{"id":171567,"date":"2025-09-26T22:21:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T22:21:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/171567\/"},"modified":"2025-09-26T22:21:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-26T22:21:09","slug":"trumps-real-architecture-agenda-is-social-submission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/171567\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Real Architecture Agenda Is Social Submission"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the end of August, President Donald Trump issued an executive order mandating<\/a> that federal buildings be constructed in the neoclassical architectural style, just as he did during his first term. And as before, Trump\u2019s dictate is a colossal distraction from the real havoc his administration is wreaking on cities and the built environment.<\/p>\n

Aside from the $200 million White House ballroom<\/a> currently under construction, Trump\u2019s order seems designed more to appeal to his base than to kick-start any real effort to build faux-Roman temples. Trump\u2019s real impact on architecture will be made through the sales of federal buildings, the spatial occupation of American cities by military patrols, the denial of disaster recovery funds to places like tornado-stricken St Louis, and the construction of immigration detention camps that gin up profits for the private sector.<\/p>\n

Liberals, progressives, and even some socialists seem to be falling for the distraction<\/a>, expending time and energy on what is undoubtedly a well-crafted diatribe. Clearly Trump\u2019s ghostwriters understand the symbolic use of neoclassical architecture as an instrument of social control, especially the implications of the style\u2019s racialized past. From the Roman rotunda of the St Louis Hotel<\/a> in New Orleans, where slave auctions took place in the early nineteenth century, to the US Capitol Building<\/a> itself, built by slave labor, neoclassical architecture in the United States has long represented rule by white elites and the dehumanization of everyone else. Neoclassicism thus represents the betrayal of our nation\u2019s founding ideals of liberty and democracy, not their fulfillment.<\/p>\n

But don\u2019t be surprised if the federal government under Trump neglects to build elegant courthouses or federal office buildings in the neoclassical style. On the contrary, the administration is undertaking another project entirely. The General Services Administration (GSA) announced the sale of 440 federal buildings<\/a> in March, under the direction of Elon Musk\u2019s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). While that sale list has since been reduced, the GSA is still pushing for a major reduction<\/a> of federal buildings. The federal government is poised to sell more Roman- and Greek-inspired buildings than it will ever build again.<\/p>\n

When Trump issued a similar executive order, also titled \u201cMaking Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,\u201d toward the end<\/a> of his first term in 2020, the architectural establishment reacted<\/a> with swift denouncement. Although a very lame duck at that point, despite a dangerous attempt at a coup to stay in power, Trump proclaimed that most modernist (especially brutalist), postmodernist, and deconstructivist federal architecture was an abominable betrayal of the republic. Only a crude proscriptive neoclassicism could be the architecture of the United States of America, the executive order proclaimed.<\/p>\n

Whether or not Trump owed some very specific debt<\/a> to architecture critic and neoclassical evangelist Justin Shubow, that first executive order was designed to bond the right-wing classicists to Trump\u2019s pseudo-populist and often fairly anti-aesthetic ruling order. Shubow has long been a leading polemicist against contemporary federal architecture, especially Frank Gehry\u2019s admittedly uninspiring and bland Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial<\/a> (2020). Trump placed Shubow on the US Commission of Fine Arts, and he became chair in January 2021. Shubow\u2019s tenure as chair lasted until June 2021, when Joe Biden removed him, which, of course, provided mutual fodder for the classicists on the Right and whatever the Biden camp could be called.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that \u201cwhatever\u201d that makes Trump\u2019s petty bromides about architecture effective and meaningful at all. Obviously the president should not dictate how federal buildings should look in a democracy where such decisions are delegated to federal officials with oversight and responsibility. That is where Trump\u2019s orders are actually worst \u2014 they are profoundly anti-worker, replacing the informed judgment of expert workers with the ideological cant of the bully president. Yet much of the blowback on these orders has come from within an architectural establishment whose material interest lies in allowing a small number of star-led super-firms to receive the bulk of federal contracts, and whose laments about Trump\u2019s orders ignore that many architectural firms are anti-worker spaces<\/a> instead of bulwarks against authoritarianism.<\/p>\n

Much of the blowback on these orders has come from within an architectural establishment whose material interest lies in allowing a small number of star-led super-firms to receive the bulk of federal contracts.<\/p>\n

The principle of artistic liberty is core to democratic architecture and should be defended against the MAGA fetish for neoclassical design. Yet democracy is not embodied by the stubbornly unwelcoming, baleful look of the Eisenhower Memorial, nor by the Frank Gehry studio\u2019s exploitation of young, uncredited, and underpaid designers to achieve that look. Of course, Shubow has no concern for the exploitation inherent in architectural offices, as long as his favorite neoclassical firms are chosen. Then again, neither do many of the people who are critical of Trump\u2019s orders.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s latest executive order is probably the best written, but it\u2019s also targeted to inflame critics with simplistic explanations for why neoclassical architecture must be the architecture of the American state. For instance, the order proclaims that the Founders \u201csought to use classical architecture to visually connect our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity, reminding citizens not only of their rights but also their responsibilities in maintaining and perpetuating its institutions.\u201d This is pure bait, as it ignores the power imbalances and systems of enslavement that also link the early US republic with ancient Rome.<\/p>\n

The executive order\u2019s history of federal design is hagiographic, skipping from a supposed pure early age of neoclassical architecture to the founding of the GSA in the 1960s, which is narrated as tantamount to destroying architectural integrity. That even the US Capitol Building is a mash-up of competing and ultimately incompatible classical design concepts eludes the author of the executive order, as does Thomas Jefferson\u2019s own belief that classicism was preferable because it allowed eclectic<\/a> outcomes to design problems. No matter. The GSA apparently created \u201cundistinguished\u201d and \u201cunappealing designs,\u201d which means abhorrent modernist designs.<\/p>\n

The GSA\u2019s Design Excellence Program<\/a> from 1994 comes under fire, as it produced a generation of federal buildings of which \u201cmany of these new Federal buildings are not even visibly identifiable as civic buildings.\u201d This would be tragic \u2014 until anyone remembers that most federal buildings come in the form of military support structures, federal office blocks closed to the public, and maintenance facilities in national parks. Most federal architecture does not look like civic architecture for a reason, and that reason is the interest of the state in not making its basic functions seem welcome to<\/a> the general public.<\/p>\n

There is a real battle over major symbols of federal power, but it hardly constitutes much of a battle. The three branches of government already reside in permanent neoclassical homes. Many federal office blocks and museums in the District of Columbia flanking public spaces are neoclassical. A few aren\u2019t. Should the national government that enacted the 1964 Civil Rights Act continue to build according to the wishes of its founding enslavers? Strangely the Trump executive order states that the \u201cgeneral public\u201d (defined to exclude architects and expert architectural historians) should have power in defining the look of federal architecture, but nowhere in the order is there any account of how the masses will get to speak and what happens if they don\u2019t want the mandatory neoclassicism.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s executive order is a deal with his base, not a sweeping order for a new era of federal design. The reaction against it only helps him replenish enthusiasm in the face of the Epstein files scandal, his loosening grip on international crises, and the economic downturn his tariffs are helping to usher in. Beyond the ballroom, Trump is not steering a revival of great federal architecture but perhaps instead a demise through the selling of federal buildings. There is no depth to Trump\u2019s supposed interest in classical architecture except in how that propagandistic use of neoclassicism feeds red meat to his supporters and helps him remain in power.<\/p>\n

Any critic of Trump\u2019s architectural vision should keep their focus on where he is devastating the rights to freely dwell in the United States and abroad.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s biggest architectural project is the construction of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities \u2014 meant to control illegal immigrants today but perhaps functional for broader purposes down the line \u2014 and with their candid chain-link and cheap tents they look more like the Frank Gehry utilitarianism that Shubow disdains. These facilities are generating enormous profit to the private sector<\/a> actors being contracted to build them. Likewise the Trump administration\u2019s pro\u2013artificial intelligence (AI) stance nearly propelled the US Senate to pass a measure banning<\/a> local regulation before headwinds shifted. Even in MAGA country, the data centers needed to support the AI industry are deeply unpopular<\/a>. Data centers are another anonymous, utilitarian form of nonbuilding that will outpace any neoclassical building boom under Trump\u2019s alliance with Silicon Valley.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s growing use of soldiers as law enforcement in urban settings has a much larger impact on the enjoyment of space than his \u201cMaking Federal Architecture Beautiful Again\u201d dictate. Trump-occupied Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Memphis have all experienced the brute force of the imperial guards<\/a> for which columns and pediments are just symbols. The right to inhabit urban space freely is being actively attacked under Trump, and the burden will fall hardest on the people who have the least power in our nation.<\/p>\n

Submission to the state is the real agenda, and while that has architectural and spatial dimensions, the styles of buildings are pretty irrelevant to Trump\u2019s ultimate goals.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s unseemly proclamations about occupying Gaza and displacing its residents so that developers can reap profits \u2014 likely through building luxury dwelling towers far removed from neoclassical design \u2014 should show that his real interests in architecture remain more about what it does for powerful people<\/a>, not how it looks. None of the renderings of glass towers in Gaza suggests that the president cares what the architecture there will look like, as long as its construction fulfills displacement following a long US-backed genocide.<\/p>\n

Likewise Trump\u2019s attacks on universities and colleges mean architectural education could become subjected to state control \u2014 again far more dire than the executive order and far more venal. Nowhere has the White House proposed forcing the architecture schools at Columbia or Harvard to teach neoclassicism. Instead free speech and intellectual freedom are being attacked to incite a submissive stance toward the state.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s executive order is a big authoritarian distraction designed to keep the architectural world stuck defending orientations that are actually not very radical or hopeful. Submission to the state is the real agenda, and while that has architectural and spatial dimensions, the styles of buildings are pretty irrelevant to Trump\u2019s ultimate goals. Boots on the ground, people in tent prisons, and the tech industry looting water and power resources in data centers represent a very nonpicturesque state architectural agenda.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s actual architectural agenda is authoritarian and cruel not because its heart can be found in faux-Roman columns and pediments but because its root lies in systems of organizing space to suppress dissent, expedite human suffering, and accelerate capital accumulation. In that sense, there is a through line between the classical columns of the nineteenth-century American slave markets and the White House ballroom. But those columns are going to be a very minor part of the architectural and urban agenda of the MAGA era.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the end of August, President Donald Trump issued an executive order mandating that federal buildings be constructed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":171568,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-171567","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=171567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/171567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/171568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=171567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=171567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=171567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}