“Beautiful” Architecture
Last January, one of the first issues taken up by the new U.S. president, Donald Trump, was the architecture of public buildings. A quick search on the official White House website provides information on the initiative entitled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture”, along with the responsible bodies and the process set out to achieve its goals.
This was not the first time the president addressed the matter. In December 2020, near the end of his previous term, he had signed an executive order of similar content. That order, however, was revoked a few months later by President Biden, in March 2021, following strong opposition from the U.S. architectural community.
The central premise of “beautiful architecture” for new public buildings in the United States is “respect for traditional and classical architecture,” aiming to “elevate and ennoble the nation” and to highlight the “strength of the new American government.” In practice, this was a direct attack on contemporary architectural design, seeking instead to establish principles and rules favoring a kind of neoclassical architecture, referencing ancient Greek and Roman ideals, with the declared goal of restoring “beauty” to the urban environment.
It is worth noting that, according to reports, the federal agency responsible for managing public property -where nearly one million civil servants work- owns around 1,600 buildings, making it the most significant “patron” of architecture in the country. The implementation of such an order would therefore have a considerable impact on the appearance of many American cities, depending on the number and placement of public buildings within the urban fabric.
The desire to control public architecture so that it reflects the power and ideals of the ruling authority is hardly unprecedented. It is, in fact, most often associated with authoritarian regimes that either were, or aspired to become, empires. Yet what is striking today is the explicit acknowledgment -by a government of the scale and influence of the United States- of architecture’s power to convey a “message” and shape aesthetics and behavior.
It is also noteworthy that through a form of (neo)conservatism expressed by political authority but likely shared by a significant portion of citizens in the Western world, “beautiful” architecture is still identified with familiar forms of the past. To what extent this tendency is also the responsibility of the architectural profession itself -or of contemporary architecture more broadly- remains open to debate. In any case, setting standards for public architecture is neither illegitimate nor unusual. What is problematic, however, is the devaluation of modern design directions and the imposition of a rigid formalist aesthetic as the sole model for building -an approach that runs counter to any genuine effort toward growth and evolution.
Ariadni Vozani
