Kelsey Ables and Janay Kingsberry
| The Washington Post
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday declaring “classical and traditional” architecture the preferred government styles, reviving and expanding his old fight against modernist government buildings and overhauling design principles that have guided the U.S. government’s construction for more than six decades.
The order, titled “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” largely echoes that of his previous administration, directing that all new federal buildings in Washington, D.C. be constructed in a “classical” style and that classical and traditional styles guide federal construction throughout the country.
But it goes a step further than Trump’s previous edict, rejecting Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1962 Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, which urged the government to avoid an “official style” and to follow the lead of contemporary architects, resulting in a number of modernist buildings throughout the country.
Thursday’s action reverses that guidance, ordering that “design must flow from the needs of the Government and the aspirations and preferences of the American people to the architectural profession.” Some of Moynihan’s language remains, including attention to “regional architectural traditions” across the country where federal buildings are located, and incorporating fine art from “living American artists.”
“President Trump is restoring beauty and pride to our nation’s federal buildings which have been destroyed by terrible and unpopular modern architecture,” said White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers in a statement. “The Founders envisioned our federal architecture to reflect American exceptionalism and inspire civic virtue. President Trump is restoring American greatness to everything – even our buildings.”
Critics of Moynihan’s principles say rather than prohibit an official design style, they made modernism the de facto architectural style and prioritized the taste preferences of the architectural establishment over that of the general public. Proponents say that they allowed for the United States to embrace cutting-edge designs and that Trump’s approach to federal architecture restricts creativity, relying instead on regressive, limited beauty ideals while assuming too much about public preferences by so heavily emphasizing classical architecture.
Trump’s team again defined classical broadly as all premodernist architectural styles, with roots in Greco-Roman antiquity, though art deco, which is on the list, is not typically considered traditional. The order defines “traditional architecture” as Gothic, Pueblo Revival, Spanish Colonial, and Mediterranean styles historically rooted in parts of the United States.
“Designs diverging from classical architecture must convey the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American government and command public respect,” the White House said in a fact sheet for the order, which also requires that Trump is notified when a building design deviates from the preferred style.
Justin Shubow, who is the head of the National Civic Art Society and helped draft the order, in a statement Thursday called the revisions a “monumental development … placing the government – and ultimately the American people – in charge.”
Shubow told The Post in an interview that he does not believe this is a political issue for most people, pointing as an example to former president Barack Obama accepting the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008 in front of classical Greek backdrop. “Whoever was stage-managing understood that this is how Americans think of the presidency. They do associate it with classical architecture,” Shubow said.
“In my view, it was an abdication of authority, the government going to the private sector and saying, ‘You tell us what we should be building,’” Shubow said. “It’s like the equivalent of the Pentagon going to Boeing and saying, ‘You tell us what kind of airplanes to we should be building.’”
Cameron Logan, an architectural historian at the University of Sydney and author of “Historic Capital: Preservation, Race, and Real Estate in Washington, D.C.,” said that in shifting the control away from the architecture profession, there is a risk of “disengagement from the broader qualities we might be looking for in buildings in terms of, say, their performance, their sustainability.”
“All these things would be at the top of a contemporary architect’s list,” he said.
Trump first took up the cause against modernism at the end of his previous administration, and he renewed the push in a memorandum soon after taking office this year. In a fact sheet, the administration tied the architecture order to other projects “revitalizing the beauty of America’s public spaces,” including recent measures in Washington that included the deployment of troops on D.C. streets.
The campaign is part of a widening effort to influence aesthetics and culture by Trump, who has also announced a sweeping review of content at the Smithsonian Institution to rid it of what he deems “improper ideology” and espouse “American exceptionalism.” He is also outfitting the White House in his preferred gold.
Logan said the executive order fits in with Trump’s apparent desire to have a federal government “where everyone is impressed by its grandeur.”
“If you look at introducing things like military parades, to me, that tells you as much about this as anything,” he said. In June, a military parade capped a day-long extravaganza in D.C. honoring the Army’s 250th birthday on the same day as Trump’s birthday.
Logan said he reads Moynihan’s design principles as an attempt “to reduce badly-handled classical language” in federal architecture. He points as an example to the Rayburn House Office Building, a sprawling structure that was widely criticized for its high cost and in the Atlantic’s words in 1967, its “corrupt classic facade” with details that “fell out of favor among fashionable architectural circles a half century ago.”
Moynihan’s 1962 design principles go back to a different philosophy, Logan said, when classical architecture was seen as a kind of “federal brand” – one that was “out of tune” with the public and “the sense that the government was something with which you should engage rather than be impressed by.”
Samuel Sadow, a lecturer in the Art Department at American University who has studied federal architecture, said in an email that he believes the push for classical architecture “has something to do with the conservative tendency to appeal to periods of history that have been mythologized as better, richer, more authentic, simpler, etc.”
But such endorsements of early American history are troubling, he added, “given the realities of that period, especially when the clear aim is to use that history as a basis for national identity in the present.”