Donald Trump, Architecture Critic

News of Donald Trump’s recent executive order concerning architecture, and particularly about preserving and protecting hallowed traditional styles, will have come as a surprise to anyone who recalls that one of his first appearances in the architectural realm occurred while tearing down an Art Deco treasure, the old Bonwit Teller building, and replacing it with a shiny glass tower meant for the residence of the very rich in a midtown New York non-neighborhood—an early instance of the now popular (and trendy) building type, the Oligarch’s Erection. Nonetheless, the Trump Administration, having now remade American medicine and remedied our higher education, is hard at work reforming our buildings, with memos on movie editing and how to write short stories doubtless on the way. When you have a totalizing program, you totalize.

The executive order states that “Applicable Federal public buildings should uplift and beautify public spaces,” and that “Architecture—particularly traditional and classical architecture—that meets the criteria set forth in this subsection is the preferred architecture for applicable Federal public buildings. In the District of Columbia, classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings absent exceptional factors necessitating another kind of architecture.” The weird mix of bureaucratese (“set forth in this subsection”) and authoritarian diktat is part of the new normal, perhaps, as is the nature of the codicil stating the necessity of “notification to the President through the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy when a building design deviates from the preferred style, including where a design embraces Brutalist, Deconstructivist, or other modernist architecture.” Public struggle sessions will presumably be held to denounce deconstructivist deviationists—although, given the complicated ironic reuse of familiar motifs that is so essential to American postmodern architecture, one can imagine worried memos being sent to the Oval Office: “Oh, Beloved Leader: Many are concerned that the Roman imperial column with the Emperor standing resolute, attached to the front of the Boston federal courthouse, might be meant ironically? A ruling from above is necessary!” (And, lest one think this too fanciful, recall that this is more or less how buildings got built in Stalinist Moscow.)

There are, let it be said, elements of explicable emotion in Trump’s executive order—as is usually the case with such authoritarian declarations. Populist demagoguery wouldn’t be popular, nor speak so well to the demos, if there weren’t. To put it in plain English: many people hate modern architecture and long for some old styles in its place. (And taste is not some wholly subjective internal phenomenon; if it were, mankind would never have settled, as on the whole we have, for admiring monuments such as the Parthenon or the Chartres Cathedral or the Taj Mahal that somehow combine human scale with a sense of human possibility.) To praise the elevated sensibility of Pierre Charles L’Enfant and the makers of classical Washington, D.C., against their brutalist successors has in it seeds of common sense. Many would agree that possibly “the ugliest building in the world”—as the school of design at Harvard, that redoubt of everything rotten, noted it has been called—is the nineteen-seventies J. Edgar Hoover F.B.I. building in D.C. Its brutalism is brutal. If, indeed, all federal buildings were to be done in the manner of nineteenth-century courthouses—well, worse things are happening.

Yet “many” and “some” are key words here. Much modern architecture does disappoint. The late Tom Wolfe, rubbing his hands with glee and spilling lemonade on his white suit, would be delighted that tradition has now taken its revenge on stuffy Bauhaus Europeanism, and maybe rightly so. But Wolfe’s good point, in his writing on architecture, was that there was an immense reservoir of idiomatic American style that deserved to be taken as seriously—or, more to the point, as joyfully—as any European art-school dogma. That we had much to learn from the Las Vegas Strip and Miami Beach seems obvious now. Wolfe’s bad point was that there was some kind of conspiracy that made the modernist buildings a campaign of New York “élites” against True Americanism.

In fact, modern design is often far more powerful and evocatively “patriotic” than its traditional-minded counterparts. Wolfe mocked Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial before it opened, praising instead the neoclassical sculptor Frederick Hart’s trio of soldiers, which was parachuted in at the last moment to add a realist touch to the minimalist monument. Yet when the Vietnam Memorial opened, it became perhaps the most beloved and admired monument in Washington precisely for its spare reticence. Indeed, its spiritual child, the 9/11 memorial in New York City, with its simple sunken fountains, has certainly seemed satisfying to a large public—visibly so, in the crowds one sees standing soberly around it every time one walks by.

The subtler truth is that a similar kind of minimalist rectitude is what has governed the best of the older monuments in the nation’s capital. The Washington Monument itself is now so familiar that it is hard to see just how radical and unprecedented its extreme simplicity was by the standards of its time: though called an Egyptian obelisk, no ancient obelisk is as pure, as unadorned, or as direct in its address—without so much as an evident inscription to reference the man it honors. (The Times of that time chided that “as a work of art the monument is entitled to neither more nor less consideration than a factory chimney.”) Yet the absence of obvious patriotic ornament moved us then, and it moves us still. The implicit argument was that Washington was, in popular memory at least, pure of spirit, so his monument must be pure of form. And an American argument it is.