At the turn of the nineteenth century, classical architecture represented the ideals of the new liberal republics of the United States and France. Two-hundred years ago, Donald Trump’s executive order that US federal public buildings must ‘respect… classical architectural heritage’ would have aimed to build an aesthetic bedrock upon which American liberalism would flourish. Sadly, what Ionian columns represented in 1825 are very different to what they represent today.
Trump’s executive order claims its aims are to ‘ennoble the United States and [its] system of self-government.’ A previous iteration, signed in December 2020 is longer; it quotes from the 1309 constitution of Siena, and Christopher Wren. Why is Trump doing this? Mar-a-Lago is not classical; Trump Tower could hardly be further from it. Some of his golf course clubhouses might come close, but images of Mar-a-Lago’s interior provide a new definition to the word ‘tasteless’. The Capitol Hill riots of 2021 hardly suggested a deep-seated respect for the architectural heritage of the US government.
Rules about the architectural style of government buildings are not new, and they can be deceptively political. When the British Houses of Parliament were rebuilt in the 1840s, the design competition required entries to be gothic rather than the neoclassical style associated with the American Revolution. At the time, the Spectator questioned whether the style demanded was actually possible to define. Such questions may well be asked in America over the next four years.
Neoclassical architecture was seen as the architecture of liberalism, in the way we might associate brutalism with socialism today. Does this new executive order mean a commitment to the liberal values of the US Constitution? Possibly not. Today classical architecture has become a favourite subject of the reactionary right across the world.
Those ‘wired in’, may be aware of the X and Instagram accounts with marble statues as profile pictures. Their posts are often a blend of architectural criticism (of the “lamp posts aren’t what they used to be” sort) and illiberal ‘right-wingism’. Columns have become a literal pillar of the ‘culture wars’.
Trump’s executive order represents at best a superficial sort of conservatism and at worst an adoption of authoritarian aesthetics. Combined with the more prominent aim to reduce federal government spending, the results will likely be uninteresting boxes with a beige veneer of movie-set columns. It takes effort to get classical proportion right. I suspect this effort will not be taken.
There is a particular brand of obsessively promoting architectural classicism that has an ethnonationalist following in America and Europe. This is not about encouraging local heritage, it is a universalist ‘classical’ style as bland as the concrete boxes its proponents despise. In fascist Italy the adoption of classical design was more about the authority of the state and empire Mussolini aimed to create than about promoting architectural heritage. There is an authoritarian streak that runs deep in many proposals for absolute classical revivals.
The actual conservatives have moved away from classicism towards local heritage. The Building Better, Building Beautiful commission’s final report does not contain the word ‘classical’ once. It instead recommends the use of ‘local materials and… vernacular ways of building that have inserted themselves comfortably into the landscape’. You would be wrong to call places like Poundbury classical. Poundbury is neo-Georgian: rightly more like nearby Blandford Forum than it is like Rome under the Emperor Augustus – or Mussolini for that matter.
Demanding vaguely ‘traditional’ or ‘classical’ architecture seems like more of a nod to the marble-statue-profile-picture accounts than a meaningful exploration of which architectural traditions are worth encouraging in America. The sidelining of art deco, possibly America’s greatest contribution to design, is unfortunate.
Maybe Trump will find Washington a city of concrete, and leave it one of marble, but it seems unlikely. I find it hard to believe that Trumpian classical design is classicism for beauty’s sake. Instead it looks like classicism for politics’ sake. Ionian columns and gleaming white marble may have been a reflection of liberalism 200 years ago, but today the politics lurking under budget colonnades are increasingly reactionary and illiberal.
The White House might (architecturally) represent freedom from oppressive taxation, but anything built to cheap faux-classical standards in the next four years may yet stand to represent the end of free trade, and an era of American imperialism.
