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Donald Trump is architecture's nightmare client

2016-08-03T13:50:00-04:00

Two weeks ago at the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump's daughter introduced him as a man who has overseen the construction of skyscrapers, thereby qualifying him to somehow take stead of the vastly more complex civic architecture of the United States. Never mind that Donald Trump doesn't necessarily pay the architects he hires, making him less of an overseer and more of a cheap tyrant (with a terrible, reductive aesthetic sense, to boot). This tendency to inaccurately appropriate architecture is a theme within the Trump family—Melania made up an entire degree—but what Duo Dickinson notes over at CommonEdge is that Trump's blowhardism is counter to what architecture is: notably, an exchange of ideas, and a conversation about how best to implement those ideas. As Duo writes:

Agreement with the Donald is being right, anything else puts you in the other side of him—wrong and disqualified; not a great place for an architect if he’s your client and radically divisive even in a ...

Christopher Hawthorne on the Republican National Convention's architecture: "It’s as if a bunch of mud-covered actors from 'Game of Thrones' or 'The Crucible' wandered into an Apple store."

2016-07-21T13:04:00-04:00

the set is a shotgun marriage of Star Trek and Macbook modern, with perhaps a touch — in the rounded stairs, lighted from below — of Art Deco. [...] The goal seems to be a series of smooth surfaces to which none of the more direct ad hominem verbal attacks or accusations of plagiarism might stick — a slate that can be wiped clean whenever a change in tone or direction is wanted. Call it Teflon minimalism.

Hawthorne's Teflon comparison is particularly evocative, given one of the latest incidents last night at the RNC, when Ted Cruz didn't endorse Trump during his primetime address. He was booed off the stage.

The Republican National Convention's last day in Cleveland is today, themed "Make America One Again", with speakers Peter Thiel, Tom Barrack, Ivanka Trump and the one, the only, Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

More News from the 2016 Presidential campaign:

Yeah, so about Melania Trump's architecture degree...

2016-07-20T14:02:00-04:00

When Melania Trump’s much-anticipated address at the Republican National Convention on Monday provoked outrage for plagiarizing Michelle Obama’s speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, the typically demure member of Trump’s campaign suddenly became the center of a lot of negative press.

The ensuing wave of critical attention towards Melania Trump dug up other questionable details about her position in the campaign—among them, its claim that she obtained “a degree in design and architecture at University in Slovenia”, according to her bio in the GOP Convention’s program. The same information appears on Melania Trump’s official website.

An obvious red flag, pointed out by snopes.com, is that “There is no ‘University in Slovenia,’ nor is there a ‘University of Slovenia.’” Previous to the RNC, multiple profiles of Melania Trump (including those for GQ and The New Yorker) had looked into her academic background and reported that she did indeed attend the school of architecture a...