be disguised.

And as for all of the rococo decorative gilding he has stuck onto the walls of the Oval Office, it is hard to imagine Washington or Jefferson approving of such crassness. It needs to go at once, and the mandate on classical style can go with it.

Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of The Dallas Morning News and a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.