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Make Architecture Great Again
The brutalist J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, DC, built in the 1960s.
The Trump administration may be crafting an executive order that would require all new federal buildings to be designed with a classical appearance. The Architectural Record claims to have obtained a copy of the order, ‘Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.’ According to the report, the order makes reference to the architectural taste of the Founding Fathers, who styled buildings from ‘democratic Athens’ and ‘republican Rome.’ The order critiques modern architecture under the General Service Administration’s ‘Design Excellence Program’ for failing to integrate ‘national values into federal buildings.’ It claims the quality of architecture produced in the modern era is ‘influenced by Brutalism and Deconstructivism.’
On cue, the architectural establishment threw a tantrum. The American Institute of Architects released a statement “strongly condemn[ing] the move to enforce a top-down directive on architectural style,” adding that “[a]ll architectural styles have value and all communities have the right to weigh in on the government buildings meant to serve them.” Fair enough. But the Chicago Sun-Times, which evidently sees itself as the guardian of all that is good and holy in design, has this to say:
[Trump] would demand that the buildings be designed in architectural styles of centuries past, extending his reactionary instincts to the very brick and mortar of government. . . . Trump’s order would hurl architecture back into a bygone era when women wore bonnets, men wore tricorn hats and the only acceptable design for a federal building was a knock-off of a classical Greek or Roman structure.
Heh. I’ll note only this: Perhaps it’s time to make knock-offs great again . . . like the Capitol, the Library of Congress, the White House, and all the Smithsonian buildings. Some knock-offs, those. Moving on:
A state-mandated architectural style that retreats so resolutely into the past is an implicit negation of the best of American and world culture over the last few hundred years. It is also the stuff of authoritarian regimes, which always distrust the new and unexpected. It doesn’t go unnoticed here that Mussolini, Franco and a particular failed German art student all pushed for a singular, classically inspired state architecture intended to project tradition, order and the superiority of the state.
Ah, yes. The go-to argument among modernist intellectuals. Prefer columns and cornices to amorphous blobs of steel and glass? Fascist! Not thrilled with the “new and unexpected” melting butter-cubes, cheese-graters, and squatting insectoids that pop up in modern cities? Hitler! Prone to artistic nostalgia? Die in a ditch, brownshirt scum! It’s true, of course, that bad men used good architecture for bad purposes. Why should that stop us from pursuing good architecture? Bad men also wore pants. I don’t suppose that we’re obliged to adopt the kilt or the toga, no?
In all seriousness, I’m not in full agreement with the proposal. I’m no fan of the executive order, and I’d rather the state not decree an “official style.” Still, why shouldn’t the federal government have some say over the design of its own buildings? In a bygone time, when women wore bonnets and men wore tricorn hats, there was no need for such heavy-handed guidance. All architects could be trusted to create something beautiful. Now, they can only be trusted to create . . . something. I, for one, would welcome a return to the old way of designing.
Until that time comes, I’m content to sip from my glass of cool, refreshing, and oh-so-delicious modernist tears.
Published in Culture
Not sure what you mean – the WPA’s legacy in towns across the country was good, creating some pretty cool buildings. For a town that hadn’t seen anything new in a long time, a futuristic WPA structure was a welcome addition, and an affirmation that the town was still alive and looking forward. WPA Moderne made some gorgeous buildings large and small, and hanging some classical details on their facades would be a travesty.
American state architecture of the 30s was close to the Fascist styles, but it never crossed the line. There was always something chilly, inhuman, and wrong about German / Italian fascist architecture. The American interpretation of the stripped-down ethos felt resolutely democratic; it was meant to ennoble, not dominate.
I like most WPA buildings I know of. Just put me down for Team Better Architecture!
I got to visit there in 2006. We were taken to a balcony of our hotel and told to look for identical buildings. Apparently, you can tell who was running the USSR by what building it is. They would come up with a design for a tower and just replicate it everywhere. None except the 7 sisters was really worth looking at.
It’s all about breaking every rule of aesthetics and critics who embrace this idea lie and claim it’s beautiful and everyone who doesn’t is just an unsophisticated rube.
The EJH building really is not nearly as bad as other styles I’ve seen.
I’m torn on this. I like the light airy feel of an open living space, but my husband is a gamer and we are family centric and private, so all our entertainment is in one room and I just don’t want that visible to anyone who comes in our house and it tends to be dark because of technology use.
So i see the need for closed space, but i also like an open entertaining space.
I think the mcmansion is just trying to get everything we want in one house. That’s not usually elegantly possible.
The Federal Building in SF is a perfect example of what I most dislike about modern architecture:the hostility it oozes toward everyone outside. There is no friendliness, no sense of welcome. The FBI building, like far too many others, doesn’t make sense of its own space; there’s no natural point of entry—if you don’t already know how to get in, you’ve got no business here—- no obvious way to interact imaginatively with the building and nothing that signals any interest in pleasing or entertaining (let alone assisting or protecting) the passer-by.
I don’t mind private entities conniving in architectural stunts. Sometimes, they’re sort of interesting and, for all I know, sometimes they actually make the lives of those who must work or dwell in them more comfortable, more productive, or more fun.
But since the government is by and for the people, its buildings should both provide and signal welcome and respect to, y’know, the people.
EDIT: Harrumph! Get off my lawn.
It’s only missing the tracks, otherwise it has all that stuff already. It’s a Federal building after all.
The FBI building is an excrescence. But a mandate to Graeco-Roman style is not without risks. The graceful arches and proportionate lines can be morphed into heavy quasi-fascist stylings like Federal Triangle in DC. But anything is better than the sterility of so much modern design.
I enjoyed Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House (1981) is still immensely fun and still applicable.
The old history of modern art series from Robert Hughes The Shock of the New (1980) made a brilliant point when he stood before the identical sterile office buildings of the New York state government and asked the viewer to imagine an American Eagle insignia on top, then a swastika or a Soviet red star. He said you notice that the building doesn’t care. You can’t do that with gothic cathedrals or classic Greek architecture. There is a heritage, a set of values inherent in those designs. In contrast, so much modern architecture virtually celebrates a soulless bureaucratic use of its spaces in service to whatever power center controls. And that seems to be the leftist ideal–sever all ties with our cultural and moral heritage so that bureaucratic power is unfettered in the quest to remake us into whatever.
With the caveat that the WPA did build plenty of agreeable buildings, I’d say that “looking forward” is precisely what created our current architectural malaise.
Even postmodern architects, supposedly disillusioned with modernism, still cling to the idea that “the zeitgeist tells me to build X, so I must build X.”
Some day I’m going to have to build a photo collection of buildings that are beautiful and were clearly designed post-1900, to pull out for the next all-new-designs-are-ugly post.
Most new designs are ugly. And it wasn’t until World War II that western people, en masse, lost their ability to build beautifully.
What most are trying to do is be edgy, which, turns out, is difficult to achieve. As my art teacher said, most of the stuff the Beatles wrote was junk, same with art.
Replying to a dismissive critic, the writer Theodore Sturgeon wrote “Well, yes, 90 percent of science fiction is crap. But 90 percent of everything is crap.”
The problem with the schools of architecture we are criticizing here (brutalism etc) is that for them the figure is 99.9 or worse–because the premises and goals are bad.
Contrary Opinion: Government buildings should be brutalist precisely because government is inherently brutal. Nice-looking government buildings convey the false impression that government is nice, and should therefore be discouraged.
Case-in-point: The J. Edgar Hoover Building does a pretty great job conveying the brutality of the F.B.I.
I’m thinking maybe a gleaming white ziggurat with thousands of rooms above and below ground, no windows, cyclone-wire, solid metal doors, and machine-gun slits with ‘THE MINISTRY’ in bright gold lettering.
Your comment may be a joke, but some people make this argument earnestly.
The worst thing about public architecture is that even when you paint over it, it’s still there.
It’s not intended as a joke. I see daily how the nice-looking government architecture in my town (Ottawa) instills positive feelings towards the government departments housed within said buildings, and I’m skeptical that’s a healthy thing for a free society. Luckily, there are also soul-crushingly ugly government buildings around the periphery of the city, and those government departments tend to be objects of derision.