Kelsey Ables and\u00a0Janay Kingsberry
\n\u00a0|\u00a0 The Washington Post<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday declaring \u201cclassical and traditional\u201d 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\u2019s construction for more than six decades.<\/p>\n
The order, titled \u201cMaking Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,\u201d largely echoes that of his previous administration, directing that all new federal buildings in Washington, D.C. be constructed in a \u201cclassical\u201d style and that classical and traditional styles guide federal construction throughout the country.<\/p>\n
But it goes a step further than Trump\u2019s previous edict, rejecting Daniel Patrick Moynihan\u2019s 1962 Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, which urged the government to avoid an \u201cofficial style\u201d and to follow the lead of contemporary architects, resulting in a number of modernist buildings throughout the country.<\/p>\n
Thursday\u2019s action reverses that guidance, ordering that \u201cdesign must flow from the needs of the Government and the aspirations and preferences of the American people to the architectural profession.\u201d Some of Moynihan\u2019s language remains, including attention to \u201cregional architectural traditions\u201d across the country where federal buildings are located, and incorporating fine art from \u201cliving American artists.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cPresident Trump is restoring beauty and pride to our nation\u2019s federal buildings which have been destroyed by terrible and unpopular modern architecture,\u201d said White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers in a statement. \u201cThe Founders envisioned our federal architecture to reflect American exceptionalism and inspire civic virtue. President Trump is restoring American greatness to everything – even our buildings.\u201d<\/p>\n
Critics of Moynihan\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Trump\u2019s 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 \u201ctraditional architecture\u201d as Gothic, Pueblo Revival, Spanish Colonial, and Mediterranean styles historically rooted in parts of the United States.<\/p>\n
\u201cDesigns diverging from classical architecture must convey the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American government and command public respect,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cmonumental development \u2026 placing the government – and ultimately the American people – in charge.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cWhoever was stage-managing understood that this is how Americans think of the presidency. They do associate it with classical architecture,\u201d Shubow said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn my view, it was an abdication of authority, the government going to the private sector and saying, \u2018You tell us what we should be building,\u2019\u201d Shubow said. \u201cIt\u2019s like the equivalent of the Pentagon going to Boeing and saying, \u2018You tell us what kind of airplanes to we should be building.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Cameron Logan, an architectural historian at the University of Sydney and author of \u201cHistoric Capital: Preservation, Race, and Real Estate in Washington, D.C.,\u201d said that in shifting the control away from the architecture profession, there is a risk of \u201cdisengagement from the broader qualities we might be looking for in buildings in terms of, say, their performance, their sustainability.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAll these things would be at the top of a contemporary architect\u2019s list,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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 \u201crevitalizing the beauty of America\u2019s public spaces,\u201d including recent measures in Washington that included the deployment of troops on D.C. streets.<\/p>\n
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 \u201cimproper ideology\u201d and espouse \u201cAmerican exceptionalism.\u201d He is also outfitting the White House in his preferred gold.<\/p>\n
Logan said the executive order fits in with Trump\u2019s apparent desire to have a federal government \u201cwhere everyone is impressed by its grandeur.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look at introducing things like military parades, to me, that tells you as much about this as anything,\u201d he said. In June, a military parade capped a day-long extravaganza in D.C. honoring the Army\u2019s 250th birthday on the same day as Trump\u2019s birthday.<\/p>\n
Logan said he reads Moynihan\u2019s design principles as an attempt \u201cto reduce badly-handled classical language\u201d 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\u2019s words in 1967, its \u201ccorrupt classic facade\u201d with details that \u201cfell out of favor among fashionable architectural circles a half century ago.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moynihan\u2019s 1962 design principles go back to a different philosophy, Logan said, when classical architecture was seen as a kind of \u201cfederal brand\u201d – one that was \u201cout of tune\u201d with the public and \u201cthe sense that the government was something with which you should engage rather than be impressed by.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201chas something to do with the conservative tendency to appeal to periods of history that have been mythologized as better, richer, more authentic, simpler, etc.\u201d<\/p>\n
But such endorsements of early American history are troubling, he added, \u201cgiven the realities of that period, especially when the clear aim is to use that history as a basis for national identity in the present.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kelsey Ables and\u00a0Janay Kingsberry \u00a0|\u00a0 The Washington Post President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday declaring \u201cclassical…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":122741,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[13716,414,230,23376,228,226,227,19548,25243,8833,25246,229,14804,12,88,14805,15911,19555,15606,13962,664,3729,13723,15903,13547,3,25242,13470,13560,15902,111,29461,5262,22093,29465,6072,3479,13692],"class_list":["post-122740","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-affiliate","tag-and","tag-architecture","tag-architecture-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-autopilot","tag-barack","tag-barack-obama","tag-branch","tag-design","tag-donald","tag-donald-trump","tag-entertainment","tag-exclude","tag-exclude-from-paywall-logic-testing","tag-exclude-social-autopilot","tag-executive","tag-executive-branch","tag-from","tag-local","tag-local-affiliate-arts-u0026-entertainment","tag-logic","tag-neutral","tag-news","tag-obama","tag-overall","tag-overall-neutral","tag-paywall","tag-politics","tag-rogers","tag-social","tag-taylor","tag-taylor-rogers","tag-testing","tag-trump","tag-u0026"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122740","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122740"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122740\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122741"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122740"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122740"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122740"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}