President Trump is set to direct all new federal buildings in Washington, D.C., to be constructed in the classical style. The architectural community has been buzzing with outrage since an executive order leaked in early February, with reams of online articles (re)announcing the arrival of fascism going live as quickly as they could be uploaded. The order, titled “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” was supported by the National Civic Art Society, a small and pugnacious Washington nonprofit organization that advocates for traditionalist public architecture. It is most famous for lobbying against the celebrity architect Frank Gehry’s design for the Eisenhower Memorial.
When I heard about this compulsory new crop of classical buildings, the word “kitsch” shot immediately into my mind, followed by a mental slideshow from history: There was Albert Speer’s Nazi neoclassicism, an architecture of rigid manliness as imagined by a fragile teenage boy; the Venetian hotel in Vegas, with its campy faux-opulence, halfheartedly aping a decadent kind of Roman grandeur; and finally, in a similar vein, Trump’s Manhattan penthouse — three floors of marble and gold paint, crowded with gaudy columns and frilly little ornaments, seemingly designed to announce the owner’s wealth, insecurity, and lack of taste.
My first reaction was: Is this where we are as a country? Do we really want to eliminate our ability to innovate, to think and make and love new things? Are we doomed to stale, soulless repetition? If so, how terrible. How sad! But such doom-saying is too quick and tidy. The tradition of classical architecture has had myriad revivals over the past two millennia, and some of them have produced buildings of incredible beauty and vitality. Classical proportion and scale, symmetry and balance, fluted columns, domes, and arches — these have provided the grammar for a number of fluent architectural vernaculars.
The Romans themselves, for one, were emulators of what was, to them, ancient Greece. A millennium and a half later, the Italian Renaissance left behind astonishing architectural accomplishments, which are artifacts of renaissance in the literal sense, a self-conscious push for the rebirth of classical culture. I don’t know if there are humans who enter St. Peter’s Basilica (completed in 1590) and find it gaudy, overblown, derivative, boring, etc. Probably there are, but I, for one, have no choice but to agree with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who called the neoclassical St. Peter’s “an ornament of the earth … the sublime of the beautiful.”
“Sublime” is indeed the right word. Sublimity is a not-unpleasurable reminder of one’s smallness. Standing beneath the cupola of St. Peter’s, one feels absolutely minuscule, overshadowed by an irresistible grandeur. Great classical architecture is expert at inducing a sense of peaceful awe at the hierarchy of being, a feeling that this hierarchy is good and beautiful and that we should be happy with our place in it.
There are other kinds of awe that architecture can inspire. In the executive order, Trump sets up classicism as the white-hatted foe of brutalism and postmodernism. Brutalism, in particular, traffics in a very nonclassical species of awe. Its raw, massive concrete forms overawe the viewer with simple stony mass. You are small, once again, but the hierarchy here, the thing you stand in awe of, is neither beneficent nor comforting. With some notable exceptions, brutalism tends toward the cold, the inhumane, and the ruthless. Most people would prefer not to look.
Yet our choice is not necessarily between brutalism and classicism. According to Joshua Rubbelke, a Washington architect familiar with federal projects, very few such projects are shaped by massive artistic or intellectual ambition. Most are more pedestrian efforts to meet a large raft of pragmatic demands while complying with a significant battery of regulations under conditions of budgetary austerity. Gigantic, terrifying chunks of raw concrete that showcase our cosmic insignificance? In this economy?
The real-life opponent of Trump’s new classicism isn’t evil, glowering brutalism — it’s office park banality. It’s sustainable, livable boxes that allow for efficient workflow and don’t strike the paying public as too opulent. It’s less Great Man architects such as Gehry and more Friedrich Nietzsche’s last man, with nothing left to care about and nothing to stand in awe of.
If this is our choice, then the choice is clear. Let’s have inspiration, grandeur, national aspiration. The Italian Renaissance was neither the first nor the last significant rebirth of Greek architecture, and probably there will be yet more in the future. Classicism is a wonderful style, responsive to many deep human desires and needs. Unfortunately, there is reason to doubt that Trump is signing such a rebirth into being.
Greek architecture developed through the building of temples. St. Peter’s is a church. The stateliness, the quiet little miracles of classical logic and form, can find a wide array of applications, but classical architecture is at its strongest when serving as a vehicle for awe, which is ultimately directed above and beyond the arches and domes of the physical building. Without this, attempts at classical grandeur collapse into kitsch. The question is: What, exactly, do we as a nation stand in awe of in 2020?
When he was still running for president, Trump was asked by Barbara Walters to describe his desired legacy in a single word. He chose “victory.” When she asked Bernie Sanders the same question, he picked “compassion.” These are compelling things in their different ways. Groups can gather around these flags. But is either one of them a god who could hover over the top of a temple, making it holy, making us small and happy in its shade? Or is there something else we have to be in awe of? Our laws? Our principles? Our ideals?
I don’t know right now; again, I have my doubts. If there are seasons when one of these can inspire awe in a nation of serious people, 2020 doesn’t seem to be one of them. Maybe this is the product of long-running mismanagement and corruption on the part of our elites. Maybe they have besmirched our ideals. Maybe it will pass. We’ll see. But if there isn’t anything that we can together stand in awe of, we might be in for a long, difficult time. If so, there isn’t a quantity or quality of columns, pilasters, domes, or plinths that can birth an American renaissance worth having.
Ian Marcus Corbin is a writer, academic, and entrepreneur in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
