Smoke and Mirrors

When Trump issued a similar executive order, also titled “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again,” toward the end of his first term in 2020, the architectural establishment reacted with swift denouncement. Although a very lame duck at that point, despite a dangerous attempt at a coup to stay in power, Trump proclaimed that most modernist (especially brutalist), postmodernist, and deconstructivist federal architecture was an abominable betrayal of the republic. Only a crude proscriptive neoclassicism could be the architecture of the United States of America, the executive order proclaimed.

Whether or not Trump owed some very specific debt to architecture critic and neoclassical evangelist Justin Shubow, that first executive order was designed to bond the right-wing classicists to Trump’s pseudo-populist and often fairly anti-aesthetic ruling order. Shubow has long been a leading polemicist against contemporary federal architecture, especially Frank Gehry’s admittedly uninspiring and bland Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial (2020). Trump placed Shubow on the US Commission of Fine Arts, and he became chair in January 2021. Shubow’s tenure as chair lasted until June 2021, when Joe Biden removed him, which, of course, provided mutual fodder for the classicists on the Right and whatever the Biden camp could be called.

It’s that “whatever” that makes Trump’s petty bromides about architecture effective and meaningful at all. Obviously the president should not dictate how federal buildings should look in a democracy where such decisions are delegated to federal officials with oversight and responsibility. That is where Trump’s orders are actually worst — they are profoundly anti-worker, replacing the informed judgment of expert workers with the ideological cant of the bully president. Yet much of the blowback on these orders has come from within an architectural establishment whose material interest lies in allowing a small number of star-led super-firms to receive the bulk of federal contracts, and whose laments about Trump’s orders ignore that many architectural firms are anti-worker spaces instead of bulwarks against authoritarianism.

The principle of artistic liberty is core to democratic architecture and should be defended against the MAGA fetish for neoclassical design. Yet democracy is not embodied by the stubbornly unwelcoming, baleful look of the Eisenhower Memorial, nor by the Frank Gehry studio’s exploitation of young, uncredited, and underpaid designers to achieve that look. Of course, Shubow has no concern for the exploitation inherent in architectural offices, as long as his favorite neoclassical firms are chosen. Then again, neither do many of the people who are critical of Trump’s orders.

Trump’s latest executive order is probably the best written, but it’s also targeted to inflame critics with simplistic explanations for why neoclassical architecture must be the architecture of the American state. For instance, the order proclaims that the Founders “sought to use classical architecture to visually connect our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity, reminding citizens not only of their rights but also their responsibilities in maintaining and perpetuating its institutions.” This is pure bait, as it ignores the power imbalances and systems of enslavement that also link the early US republic with ancient Rome.

The executive order’s history of federal design is hagiographic, skipping from a supposed pure early age of neoclassical architecture to the founding of the GSA in the 1960s, which is narrated as tantamount to destroying architectural integrity. That even the US Capitol Building is a mash-up of competing and ultimately incompatible classical design concepts eludes the author of the executive order, as does Thomas Jefferson’s own belief that classicism was preferable because it allowed eclectic outcomes to design problems. No matter. The GSA apparently created “undistinguished” and “unappealing designs,” which means abhorrent modernist designs.

The GSA’s Design Excellence Program from 1994 comes under fire, as it produced a generation of federal buildings of which “many of these new Federal buildings are not even visibly identifiable as civic buildings.” This would be tragic — until anyone remembers that most federal buildings come in the form of military support structures, federal office blocks closed to the public, and maintenance facilities in national parks. Most federal architecture does not look like civic architecture for a reason, and that reason is the interest of the state in not making its basic functions seem welcome to the general public.

There is a real battle over major symbols of federal power, but it hardly constitutes much of a battle. The three branches of government already reside in permanent neoclassical homes. Many federal office blocks and museums in the District of Columbia flanking public spaces are neoclassical. A few aren’t. Should the national government that enacted the 1964 Civil Rights Act continue to build according to the wishes of its founding enslavers? Strangely the Trump executive order states that the “general public” (defined to exclude architects and expert architectural historians) should have power in defining the look of federal architecture, but nowhere in the order is there any account of how the masses will get to speak and what happens if they don’t want the mandatory neoclassicism.

Trump’s executive order is a deal with his base, not a sweeping order for a new era of federal design. The reaction against it only helps him replenish enthusiasm in the face of the Epstein files scandal, his loosening grip on international crises, and the economic downturn his tariffs are helping to usher in. Beyond the ballroom, Trump is not steering a revival of great federal architecture but perhaps instead a demise through the selling of federal buildings. There is no depth to Trump’s supposed interest in classical architecture except in how that propagandistic use of neoclassicism feeds red meat to his supporters and helps him remain in power.

The Real Architectural Agenda

Any critic of Trump’s architectural vision should keep their focus on where he is devastating the rights to freely dwell in the United States and abroad.

Trump’s biggest architectural project is the construction of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities — meant to control illegal immigrants today but perhaps functional for broader purposes down the line — and with their candid chain-link and cheap tents they look more like the Frank Gehry utilitarianism that Shubow disdains. These facilities are generating enormous profit to the private sector actors being contracted to build them. Likewise the Trump administration’s pro–artificial intelligence (AI) stance nearly propelled the US Senate to pass a measure banning local regulation before headwinds shifted. Even in MAGA country, the data centers needed to support the AI industry are deeply unpopular. Data centers are another anonymous, utilitarian form of nonbuilding that will outpace any neoclassical building boom under Trump’s alliance with Silicon Valley.

Trump’s growing use of soldiers as law enforcement in urban settings has a much larger impact on the enjoyment of space than his “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again” dictate. Trump-occupied Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and Memphis have all experienced the brute force of the imperial guards for which columns and pediments are just symbols. The right to inhabit urban space freely is being actively attacked under Trump, and the burden will fall hardest on the people who have the least power in our nation.

Trump’s unseemly proclamations about occupying Gaza and displacing its residents so that developers can reap profits — likely through building luxury dwelling towers far removed from neoclassical design — should show that his real interests in architecture remain more about what it does for powerful people, not how it looks. None of the renderings of glass towers in Gaza suggests that the president cares what the architecture there will look like, as long as its construction fulfills displacement following a long US-backed genocide.

Likewise Trump’s attacks on universities and colleges mean architectural education could become subjected to state control — again far more dire than the executive order and far more venal. Nowhere has the White House proposed forcing the architecture schools at Columbia or Harvard to teach neoclassicism. Instead free speech and intellectual freedom are being attacked to incite a submissive stance toward the state.

Trump’s executive order is a big authoritarian distraction designed to keep the architectural world stuck defending orientations that are actually not very radical or hopeful. Submission to the state is the real agenda, and while that has architectural and spatial dimensions, the styles of buildings are pretty irrelevant to Trump’s ultimate goals. Boots on the ground, people in tent prisons, and the tech industry looting water and power resources in data centers represent a very nonpicturesque state architectural agenda.

Trump’s actual architectural agenda is authoritarian and cruel not because its heart can be found in faux-Roman columns and pediments but because its root lies in systems of organizing space to suppress dissent, expedite human suffering, and accelerate capital accumulation. In that sense, there is a through line between the classical columns of the nineteenth-century American slave markets and the White House ballroom. But those columns are going to be a very minor part of the architectural and urban agenda of the MAGA era.