Make Federal Buildings Great Again (sigh)

Celebrity branding is a high-risk, high-reward proposition. I’m just barely old enough (46) to remember O.J. Simpson as the pitchman for Hertz Rent-a-Car. When O.J. was the star running back dashing through the airport to get to the rental counter, all the positive feelings about his great sports career and backstory were transferred to Hertz. Today, I still am reminded of Simpson whenever I see a Hertz rental counter – Run, Juice! Run! – but instead of a positive emotion, my brain associates Hertz with the horrific murder of Simpson’s wife and all the cultural drama that accompanied the trial.

This is what makes celebrity branding so tricky. All humans are flawed, some more than others and many in (often unknown) ways no brand would want to associate with. When embarking on a celebrity endorsement, stewards of a brand will generally weigh the potential downside risks as much, potentially more, than the possible gains. Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, and Martha Stewart are all spectacular warning signs that threats sometimes lurk even in calm waters.

An Executive Order on Architectural Style

Last week, a draft executive order from the White House was circulating throughout the media. The order – titled Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again (sigh) -- establishes classical architecture as the “preferred styles for applicable public buildings.” I first was alerted to it through a statement of opposition tweeted by the America Institute of Architects. Media coverage has been similarly hostile.

And I knew at least one of these publications would go Godwin’s law, resorting to the ultimate smear. Here’s from Wired:

Neoclassicism was fundamentally inauthentic, a facadism that pretended to represent glory and truth. That might be why, in the 1930s and 1940s, it became the house style for Albert Speer, official architect of the Nazi government.

It's the kind of association that usually turns people off—but not the Trump administration’s would-be aesthetic guardians. Their neo-neoclassicism gets to pretend to recall the glory of Greece and Rome in the service of symbolizing a hegemonic world power. It also winks even harder at an America before women and people of color could vote.

Yes, the Nazis liked classical architecture. So do the millions of non-Nazis who have walked up the steps to the Lincoln Memorial, stopping at the place where Martin Luther King gave his I Have a Dream speech, before proceeding to a reading of the Gettysburg Address, all while pondering in reverent silence the humble sacrifices and many implications for humanity.

Let me put forth a supposition: Very few lovers of classical architecture want their brand spokesman to be President Donald Trump. That’s not a partisan comment; you can support or oppose the president and still reach that conclusion. It’s more an observation that, if I were picking a celebrity spokesman for a brand I loved, I would want someone non-controversial, widely embraced, and easy to admire. In general, politicians make terrible brand representatives. This is especially true in a time of extreme political polarization.

I have no training in architecture. I was first exposed to the debate over classical versus other modern styles of design through the Congress for the New Urbanism, where a (dare I say) small but vocal minority of people are wildly passionate about it (incidentally, with plenty of disagreement and diversity of opinion). If you would have asked me whether I thought classical architectural styles should be the default for federal buildings, I would not have had a strong opinion.

I do now, although I wish I didn’t have the burden of having to defend it under these circumstances.

Classical versus Modern

While I would not have had an opinion a decade ago regarding the terms “classical” and “modern” as applied to architecture, I would have had a strong opinion had you shown me the buildings. Here are the ones listed in the draft executive order. If the federal government is going to spend more than $50 million (the threshold for where this order would take effect), what would you like the default to be?

Team Classical versus Team Modernism

All images are from Wikimedia.

There is something subtly innate expressed in classical architecture. Over a decade ago, my oldest daughter and I were driving through downtown. She pointed at the historical county courthouse and asked me, “Daddy, what is that building?” Being a dad, I asked her what she thought it was. “I don’t know. A church?” I then circled around the block and pointed to the new county courthouse. “What do you think that building is?” Neurons were being rewired. She said, “A target?”

Historic courthouse. (Church?)

New courthouse. (Target?)

In her four-year-old mind, she associated the classical architecture of the old courthouse with a community building of significance, something she could pull out of her limited catalog of such places. She also associated the new courthouse with simple utilitarian function. She might be brilliant (I certainly think so), but she was still a child with a child’s mind. No matter; she was right.

An Exclusive Club

Nearly all the critics of the draft executive order have pointed out that aesthetics are in the eyes of the beholder. I agree completely. Yet that isn’t to say that there isn’t a median aesthetic that would have the most universal and enduring appeal. And for buildings costing more than $50 million in 2020 dollars (which is where the preference threshold kicks in), we should be constructing buildings that are universally loved and enduring. As Steve Mouzon has pointed out in The Original Green, if we want a building to endure, it must be lovable. This is especially true for public buildings maintained with taxpayer dollars.

Architecture is a very exclusive club. It was reported a couple of years ago that there are a little over 109,000 licensed architects in the United States. Of the percentage of them that do actual design work, the vast majority spend their days designing strip malls, fast food joints, and suburban spec houses (gotta feed the family). A very tiny percentage – I would guess less than 500, if that – are in a position where they can credibly compete for a commission on a federal building valued over $50 million.

The self-reinforcing echo chamber of this exclusive clique, and the power that exclusivity provides, is one of the reasons why architectural theorist and urbanist Nikos A. Salingaros uses a term like “architectural bullies” to describe them. As he wrote in a short piece I found online:

“As soon as word of the president’s executive order on creating a more beautiful and human “official” face for the United States — as expressed in its major government buildings — was out, all hell broke loose. The usual group of architectural bullies who had intimidated past administrations into accepting absurd or totalitarian designs for public buildings felt their continuing hegemony threatened.

They of course are protesting, crying out about “loss of freedom of expression” and other stock justifications for their past bullying. Journalists and architectural critics joined in the chorus of protests, again with the usual emotional trigger phrases about “pluralism”, deceptively ignoring how for years those architectural bullies stamped out any attempts at pluralism.”

Indeed, one of the most controversial aspects of the executive order among vocal architects, their organizations, and their supporters isn’t the banning of Brutalist of Deconstructivist styles but the notion that when the U.S. General Service Administration holds a design competition for a new building, the panelists providing feedback on the designs would not come from this exclusive clique. They would represent, in effect, the general public (those who are actually commissioning the building). From the draft executive order:

With respect to the public panels, participants shall not include artists, architects, engineers, art or architecture critics, members of the building industry or any other members of the public that are affiliated with any interest group or organization involved with the design, construction, or otherwise directly affected by the construction or remodeling of the building.

For the record: I think that goes too far, although I absolutely support empowering those outside of the architecture clique to guide the process, especially early in the conceptual phases. I think there is a realization (spoken or not) among top architects that, if we randomly selected 100 rubes off the street and asked them to give their opinions, nearly all would react like my daughter did to the two courthouses. If you are a fan of Modernism, the Fanfare for the Common Man is a great tune, but not one that inspires your work.

Yet, with her insight, my four-year-old Chloe was tapping into something universal. I’m a big fan of the work of Ann Sussman (Cognitive Architecture: Designing for How We Respond to the Built Environment), whom I quoted extensively in my book (Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity). She was the guest for our most popular episode of the Strong Towns Podcast last year. In the same short article I quoted earlier, she wrote:

We live in a remarkable time in the early 21st-century where we can better understand how the human experience functions, including how perception happens. New biometric tools let us track in real time how stressful or soothing new buildings are, and how the body implicitly responds without our conscious awareness to our surroundings. This new science has brought to the fore the fact that though we live in modern times, our bodies remain ancient, and that evolution has pre-set our response to visual stimuli more than most realize.

Classical and traditional architecture meets our bodies and brain where they are, in an evolutionary sense, providing the bi-laterally symmetrical, hierarchical facades that we are hard-wired to easily see and enjoy taking in. Modern architecture, with its blankness, random arrangements, and asymmetries, does not.

I recommend that everyone read her article, co-written with her collaborator Justin Hollander, Three Foundational Errors in Architectural Thinking and How to Fix Them. These insights into what makes us human, so deeply human, have permeated design fields where the feedback loops are shorter and more direct (think: video games or theme parks), yet remain elusive in those that are more consequential, enduring and (dare I say) aloof.

My defense of classical architecture is not a defense of this executive order. I’m not a fan of executive orders, unilateral top/down action, lack of architectural diversity, and many other things embodied in this (rather clumsily worded) document. Even so, if we picked 100 people at random out of a phonebook and asked them to sit on a panel and choose one architectural design over all others, I’d go with that opinion over a group of insider experts every day.

And I’m confident that choice would almost always be a classical design. More importantly, the resulting building would be broadly loved and cared for, which should be the essential requirement when we come together as Americans to collectively build anything at such a scale.

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Postscript: I’d like to recommend a delightful book called Designing Disney’s Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance. It might sound whimsical, but theme parks are some of the only built environments in modern America where the designers intimately care about the human experience. As Sussman points out, humans are emotions first and thinking second. How much lovelier would we all be to each other if our human habitat was designed to reassure our anxieties instead of accentuating them? (Hint: Traditional design approaches subtly did this in many ways, as you would expect from an evolved habitat.)

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Charles Marohn
Charles Marohn

Charles Marohn (known as “Chuck” to friends and colleagues) is the founder and president of Strong Towns and the bestselling author of “Escaping the Housing Trap: The Strong Towns Response to the Housing Crisis.” With decades of experience as a land use planner and civil engineer, Marohn is on a mission to help cities and towns become stronger and more prosperous. He spreads the Strong Towns message through in-person presentations, the Strong Towns Podcast, and his books and articles. In recognition of his efforts and impact, Planetizen named him one of the 15 Most Influential Urbanists of all time in 2017 and 2023.

Charles Marohn