The Architecture of Owning the Libs

What's really going on with that draft executive order about federal buildings.

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Everyone in the political world has suddenly decided that they have very strong opinions about architecture now that the Trump administration is floating an executive order to mandate “classical” architecture in federal buildings.

The draft executive order, reported last week by Architectural Record, “would require rewriting the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, issued in 1962, to ensure that ‘the classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style’ for new and upgraded federal buildings.” The order is titled, inevitably, “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.”

This is an attempt to create an official style of architecture dictated by Donald Trump and his hangers-on. Or maybe just by Trump: the executive order notes right off the bat that “Washington and Jefferson, both amateur architects, personally oversaw the competitions to design the Capitol Building and the White House.” You can bet this was written to appeal to Trump’s vision of himself as amateur architect in chief.

This prospect has set off a spate of poorly informed comments on the history of art and architecture by people who seem to have developed an interest in the topic a week ago when it became the latest chess piece in their partisan battles.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Smitty

    GSA is clearly under the control of the executive branch. Absent some controlling law there is no question this is under the President's discretion. But we didn't give the President this authority. Article two of the Constitution does. Should Bernie Sanders be elected Comrade in Chief he too will enjoy that authority.

    Also I have seen so many ugly Federally owned buildings (not to mention ugly Federal buildings).
    I don't see why it would be in the public interest to build even one more ugly building. Maybe I'm missing something but I really don't see the problem.

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    Lawrence D'anna

    I don't agree that it's the "exact same hectoring didacticism, but from the right".

    Remember we're talking about public buildings here, not all art, or even all buildings. If any kind of art should be reasonably expected to carry a political message, and should be judged on the basis of that message, it's public buildings.

    The problem here isn't didacticism, it's didacticism in service of trolly partisanship. A certain amount of didacticism in service of patriotism and those values that are truly shared widely by the nation is appropriate for public buildings.

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      Stephanie

      The whole idea of politicizing what a public building will look like seems ridiculous. Whatever the decision making process for soliciting and approving an architectural design has been up until now, is perfectly good enough to continue with. This faux "classicism" is just another expression of Trump's lousy taste in design. It has no deeper significance.

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        Lawrence D'anna

        I guess what I’m trying to say is that public building will always be political in a broad sense, but they shouldn’t be partisan.

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    Kevin Durant?

    The second term will include an executive order addressing the designated hitter

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    Israel Bigelow

    The article is right to point the pitfalls of a top-down government mandated effort against modernist architecture but doesn't articulate an alternative to an important problem. Yes, we should be wary of what sort of precedents we set given that Trump won't be in the office forever, but could it also be that because the Left consistently asserts itself in the public sphere and the Right doesn't, that the country as a whole continues to drift Leftward? Conservatives, from Edmund Burke and to the late great Roger Scruton, appreciated ascetics for their ability to promote a sense of place and the transcendent. If Trump's executive order isn't the answer, then how else should conservatives assert themselves in the culture?

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      Idontdocute

      It might also be that the country is drifting Leftward because the GOP has gleefully abandoned classic conservative values. It is so much easier to stand in public and support fiscal responsibility, smaller government that minds it's business and not ours, and conservation of the land and water that we all own together than whatever this Beast we have to deal with today actually is.

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        Israel Bigelow

        I agree 100%. I'd also argue that our culture and common heritage is something else we need to protect instead of allowing postmodernists to rewrite our history. Jonah does a good job in his book of showing how the Founders took the best parts of the Enlightenment and Protestantism to create something miraculous. Liberty can't exist without Virtue. It doesn't seem either political party or our government is interested in virtue, only power.

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      Stephanie

      Lots of circular reasoning, unproven premises that don't help in making your point, e.g., "the Left consistently asserts itself in the public sphere and the Right doesn't" (even hear of Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Ronald Reagan et al.?). And can you explain how Donald Trump is an ascetic? That one is truly hilarious. Unless you mean "aesthetic" which doesn't quite fit either somehow. I do agree with some of the article premises in that it's all part of the authoritarian drive of this administration.

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        Israel Bigelow

        You got me on the misspelling, one of the perils of typing a comment on your phone with autocorrect. I meant aesthetic and no, I'm not arguing that Donald Trump is one or even that I support this executive order. My point is that aside from staying in our own echo chambers watching Fox, listening to Rush, and remembering Reagan, maybe there is something here that conservatives should do in promoting architecture that gives Americans a sense of place and connection to our history. Again, Trump isn't the person to be dictating who builds what but isn't there something more conservatives should be doing here?

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          Israel Bigelow

          Also, I think Avi Woolf in his column this morning is on the right track. Think Local. Act Locally.

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            Robert Tracinski

            I generally agree. We cut out a section in the article that addressed this, because it was a little too in the weeds. The upshot was that when Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote the guidelines for federal architecture, he was trying to balance the question of how do you have Big Government without the feds imposing cultural dogma from DC. But it's not entirely successful, because the government has to hire somebody to choose architects, and they end up with basically "whoever is the establishment in the field." But the Trump EO is not a solution to that. It just says, "Conservatives will dictate a new establishment from Washington, DC."

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    td12212

    I wonder if there's going to be an "own the libs" executive order on highways to ban all left turns. That would be typically trumpian...

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      Robert Tracinski

      If he were against left turns, he wouldn't have gone to NASCAR.

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      Johntadian

      I think Trumpian would be more like saying he was going to do that, as a,"Hey, look, a squirrel" move; then appoint another three judges. It doesn't take 4-D chess to distract the press or his detractors.

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        Stephanie

        You make a great point. And boy am I tired of this self-congratulatory "owning the libs" triumphalism. No one's actually being owned. Everyone's just rolling their eyes and thinking, what a glass bowl . . . I think about what I understand was Don McGahn's nickname for him: "King Kong." It hints at the pointless destructiveness of the man.

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        Idontdocute

        Then again, look at how much trouble he gets into when we are not keeping a close eye on him. Besides, it gives us a break from the Hollywood extra baby momma photo shoot meme scandals.

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    Johntadian

    Eye Roll. All this pontificating to boil down to: "An official style imposed by executive order lasts only so long as the leader of one's own party or faction remains in power." O.K. At most, 4 more years. Any guess as to how long it takes to approve, appropriate, design and construct a Federal building in DC? How many structures could this possibly effect? I truly love the Dispatch; but you're as close as I need to get to "democrat, hair-on-fire, Trump is ruining our life" rhetoric in my daily reading.

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      C C Writer

      I dunno about that. Most of it was in support of the point that one should actually know something about architecture if one is going to make policies about it. I came away knowing more than I did, yet I'm sure the examples of the Eisenhower and the Capitol only scratch the surface.

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