Here We Go Again
Trump Signs Executive Order Promoting ‘Beautiful’ Architecture
Screenshot from Whitehouse.gov
Donald J. Trump, in his first day in office as the 47th President of the United States, signed close to fifty executive orders, one requiring “that Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces.”
If this feels like déjà vu, that's because “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” the presidential action Trump signed yesterday, has the same name as the executive order he put in place in December 2020, when Trump had just one month left in his term as the 45th US president. The earlier order, which likewise defined that “classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings,” lasted barely two months, as Joe Biden, who defeated Trump in the 2020 election, promptly revoked it and other orders when he took over as president. The full text of the new action — short compared to the December 2020 order — is at bottom.
Although Trump signed the first executive order late in his first term, he had been working on it for at least a year, based on a leak of the executive order in February 2020 and the subsequent reworking of contract language by the General Services Administration (GSA), which oversees the construction and preservation of Federal buildings. A target of the order was undoing the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture that were established in 1962 and have long been attributed to the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who believed style should not be dictated by the government. Courthouses, ports of entry, and other federal buildings carried out by the GSA in the ensuing decades have been designed predominantly in modern rather than traditional styles.
Trump's 2020 executive order was believed to have been shaped by Justin Shubow, the president of the National Civic Art Society, which promotes classical architecture over modern architecture, and the first of Trump's appointments to the US Commission of Fine Arts, the body that approves architecture and design in Washington, DC. Members of the Commission serve four-year terms, such that Shubow, as chair, was replaced by Billie Tsien — an architect who clearly embraces modern architecture — in June 2021, when Biden appointed her and three others. This means Tsien's appointment will end in five months, after which the possibility is likely, given Trump's preference for being surrounded by allies, that Shubow will chair the Commission once again. But sooner than knowing that, we will know within the next two months, per the language Trump's presidential action yesterday, what legal language this policy will have on the role of architecture during his second term as president — and what legal challenges, by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) and others, will have to address.
MEMORANDUM FOR THE ADMINISTRATOR OF THE GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION
SUBJECT: Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture
I hereby direct the Administrator of the General Services Administration, in consultation with the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and the heads of departments and agencies of the United States where necessary, to submit to me within 60 days recommendations to advance the policy that Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government. Such recommendations shall consider appropriate revisions to the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture and procedures for incorporating community input into Federal building design selections.
If, before such recommendations are submitted, the Administrator of the General Services Administration proposes to approve a design for a new Federal public building that diverges from the policy set forth in this memorandum, the Administrator shall notify me, through the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, not less than 30 days before the General Services Administration could reject such design without incurring substantial expenditures. Such notification shall set forth the reasons the Administrator proposes to approve such design.
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