Critics from around the country weigh in on President Trump's proposed "Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again" executive order. Shown: The United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons / Architect of the Capitol.

Over the last week, critics from across the country have begun weighing in on the proposed “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” executive order, an initiative crafted by the National Civic Art Society for President Donald Trump that would impose a “classical architectural style” on many of the nation’s federal buildings. 

The order, which also proposes to eliminate the influence of professional architects, planners, and artists over the design review process for federal buildings that cost more than $50 million, has been generally panned by architects, critics, professional organizations, and other associated groups alike, including by the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), The Architecture Lobby, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), and several others. 

To help make sense of the debate, Archinect has collected some of the critical responses to the initiative—for, against, and in between—to highlight the multiple arenas and perspectives that the proposed executive order has brought into public discourse. 

Design Excellence

While most architecture critics have come out against the proposed executive order in some form or another, a few notable voices have spoken favorably of the measure, typically, echoing sentiments raised in the proposed text of the order that are highly critical of the contemporary designs embodied by recent federal building projects, like the Brutalist style J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, D.C. designed by Charles F. Murphy and Associates in 1964. 

Specifically, the draft text of the order states that “The Federal architecture that ensued” from the 1962-era Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture and, more recently, from the General Services Administration’s Design Excellence Program, has produced architecture that “ranged from the undistinguished to designs the public widely considered uninspiring, inconsistent with their surroundings and the architectural heritage of a region, and even just plain ugly.” 

Although professional built environment groups countered the proposed executive order by highlighting the high quality of design and historical significance of the work that has resulted from GSA’s programs, critical response from across the opinion spectrum has supported the critical and negative tone of the executive order’s analysis of these buildings, to varying degrees.

The Supporters

In a blog post on his personal website, for example, Canadian-American architect and theorist Witold Rybczynski vaguely supports the aims of the initiative, but not necessarily the messenger, President Donald Trump. 

Rybczynski writes, “There is a serious and reasoned discussion to be had here, but Trump’s precipitous action–and the reaction it has engendered–preclude that. Instead we have outrage and veiled references to Speer and Mussolini.” Taking aim at the too-modern stylings of recent federal buildings, Rybczynski adds that “The challenge of modernism is that it covers . . . almost anything. The result is that you get courthouses that look like corporate office buildings and atrium-equipped government buildings that resemble casinos or upscale resort hotels.”

Writing in The Federalist, Utah Senator Mike Lee (not an architecture critic, of course, but Salt Lake City is home to the controversial U.S. Courthouse for the Utah District, designed by Thomas Phifer & Partners in 2014) compares the Phifer-designed building to the earlier Frank E. Moss U.S. Courthouse Neoclassical style complex from 1905. Lee describes the older courthouse and its more recent, but still traditionally-articulated, Art Deco and New Deal-era additions as being “true both to America’s founding principles and Utah’s unostentatious culture. Back home, we love it.” He adds that the newer Phifer-designed court house looks like “a giant air conditioning unit,” and remembers that “as the building neared completion, many Utahns believed (hoped!) the jarring, vaguely threatening glass Rubik’s Cube was just the frame, sure to be beautified and adorned before being loosed upon our community. No such luck.” Lee continues, “Classically designed public buildings serve the surrounding community, and affirm our shared civic values. The Brutalist and Deconstructivist styles that inspired the menacing failures above – and that “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” would finally dump – do no such thing.”

There is a serious and reasoned discussion to be had here, but Trump’s precipitous action–and the reaction it has engendered–preclude that. Instead we have outrage and veiled references to Speer and Mussolini," Witold Rybczynski, critic and historian.

The New York Times conservative opinion columnist Ross Douthat (also not an architecture critic, but what can you do) rejoices in the proposed executive order in a meandering opinion piece, calling it an “evolution of the culture war” that could potentially notch a victory against architects’ “long-running war on beauty.” Douthat adds, “I can confidently say that my own patriotism, my own trust in American institutions, would be modestly increased if public architecture tilted toward the wide variety of forms called classical under Republican presidents and then back toward “starchitect” experiments under Democrats.”

The Radical Middle

Among the architecture critics opposed to the measure, the degree of antipathy to the proposed executive order varies from slight annoyance to indignation. There is a significant generational break between the old guard critics and younger commentators, however, with more of the nation’s legacy critics falling into the former category, and nearly all of these opinionators seemingly struggling to care about the implications of initiative at all. Younger writers, on the other hand, are more likely to connect the order not just to the rising tide of nationalistic fervor and authoritarian impulse often displayed by President Trump, but also, to this country’s own struggles with assessing the racial and gendered legacies it's federal architecture. 

On the “slightly annoyed” side of the spectrum is Justin Davidson, architecture and music critic of New York Magazine, who considers the proposed executive order little more than a distraction and actually doesn’t think the executive order is such a bad thing after all. 

Davidson writes, “I’m saving my outrage. The White House’s proposed architectural edict is a boneheaded idea cooked up by a crackpot cabal of ideologues who hate not just modern architecture but modernity itself. Yet on the scale of Trump’s iniquities, the move barely registers. This administration’s attack on the natural environment is far more dire than anything it could wreak on the built environment.”

Rebutting the many professional and cultural groups who spoke out against the order’s potential to snuff out free architectural and artistic expression, Davidson explains that “The executive order doesn’t censor architects or stifle creativity in the country at large. It confines itself to however many federal courthouses, embassies, and passport offices the government can get built in the regime’s remaining (I hope) months or (please, no) years. It doesn’t portend architectural apocalypse.” Speaking in terms of practicalities, Davidson likens the edict to the types of ubiquitous constraints managed by practicing architects on a daily basis by adding that “A broad-brushed stylistic preference is not a crushing burden compared with the more mundane restrictions architects contend with every day. Clients’ fears, donors’ egos, lenders’ rules, a budget-review process that strips away all nonessential and therefore interesting design details [...] these are the conditions that lead to widespread homogeneity in contemporary architecture.” 

Designers could try to satisfy both benighted bureaucrats and their own sense of honor [...] by coming up with one more neo-neo-neoclassical-revival revival that is simultaneously familiar and forward looking. It’s been done before," Justin Davidson, architecture critic, New York Magazine.

Most surprisingly, Davidson actually encourages architects to take up the creative challenge embodied by the president’s strict-yet-vague stylistic mandate with a rhetorical question: “What if, rather than invoking Speer, architects took the new edict as the kind of challenge they generally relish? Designers could try to satisfy both benighted bureaucrats and their own sense of honor [...] by coming up with one more neo-neo-neoclassical-revival revival that is simultaneously familiar and forward looking. It’s been done before.”

Echoing Davidson’s resigned ambivalence to the proposed executive order, opinion columnist Aaron Betsky, writing in Architect, explains: “I’m afraid I really don’t care that much.” Betsky adds, “Of course it is ridiculous to enforce the use of any kind of style for the design of public buildings in a reputed democracy; yes, the problem with both Classical and traditional architecture is that they are the products of one particular cultural stream that, whether by intent or not (and more often latter), expresses the values of white, middle-class people of western European heritage; and yes, the order is potentially yet another example of the biases of a clueless President [...] But so what? As with most of this administration’s bluster, the order masks a much more sinister dismantling of quality control and investment in shared infrastructure.” Betsky continues, “The bigger problem is that we are not building what we really need: namely, facilities and infrastructure we can all use and that bring us together.” 

And also like Davidson, Betsky actually moves to embrace the order. “Let Trump have his Classicism,” Betsky writes, “Good architects can use any style. Let’s argue for openness, sustainability, and the deep beauty that comes from building truly democratic structures instead. Explaining that performance and carbon emissions are more important than style, Betsky seeks to meet Trump halfway by envisioning a new style of eco-classical architecture. “I am not sure how columns work as solar collectors or if you can open up buildings with string courses, but I would love to see it happen,” Betsky states.

Classical architecture can be wonderful. But it is difficult to love something when it is forced upon you," Ned Cramer, Editor-in-Chief, Architect.

The ambivalence was felt all the way in Texas, where Mark Lamster, architecture critic for The Dallas Morning News, sounded a similar note in his analysis, writing, “a small group of ideologues seems to have hijacked the policy process, potentially derailing a proven, bipartisan program celebrated by critics and supported by a professional organization [the American Institute of Architects] of more than 95,000 members.” 

The executive order is, Lamster writes, “a waste of time, a needless distraction at a moment when the profession of architecture has far more serious issues to address: the potentially catastrophic effects of climate change, persistent housing shortages, and energy efficiency, to name just the most obvious.”

The sentiment that the order represents a distraction away from the pressing issues of sustainability was echoed further by Ned Cramer Editor-in-Chief of Architect, the official journal of the American Institute of Architects, who penned an editorial explaining the order that also supports revisiting the details of the GSA’s “Guiding Principles” document. “Classical architecture can be wonderful,” Cramer writes, “But it is difficult to love something when it is forced upon you. No one style (or lobby group) can speak for all people.”

Referencing respected Senator Patrick Moynihan, the author of the principles, Cramer also seeks to engage with some aspects of the proposed order: “Were he alive today, I believe [Moynihan] would support the updating of the ‘Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture’—if the goal was building a more democratic society, and mitigating and adapting to climate change.”

Speaking with CityLab’s, Kriston Capps, former architecture critic for The New York Times, Paul Golberger, explains that “Advocates for traditional architecture should think carefully before supporting a government position on design,” with Capps adding that “while it might suit their interests in the short term for the White House to declare classical design as the national style, classicism could also come to be seen as a mere manifestation of Trumpism, a symbol akin to the border wall or family detention centers.” 

Goldberger explains further that “In the long term, to be associated with all the extreme right-wing positions of the current administration will not do the movement of contemporary classicism any good.”

This is a position echoed by University of Notre Dame architecture dean Michael Lykoudis, who penned an editorial for The Washington Post where he writes, “A proposal such as 'Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again'” potentially reduces an entire architectural philosophy to a caricature. Arbitrarily pasting columns and arches on a building so it looks like a Parthenon-Colosseum hybrid is pretentious — and doesn’t make the building classical. Designing classical buildings for the modern age is a complex process, requiring knowledge of construction, world architectural history, and urbanism, as well as aesthetic judgment.”

The trap is falling into a debate over taste or style. It’s the sort of cultural divider this president loves to cultivate and exploit," Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic, The New York Times.

John King, architecture critic for The San Francisco Chronicle echoes the other critics when he writes that, “The notion of imposed aesthetics is small potatoes.” 

As the only resident architecture critic in San Francisco, where the Morphosis-designed Federal Building specifically called out as having “little aesthetic appeal” in the draft text of the executive order is located, King included an obligatory comment on the project. In a nuanced assessment, King praises certain elements—“I love the tower’s metallic vigor. The three-story-high public alcove that begins on the 11th floor is a truly generous civic treasure”—and critiqued others, like the “stark, sketchy void” that fronts the building, while adding that “The Social Security Administration office on the plaza’s west edge, the space that regular citizens are most likely to visit, is claustrophobic and glum.”

Summing up his point, King cautions against the historical erasure of modern architecture, writing, “The United States isn’t perfect. Architecture doesn’t have the power to right larger wrongs. But federal buildings should convey our varied society’s potential in all its conflicted aspirational splendor — not try to pretend somehow that the 21st century does not exist.”

The Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic, Blair Kamin, described the executive order as “a profoundly misguided proposal” while invoking both the iconoclastic architecture of Chicago’s own Louis Sullivan and the classically-inspired buildings he famously disliked. Sullivan’s now ubiquitous (and often misapplied) dictum that form ever follows function, of course, came as a critique of certain contemporaneous architectural styles that, similar to the proposed executive order, sought to superficially gesture toward a specific brand of European antiquity and aesthetics. “To Sullivan,” Kamin writes, “Roman Revival banks were architectural fakes, their columns and pediments mere drapery that had nothing to do with their underlying construction.” 

Equivocating between the “reactionary” takes emanating from the left and right sides of this issue—including those articulated in a piece from the The Chicago Sun-Times editorial board in part headlined “Trump declares war on modern architecture”—Kamin writes that “the problem with the proposal in question isn’t classicism. It’s the imposition of classicism and other traditional styles from a single central authority, a move that would undercut the very democratic ideals that classicism is supposed to represent.” 

“Both sides in the federal buildings debate need to take off ideological blinders,” Kamin adds, “There is nothing inherently regressive about a classical federal building, just as there is nothing inherently progressive about a modernist one.” Kamin then explains that if local communities want to build in classical or modern styles, they should: “Our buildings should reflect that diversity, not mask it." 

The Detractors

In his own commentary on the potential executive order, current The New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman highlights the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African History and Culture in Washington, D.C., designed by an all-star team of architects led by Adjaye Associates, Freelon Group, and Bond / SmithGroup, as a recent work of federal architecture that deploys vaguely classicizing motifs without being overly reliant on classical orders. Kimmelman writes that “The design is a kind of meditation on the symbolic meanings of American classicism and how style functions as a symbol of pride, or a tool of oppression and colonialism, from which modernism, with its transparent glass and technical innovation, promised escape and liberation.” Kimmelman adds that the structure is “hands down the most popular and successful new public building in Washington this century.” 

Like several of the writers above, Kimmelman, however, ultimately feels that the executive order represents “a shiny object, Twitter bait” designed to galvanize the president’s base and frustrate experts. 

[The executive order] would also suggest that what’s most valuable in our built environment is what was codified by a white male elite before women could vote and black Americans had full legal rights,” Amanda Kolson Hurley, The Atlantic.

Kimmelman explains: “The trap is falling into a debate over taste or style. It’s the sort of cultural divider this president loves to cultivate and exploit. Like most people, I can come up with a list of modern buildings I don’t like. But if I say I admire Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago Federal Center or Thomas Phifer’s United States Courthouse in Salt Lake City or the Oklahoma City Federal Building by Ross Barney, it would only serve as ammunition for the haters in the Twittersphere and for proponents of “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” who are basically arguing that federal architecture, like the Electoral College, doesn’t actually have to represent all the people, just select people.”

This message, that the order privileges a certain type of racialized (and gendered) architectural heritage over all others, is one that architecture critic Amanda Kolson Hurley echoes in The Atlantic. Kolson Hurley explains that the executive order “would also suggest that what’s most valuable in our built environment is what was codified by a white male elite before women could vote and black Americans had full legal rights.” 

Like other critics, Kolson Hurley adds that “style has almost nothing to do with the qualities of architecture that really matter: scale, proportion, light, texture, the flow of spaces, and environmental sustainability.” Arguing against the binary nature of the executive order, which explicitly calls out “Brutalist” and “Deconstructivist” architectures as unsuitable for federal buildings, Kolson Hurley explains that “modern architecture—which embraced the idea that ‘form follows function’ and includes movements such as Brutalism and Deconstructionism—is itself a century old now. And crucially, classicism and modernism are not opposites; they exist on a continuum, and choosing between them is unnecessary.”

Todd Gannon, Robert S. Livesey Professor and head of the architecture section at The Ohio State University’s Knowlton School, penned an editorial in The Architect’s Newspaper outlining the intellectual threads underpinning the executive order’s “authoritarian posture” explaining that “in American society, beauty, value, and justice are determined [...] through the often-contentious debates we conduct in Congress, in court, in the press, in the marketplace, at school, at home, and out in the street [...] Though it often seeks guidance in expert opinion, American society is not based on timeless values, religious doctrine, or ancient edicts. It is based on mutual agreement.” 

Gannon adds that rather than engaging in this sometimes messy and protracted process, the executive order’s authors “decide in advance the outcome of public deliberation on federal buildings. Their message is clear: When it comes to the most hallowed spaces of our democracy, the American debate on beauty—and by extension, on value and justice – is settled.”

Highlighting the controversial contemporary designs the order seeks to stamp out, Gannon adds that “The authors of 'Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again' thus work entirely on the side of entrenched authority, and rightly recognize the federal buildings of [Marcel] Breuer, Morphosis, [Mack Scogin Merill Elam Architects], and others as subtly subversive. These works signal that the brilliance of American democracy issues from its accommodation of periodic reinvention, from our collective agreement that what we held to be beautiful, valuable, and just yesterday may not align with what we will hold to be so tomorrow.”

In an editorial published by Fast Company, critic and author Martin Pedersen described the hubbub surrounding the potential executive order as another example of a “reality show administration” that “thrives on chaos.” 

“How do you prioritize epic, perpetual dumpster fires?” Pederson asks as he lists the ongoing and escalating terrors unleashed by the current administration on the built and natural environments. He explains that the effort to re-center classical architecture in the American vernacular lexicon comes at the worst possible time, “Younger architects are far more style agnostic and open to other influences than their elders,” Pedersen explains, “They prioritize process over form. Modernism as a sort of style religion has lost the moral high ground (if it ever truly possessed it), due to its role as the face of global capitalism and income inequality. So, if your goal is influencing the hearts and minds of the young—the only real goal, if your objective is change—then hitching your fate to the Trump brand is likely to have the opposite effect.”

Pedersen cautions classical architecture die-hards against aligning with the president and his executive order: “No person, no organization, no idea, emerges from the Trump swamp with their dignity intact. Classical architecture deserves a better fate,” Pedersen explains. 

And finally, writing in The New Republic, architecture critic Kate Wagner similarly likens the executive order’s one-size-fits-all aesthetic approach to a long line of paternalistic dictates made by powerful men. “Claiming to speak for the aesthetic tastes of the Everyman is a trick tucked up the sleeve of both Don Draper and Albert Speer,” Wagner writes.

Further, Wagner hits on a crucial, and perhaps foreboding, fact: Donald Trump simply loves to build bad buildings that tend toward the type of superficial and aspirational ornamentation envisioned by the executive order. “Whether we like to admit it or not,” Wagner explains, “Trump is an architectural president—in his professional life as a (failing) developer, he has had his grubby, tiny hands in myriad buildings across the country. [...]Though Trump has put up buildings ranging from nineteenth-century retrofits to late-modern skyscrapers, his personal style is a combination of 2000s bling and Louis XIV—nothing in his penthouse Trump Tower apartment is spared a metallic coating.”

Wagner counters against the type of narrow-minded aesthetic populism embodied by the executive order by invoking Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour’s seminal book Learning From Las Vegas. The book, Wagner explains, “is a nuanced (and very funny) book, but its message was quickly flattened into ‘Modernism is a failure, and ordinary people hate modernism and like red barns and gables.’” 

Closing the article, Wagner cautions that “only a specific kind of person looks at architecture and feels the need to talk about the Grecian ideal or the backbone of Western Society. That person is usually either a white supremacist, a stuck-up nitwit trapped in the 1980s, or, in the case of Trump himself, both.”

What's been left out?

As is clear by the comments above, the architecture community has been enlivened on multiple fronts due to the executive order, which continues to draw new opinions and perspectives from those in the field almost daily. And while many of the critics have a point that the conversation is, in a way, a distraction from larger practical issues like the decarbonization of the building sector, it does seem like too many have been too quick to dismiss the executive order without first more thoroughly considering the full legacy of America's public architecture, including the implications of scrapping the GSA's Design Excellence program and other related efforts. 

For one, it should be noted that the buildings created by recent federal building programs represent the collective works of a professional field that is growing increasingly diverse socially, racially, and in terms of gender. And while there remains much progress to be made on these fronts, the multi-faceted and, perhaps for some, difficult to digest architecture that results is as much a reflection of that changing make up and of the shifting nature of architectural practice as it is a sign of whichever formal ideas might be en vogue in architecture circles at any given time. 

The idea that egotistical architects are willing ugly buildings into existence and then forcing government workers to toil there is simply untrue and logistically impossible. Many of these projects are designed with many critical stakeholders, including judges, administrators, and other government officials involved on the client side, guiding decisions and design with the architects hand-in-hand. The art programs that fill the lobbies, hallways, and offices of these spaces are similarly crafted with the utmost care and by some of the brightest minds in art and design. 

For these reasons and more, contemporary federal buildings represent the promise and practical realities of our cooperative, pluralistic society brought to life—in concrete, steel, stone, and yes, glass—better than any other project type simply because there are so many people at the table making design decisions and ultimately, spending our collective money to make it all happen.

Government work takes a long time, is hard-fought, and is often incredibly difficult to pull off; It's a domain antithetical to the hallucinatory egomania that can sometimes plague the field. In fact, by and large, government work is seen by the architects who have the privilege of taking on these projects as just that, a privilege. Few, if any, architects take this work lightly or think of it as anything other than what it is: an effort to guide and give life to some of the most vital working functions of our society, however mundane. 

The real tragedy, for architects and America alike, is not that our public buildings are too modern in their aesthetics or too unrooted from comfortable but baggage-laden historical forms, it's that there are simply too few of them. The sad reality is that government architecture is relegated to a very select set of building types today, namely courthouses, border crossings, jails, and other office buildings. If the American experiment seems dim as of late, it is likely due in large part to the gradual and persistent erosion of public buildings and spaces for communal enjoyment and benefit in American everyday life, not to the particular design of any specific set of offices. 

America no longer building public housing, for example, we invest sparingly in important facilities like public hospitals, libraries, and parks, our shared infrastructure is crumbling and antiquated, and our public schools exist, in many communities, largely to criminalize children so that they can be fed into the buildings government is building a lot of these days: prisons.

So, rather than debating around the edges of style and taste, perhaps Americans should work to revive and re-envision the role of public architecture in our society from top to bottom, first. 

Editor's note: A previous version of this story mistakenly referred to an editorial from the Chicago Sun-Times as being written by the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune. The article also misidentified the name of The Chicago Tribune. The mistakes have been corrected, we regret the error.