March 5, 2020
Around lunchtime on Thursday, March 5, 2020, the First Lady of the United States of America, Melania Trump (née Knavs), posted to Twitter an announcement of progress on the construction of a new tennis pavilion in the grounds of the White House.[1] It was the latest update on a project that had been underway for several months already—a project that she herself had announced toward the end of the previous year. In an earlier tweet she had made a promise: “This structure will be a testament to American craftsmanship and skill.”[2]
As word spread, the internet erupted in fury.
It was evidently bad enough to be twittering about tennis at the very moment when the nation was staggering under the rising threat of a pandemic—when hospitals not so far away would soon be setting up refrigerator trucks to act as temporary morgues. Suddenly tennis pavilions seemed terribly frivolous. But it was worse than that. This was no ordinary tennis pavilion. This was a classical tennis pavilion.
A glance at the design, by the architect Steven Spandle, would have revealed a scheme that was not, per se, unusually ambitious. It replaced a structure that was strictly forgettable: a thinly-built shed containing a toilet and various basketballs, presumably relics of the Obama administration. The new design, covering a little over one thousand square feet, was certainly more solid; but it was hardly obtrusive. If anything, it might have been accused of a lack of ambition. Much like the many other White House additions that came before it, it was explicitly “informed by the existing architecture”—partly on the logic that the presidential tennis pavilion, intended more for private retreat than for public performance, need not aspire to assert itself against the Executive Residence itself.[3] Two modestly scaled volumes, punctured by arched windows, bracketed a more open central portico with four columns evenly disposed across its length. The façade was cleanly detailed, without much in the way of superfluous ornament beyond a solid textbook rendition of the Tuscan order, as recommended by Vignola, via Jefferson. The whole thing was no less symmetrical and no more innovative than the layout of the adjacent tennis court—which was itself, of course, ordered according to the rules of a long-established tradition. No surprises here.
Be that as it may, the pavilion’s classical vocabulary compounded the problem.
After all, a few weeks earlier, someone had leaked the draft of a newly proposed presidential executive order—provisionally (but predictably) entitled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.”[4] Complete with Wikipedia footnotes, the document was not an exceptionally glorious affair; but it betrayed monumental ambitions. It suggested that newly commissioned federal buildings—courts of justice, government offices, even structures built for the nation’s most tedious federal agencies—should demonstrate a visible commitment to classical and traditional vocabularies. This was not only a vote of confidence in classical architecture’s capacity to meet twenty-first century challenges; it was explicitly framed as nothing other than a rejection of twentieth-century modernism and its legacy.
Members of the American Institute of Architecture promptly sent more than 11,400 letters to the White House condemning the proposal.[5]
It would be safe to assume that the vast majority of those architects were not, themselves, classicists, but trained instead to practice in a vocabulary that can trace its origins to such (embarrassingly Eurocentric) early-twentieth-century sources as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and the Bauhaus, via the so-called International Style that—for better or for worse—has shaped the canon of recent architectural pedagogy, informing global architecture of the past half-century from Kuala Lumpur to Kinshasa. In rejecting the legacy of modernism and of all that it encompasses, the vocabulary of the White House tennis pavilion therefore calls into question the pedagogy of almost all of America’s professional schools, and the qualifications of their graduates. That goes some way, no doubt, toward explaining those 11,400 letters, and the outrage that accompanied the announcement of progress on the president’s new pavilion.[6]
But there was more at stake here. This episode proved, after all, to be part of a longer story, of which the narrative outlines were still emerging.
December 18, 2020
The plot thickened in the months that followed.
In fact, between the end of 2020 and the start of 2021, the reluctant handover of presidential power in Washington, DC was accompanied by a veritable fury of classical drama. On December 18, one month before the end of his term, outgoing president Donald Trump signed a more polished version of the previously leaked document, now registered as Executive Order 13967: Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.[7] Critics noted with some glee that Trump’s own previous career in real estate was not conspicuous for its rigorous commitment to the classical vocabulary—excepting the letterforms occasionally used to spell out his name on his buildings’ façades. But his order recommended nonetheless that newly commissioned federal projects demonstrate a visible commitment to classical form. And again America’s architectural establishment protested.
Trump’s order triggered instant condemnation from the American Institute of Architects. This was only to be expected, if not guaranteed to sway the undecided—the AIA being famous, after all, neither as a deposit of critical depth nor as a beacon of ethical clarity. But even in its preliminary form, the order had also elicited a good number of less explicitly institutional reactions, often from pundits possessed of a murky combination of deep-seated prejudice and shallow familiarity with classicism’s history. Few acknowledged the origins or diversity of classical and traditional form, adopting instead the same narrowly European conception of classicism invoked by Trump’s order. Liberal critics aligned briefly with far-right supremacists in equating classicism with whiteness—in obstinate refusal of classicism’s polychrome history, both literal and metaphorical. Many cherry-picked their precedents from the lowest-hanging branches of the historical record. Invocations of 1930s Nazi architecture, in particular, were quick and easy, typically focused more closely on the commissioning of classicists to articulate the language of authority than on the hiring of modernists to construct the machinery of extermination. Few, in any case, questioned the order’s own binary confrontation between the classical and the modern, and many surrendered fully to simplistic readings of a strictly linear architectural history. There was little room for complexity, even in reading the most obvious of local precedents. There was no space to acknowledge, for example, that the original design for America’s Executive Mansion was hardly au courant at the moment of its proposal, or that the entirety of the White House interior dates to the 1950s or later; that precious little of the current US Capitol is original to its conception, that its current east front was completed in 1962, or that its current west front is in good measure a 1980s replica painted to look like marble. Architectural history is in fact bursting with apparent contradictions, yet the general preference, all around, was for conceptual tidiness and intellectual simplicity: the architectural-historical equivalent of an eighth-grade reading level.[8]
Average responses scored little better on pragmatics. There were countless assertions as to the importance of freedom of choice—architectural liberals reconciling with conservatives to demand freedom from government regulation—but few expressions of concern over the disastrous legacy of the past century’s free choices: the global impact of thin, glassy architectures dependent on pumping massive quantities of conditioned air into artificially lit interiors, or the growing body of evidence on the extractive implications of glass, steel, and concrete, or the heavy addiction to chemical substances and toxic building materials—the synthetic membranes, short-lived sealants, and adhered surfaces of junkspace. There was little discussion of the building industry’s intent to resolve the fundamental problems of a fossil-fuel mindset by offering more sophisticated, higher-order solutions extracted from the same mindset and delivered by the same suppliers. Few entertained the notion that some value might be derived from a concerted effort to revisit architectural forms and practices that emerged across centuries of building with minimally processed, locally derived materials, brightened by the light of the sun, and so forth. Few drew any connection to the debate over architecture’s enduring commitment to fast fashion, where this year’s looks must of course differ from last year’s offerings, delivered at low up-front investment and high long-term cost. Instead, most bought into the assertion that classical architecture is inherently more expensive than its alternatives, without noting that building well will always be more costly—in the short term—than building cheaply. Neither the executive order nor its protesters engaged with substance at this level. The focus was on image, and on style.
But Trump’s order also prompted more thoughtful expressions of unease from other groups, along with more carefully worded warnings from committed classicists, who worried that the executive order’s actual effects on public discourse would be equivocal at best.[9]
The AIA’s press release, meanwhile, was unambiguous. Its headline read: “AIA condemns executive order mandating design preference for federal architecture.” Its subtitle struck a more optimistic tone: “AIA to work with President-Elect Biden to reverse the executive order.”[10]
Among other things, Trump’s executive order stated that the design of federal buildings “should uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States, and command respect from the general public.” More specifically, it asserted that classical architectural methods, “as practiced both historically and by today’s architects, have proven their ability to meet these design criteria.” Particular care must be taken, repeated its author (who was most certainly not the president himself), “to ensure that all Federal building designs command [the] respect of the general public for their beauty and visual embodiment of America’s ideals.”
To the word respect the author might have added (but did not) the word trust. Between 1958 and 2019 public trust in the federal government fell steadily from 73% to 17%.[11] The significance of this shift cannot be overstated; it is tied, after all, to a broader fear that democracy itself is under threat. All agree that the fear is legitimate, even if the allocation of blame is disputed. But the contribution (or legitimate response) of architecture is debatable, as is the responsibility of the architectural profession toward a public that is not guaranteed to share its assessments of contemporary design. Can architecture aspire not only to command respect but also to earn the trust of the general public? And is an architecture designed to accomplish the one also likely to achieve the other? Can architects succeed where politicians have so patently failed?
Earlier generations were not always ambivalent on this count. Design directives prepared for the US Department of the Interior under President Clinton started from the premise that adopting design guidelines for the White House (at least) would, precisely, “serve to protect the public trust.”[12] Not only the architecture itself, but even the open spaces around the architecture were to “reinforce a sense of dignity and power.”[13] More precisely, the guidelines appealed to “the classical concept of decorum in public architecture.” For unfamiliar readers, they spelled out the word’s significance:
Rediscovered by Italian Renaissance designers, this ancient concept refers to the selection of building styles and sites that evoke an appropriate public message of power and respect …
The ability to illustrate the power of the executive in a republic has always been and continues to be the single most difficult challenge for designers. The attributes of the imagery that conveys this authority are subtle yet undeniably present, and they are immediately discernible to all who visit the site. The White House continues to serve as a symbol of power and authority largely as a result of designers over 200 years understanding the importance of these design principles and applying them with genius. As a result of their efforts, the White House and President’s Park today are international symbols of democratic power and participation in the government of a great republic.
The White House and President’s Park are first and foremost a public trust.[14]
Not every architect would articulate, today, a commitment to the design pursuit of “an appropriate public message of power and respect”—or, for that matter, “power and authority.” Even the predictably patriotic language of “a great republic” has faded from use within most architectural circles. Inasmuch as the vocabulary of the classical is associated with such words, it is likely to provoke unease.
And yet, to many readers, the connections between architecture and America’s national aspirations may seem self-evident. Even Architectural Record magazine, in an editorial deeply critical of President Trump’s executive order, described the Capitol as “the single most potent symbol of America’s republic,” an “essential emblem of democracy.”[15] Classical buildings more generally—including, especially, both the White House and the US Capitol—routinely top published lists of the nation’s most highly respected buildings. The AIA’s own survey of “America’s Favorite Architecture,” conducted in 2007 and not repeated, placed six of the nation’s top ten best-loved buildings in Washington, DC. Most were classical, or more precisely, neoclassical. Perhaps predictably, the survey prompted criticism from architects—who argued, for one, that it focused too narrowly on external image, and on style.[16]
But popular opinion cares little about the AIA’s scruples or the historian’s distinctions between classical, neoclassical, and new classical.[17] Irrespective of its status relative to the movements of architectural modernity, the classical language of Washington, DC is held to fit the bill for the symbolic architecture of democracy.[18] Its defenders point to the rhetorical openness and symmetry of its porticos, the stability and balance of its constituent parts, the clarity and rationality of its masonry tectonic, the basic familiarity of its vocabulary, its translation of universal human experience into formal geometries, its popular association with legitimate authority, its willingness to reinforce its symbolic message through the use of ornament, and its capacity to calibrate its communicative ambitions between the poles of austerity and celebration. Classical architecture, they insist, communicates an appropriate governing tone, and its roots sink deep into the popular imagination across boundaries of political persuasion; as such, it has the capacity to bring the country together.[19] But above all, they point to its explicit participation within a longer cultural tradition.
Trump’s predecessor, President Barack Obama, had himself been seen to endorse that message when, during a state visit to Greece in 2016, on the final overseas trip of his presidency, he paused before the film cameras on the Athenian Acropolis to give a brief architectural-historical lecture to his country:
We’ve got the Parthenon behind us, part of the Acropolis. It is here in Athens that so many of our ideas about democracy, our notions of citizenship, our notions of rule of law, began to develop. And so when you visit a site like this … you’re also sending a signal of the continuity that exists between what happened here, the speeches of Pericles, and what happened with our Founding Fathers.
And it’s a very important role for the President of the United States to send a signal to the world that their culture, their traditions, their heritage, their monuments, are something of value, and are precious, and that we have learned from them. Because what that does then is send a strong signal around the world that we view ourselves as part of a broader humanity and a community of nations that can work together to solve problems.[20]
But in recent years others have questioned classical architecture’s deliberate participation within that longer cultural tradition, just as they have questioned Athenian notions of democracy and citizenship. And when it comes to the classical architecture of America’s own capital city, the popular visual imagination of the last four years has had to deal with an extraordinary barrage of conflicting images. Only some of them send a signal that America has learned lasting lessons of citizenship, of the rule of law, of political continuity. Only some of them might be deemed to command the respect of the general public for their beauty and visual embodiment of America’s ideals.
January 6, 2021
In the days after the signing of Trump’s December 18, 2020 order Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture, America’s architects voiced their protest. But on January 6, 2021, it was a different crowd that marched upon the US Capitol—its Corinthian columns forming an orderly background to the violence of the mob. The building served, in effect, as the backdrop to a dramatic performance, complete with lighting and effects and costumes. The scenery had been carefully chosen—such that it would not be entirely disingenuous to say that the tableau was designed: designed for effect, for representation and circulation within a highly image-conscious media culture. Whether hostile or sympathetic, those documenting the event invariably took care to include the classical architecture in the background. It made for striking images.
Rioters could be seen, for example, scaling the rustication—a distinctively classical motif that not only provides human scale but also reinforces the tectonic solidity of the wall by adding shadow lines to an otherwise sheer vertical surface, making its scale legible and literally making its scaling possible. Photographs documented Trump’s supporters struggling to find a foothold on the pilaster capitals, pulling themselves up by the profile moldings, shuffling along the edges of the cornice, abandoning decorum to press their bodies spreadeagle against the rusticated wall. Here, framing a less than flattering portrait, the rustication provided the vertical module for a reversal of the image of Vitruvian man—or, perhaps, its Renaissance representation by Leonardo. Man, the measure of all things.
The hours immediately following merely added to the visual contradictions, generating unfamiliar sights. The US Capitol’s rhetorically open porticos, and their soaring columns of solid stone, were soon closed off by visually transparent but non-scalable steel fencing topped with razor wire.[21] The classical was foreclosed by the modern, the white colonnade by the black wall. Soldiers in military fatigues were billeted in the Capitol during ensuing impeachment procedures, their recumbent bodies disposed like a low-level figural frieze around the perimeter of the Rotunda. Draped across the sandstone floors in orderly disarray, the unifying camouflage of their combat uniforms blended with the variegated patterns of the stonework, yet seemed strangely out of place in a space more frequently associated with the civil liberties of civilian dress. As they slept, these representatives of the National Guard were guarded by upright representations, in bronze, of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Martin Luther King, Jr. Above them hung an 1843 painting by Robert Weir, depicting the Pilgrims praying for divine protection, their pastor raising his eyes up into the dome of the Capitol Rotunda, the words “God with us” inscribed onto the sail of their ship Speedwell. At the pilgrims’ feet lay musket, helmet, and armour.
On January 6, also in disarray, albeit not entirely un-ordered, the mob of Trump’s supporters had occupied the same space, their red caps and motley flags set against the flags and caps of the paintings on the walls behind them. In the typologically precise words of Senator Amy Klobuchar, the rioters “desecrated this temple of our democracy,” processing unceremoniously around the Rotunda and pausing from time to time to document their actions on social media. Their attitudes were curiously self-conscious; as the critic Justin Davison wrote soon after, “Having broken in, all those self-appointed patriots dressed like Visigoths went milling around the halls of power looking variously sheepish, awed, goofy, and murderous. Filing obediently between velvet ropes, they explored the Rotunda and Statuary Hall, places where, at another time and in another way, they would have had every right to be.”[22]
Had they raised their eyes above the figures of their fellow rioters, and past the figures in the paintings, they would have seen another set of bodies circulating around the Rotunda in the space of the figural frieze above, looking down on them in silent witness: Constantino Brumidi’s “Frieze of American History,” designed in 1859, begun in 1878, completed in 1953, and “representing in light and shadow events in our history arranged in chronological order.”[23]
As a calendar of sorts, that frieze is hardly representative; yet it may nonetheless reward closer study, if primarily by way of a warning built into the fabric of the architecture. Something similar might be said for Brumidi’s painting in the dome itself, high above, entitled “The Apotheosis of Washington”—after the Greek ἀποθέωσις, “deification,” or “elevation to the status of a god.” America’s president is here deified before our very eyes.
January 20, 2021
On January 20, 2021, America’s 46th president was sworn into office “in the shadow of the Capitol dome,” as he put it in his inauguration speech.[24] Despite security concerns and pandemic constraints, he had deemed it symbolically essential—now more than ever—for the inauguration to take place, as usual, in front of the Capitol. In this he was not only honouring the original intent of a building specifically designed to offer a suitable public context for presidential inauguration ceremonies;[25] he was also endorsing the fifteenth-century humanist doctrine of Alberti, who held that sound classical urban form, particularly if designed with an eye to the drama of public performance, can represent and facilitate—although it will not necessarily create—a civil society.[26]
Given the conditions of the pandemic, the members of the public who would typically represent America’s civil society at an inauguration were largely absent. They had been replaced by an array of 200,000 American flags, dutifully aligned across the public space of the Mall. But the event drew one of the largest TV audiences in history, next in rankings to the audience for the inauguration of America’s first Black president twelve years prior.
Witnesses to the celebratory speeches might have detected a more vocal commitment than usual to the notion that DC’s classical architecture served as an enduring symbol of democracy. Moments before Joseph Biden’s speech, Senator Klobuchar had interspersed her welcoming remarks with more pointed references to the significance of the Capitol. In her account, its architecture played a central role in placing the event into the longer context of two hundred and forty-four years of an imperfect American democracy. Looking back to the 1861 inauguration of President Abraham Lincoln, which took place in front of the original temple portico of the Capitol’s east front, she noted: “This conveyance of sacred trust between our leaders and our people takes place in front of this shining Capitol dome for a reason.” The sacred trust of which she spoke evidently found its legitimate symbolic home in what she described as “this temple of our democracy.” Ending with a flourish, she added: “Today on these Capitol steps and before this glorious field of flags, we rededicate ourselves to its cause.”[27]
On that cold but clear inauguration morning, the bright white dome of the Capitol was indeed shining in all the fullness of its nineteenth-century-cast-iron glory, above a building decked out in the pomp and circumstance of the occasion, with highlights of red and blue. Gigantic flags hung between the paired Corinthian columns of the Capitol’s west front, as if the portico had been invented for that purpose. Carefully selected citizens in smart dark suits and colourful overcoats were seated in orderly rows, present in person to bear witness to the proceedings. In the background, security personnel stood at watch. Both the apparatus of the inauguration and its dutiful documentation by the media played the architecture to full advantage. Classical architecture, approached on axis, was here the self-conscious backdrop to the free exercise of American democracy, witnessed by a watching world.
Just a few minutes later, in his closing prayer, the Reverend Silvester Beaman, pastor of Bethel AME Church in Wilmington, Delaware, qualified the assessment of that shining dome with a more circumspect reminder, appealing to “these hallowed grounds, where slaves labored to build this shrine and citadel to liberty and democracy.” As he spoke, the camera of America’s attention panned back across the Capitol’s classical architecture.[28]
But the same day saw the release of a new architectural logo for the White House—designed to be “forward-looking while having its roots in something very traditional.”[29] Its designers explained that it symbolized the new president’s “desire to bring the country together”—and that it came complete with classical letterforms intended to communicate “a governing tone.”[30]
It is not clear that this gesture was the product of extensive architectural-historical introspection, or that it should be invested with too much deliberate meaning. That said—as artefacts that suggest a more nuanced range of attitudes to architectural history, classical letterforms are not uninteresting. Each Trajanic capital—ultimately derived, like all such letterforms, from the architectural inscription cut into the stone at the base of Trajan’s Column in Rome—is effectively a small piece of classical architecture drawn into the present and reappropriated for new use. That monument’s original inscription “to the Emperor Caesar, son of the deified Nerva” (imp caesari divi nervae f etc.), was hardly a record of public-spirited democratic process; and yet subsequent adoptions of those same letterforms have turned their power to very different ends. The same forms can communicate radically different meanings. But two thousand years later, they still preserve something of their original elegance and weightiness, sometimes in harmony with and sometimes at odds with their new use, sometimes preserving their original three-dimensional materiality and sometimes thinned out into insubstantial vectors of digital form, sometimes adopted with intelligence and sometimes victims of misappropriation. Although the effectiveness of their use is uneven, federal agencies impose typographic standards upon their publications for good reason. Even the carefully serifed letters TRUMP on a building façade communicate greater gravitas than the cheap and rapidly aging curtain wall construction that typically stands behind them.[31]
February 24, 2021
Four weeks after his inauguration, on February 24, 2021, President Biden revoked Trump’s December 18, 2020 Executive Order 13967 (Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture). It was a day filled with signatures, revocations, and new executive orders. The legitimacy of his action was reinforced by the deployment of the full gravitas of the presidential office. Classical architecture’s communicative power transferred peacefully from Trump to Biden. That afternoon, White House press photographs dutifully documented the performance of Biden’s presidential duties at a desk placed carefully against the backdrop of the base mouldings of the State Dining Room’s Corinthian pilaster order, behind a presidential seal rendered authoritative by the classical lettering that circulated around its perimeter.