Yes, 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. But JDavidsonNYC explains why he's saving his outrage
Photo: Getty Images. Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer Last week, the Trump administration opened another front in the ongoing war on expertise. After battling diplomats, generals, spies, scientists, and journalists, the president and his minions are now trolling architects. If Trump signs the executive order that has been circulating in draft form, new federal buildings will follow a mandated preference for the classical style. Let Doric columns and entablatures spring from the land.
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 months or years. It doesn’t portend architectural apocalypse. A broad-brushed stylistic preference is not a crushing burden compared with the more mundane restrictions architects contend with every day.
Like everything Trump touches, the edict is bizarrely polarizing, forcing the public and professionals to take sides in a debate that doesn’t really exist. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a die-hard modernist reject neoclassicism on principle, or vice versa. Preservationists fight equally hard for endangered works of all aesthetic persuasions. A few architects have built careers on profoundly personal expressions.
The document dishonors classicism, miscasting it as a symbol of nostalgia rather than a shape-shifting tradition with promiscuous political associations. So it’s disconcerting to see opponents make a similar mistake. A fulminating Times editorial interpreted the term classical as narrowly as possible: “In other words, federal buildings, most of all federal courthouses, should resemble Roman temples as closely as possible — although presumably without any statues of false gods in the lobby.
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