Classical Gas

Donald Trump just did the unthinkable.  He actually came up with a policy proposal that I actually agree with!

Trump has made clear his disdain for modern architecture, particularly the design of public buildings.   Now, in his 2024 presidential re-election campaign, he wants to propose - and the Republicans have endorsed - a rule that federal buildings constructed in Washington, D.C. be designed in the classical Greco-Roman vernacular.  In other words, they want them to be designed to look good.  

Trump's critics are already blasting the proposal.  They believe that Trump's obsession with classical architecture, with its ornament and its emphasis on columns and pediments, embraces a rabidly megalomaniacal and fascistic attempt to ut his imprint on society much as Hitler and Mussolini tried to do.

Classical architecture is rabidly megalomaniacal?  Like this?

Or this?

Or how about this?

And what about this?

Incidentally, although the Supreme Court building looks like it's stood since time immemorial, or at least since 1800, when Washington, D.C. became the U.S. capital, it was actually built in the early 1930s and completed in 1935.  Architecture critics have chastened Trump in the past for wanting public buildings to be designed in the classical style because they believe that the architecture of buildings should reflect the design of their times.  Are they saying that the Supreme Court building should have looked like an Art Deco structure?

It's actually sort of amusing to see people defend modern architecture when so much of it is really, really bad, and many of our public buildings look cheap and inferior as a result. Our schools look like warehouses and our post offices look like fertilizer plants - big, ugly brick boxes.  (And don't even get me started about federal courthouses.)  But hey, Modernism and its immediate cousin, the International Style, were the architectural forms that stood up to Hitler and his sycophant, court architect Albert Speer.  So how come we've built so many modern buildings that look like the Germans won the Second World War and now were here imposing National Socialist taste on our buildings?

A prime example of this is Washington's own John F. Kennedy Center For the Performing Arts, designed by architect Edward Durrell Stone.  Architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable said she could not look at the Kennedy Center without thinking of Albert Speer's designs for the Third Reich, and Paul Fussell found its 600-foot-long lobby to resemble that of Hitler's Chancellery in Berlin.  It doesn't look like anything classical.  It looks like a Whitman's Sampler box.

And it's cut off from the rest Washington, sitting in isolation on the Potomac, away from everything else.  And it's not so much a performing arts venue as it is an overblown theater hosting traveling musical production and middlebrow pop entertainments.  In other words, the very sort of entertainments President Kennedy himself fancied.  It was Jackie - his wife - who was into symphonies and recitals.    

Oh, and the equally pretentious Kennedy Center Honors? Not only have they gone to performers like Led Zeppelin (a great band but hardly highbrow art), they've also gone to rappers like LL Cool J.  So much for the building's grandiloquence.

So, why would people be worried about Trump embracing the aesthetics of authoritarian architecture when we already suffer under its worst excesses?

And don't even get me started on the Center for Character & Leadership Development building at the United States Air Force Academy out in Colorado Springs, which Ray Mark Rinaldi of the Denver Post actually described as a building that "rises with precision and purity, with shrewd sensitivity to its circumstances and with an abundant belief in the power of design to inspire great action."

You're kidding, right, Ray?   

It's clownishly meant to represent the tail wing of a jet, but it also rises up like a phallic symbol; it wasn't so much built as it was erected.  If Albert Speer had worked with glass like I.M. Pei did (this was designed by Roger Duffy), this is what Speer would have come up with. 

Trump may embrace classical architecture for megalomaniacal reasons, fancying himself a latter-day Nero, but most of Washington, D.C.'s buildings were designed in the classical or neoclassical style to symbolize democracy.  They drew inspiration from the ancient Greeks, who invented democracy, as well as the the early Romans in the era before Caesar, who fine-tuned Greek democracy and produced the world's first lowercase-r republican government.  Many of the classically inspired government buildings throughout the country were built in the late nineteenth century as a result of President Ulysses S. Grant's involvement; Grant, having saved the Union as the commanding general of the Union army in the Civil War, had courthouses and federal office buildings built and designed with classical flourishes to make Americans feel close to the government - their government, the people's government.  Early twentieth-century structures in Washington like the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, and the U.S. Supreme Court building were designed with that ethos in mind.  

If Trump wants to have classically designed federal buildings constructed to assert his authority in a second presidential administration, then the joke's on him.

But classical architecture has a new stigma.  The people who created it and the people who endorse it are, we are told, inflexible white men who use columns, pediments, marble and all of those groovy things to build monuments to their patriarchal superiority in the interest of suppressing the influences of women and people of color.  Perhaps that's why David Adjaye, J. Max Bond, and Phil Freelon designed the National Museum of African American History and Culture building to look the way it does - as a stark contrast to the ivory towers around it.

I'm sorry, I'm sure the museum itself is a wonderful experience from an educational and entertainment standpoint, like all museums should be, but yes, I still think it - the damn building looks like a stack of rusty lasagna pans piled on top of one another.

It's ridiculous to suggest that any innovation generated by white men is inherently sinister, although once in awhile women and people of color are right about that  - after all, we gave the world Emerson, Lake and Palmer.  But they're not right about classical architecture or classical music or classical anything.

So yes, I agree with Trump on classical architecture.  But I have just one problem.  The problem is, he's got a lot of damn gall to complain about ugly buildings when he's responsible for the ugliest building in New York.

Which replaced one of the most beautiful buildings in New York - the Bonwit Teller department store, which Trump destroyed without even saving its friezes.

Nice Art Deco look . . . it would have made a great design for the Supreme Court building. 😉