“For more than a century and a half, America’s Federal architecture produced beautiful and beloved buildings,” reads a draft executive orderby the Trump administration obtained by Fast Company called “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.” The proposed order, first obtained by Architectural Record, would mandate a classical or traditional style for new or renovated federal buildings.
Then things turned ugly. That’s at least according to this document. It claims that after the Ad Hoc Committee on Federal Office Space issued its “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture” in 1962, classical architecture was replaced with increasing speed by midcentury modernist design, ranging from the “undistinguished to designs the public widely considered uninspiring . . . and even just plain ugly.” According to the draft order, the General Services Administration established the Design Excellence program in 1994 to better adhere to those original 1962 Guiding Principles—after recognizing “the aesthetic failures, including ugliness, of the designs it was commissioning.” Ouch.It goes on to cite buildings that have “little aesthetic appeal,” saying that the government has effectively stopped constructing “beautiful buildings that the American people want to look at or work in.” (One such building it calls “universally cherished”? The Eisenhower Executive Office Building built in 1888, which American author and satirist Mark Twain called “the ugliest building in America.”) While the draft order talks a lot about aesthetics and “national values,” what it doesn’t mention is how those spaces are actual workplaces that federal employees have to use every day and the public has to visit. So would buildings constructed under new guidelines be places where the American people actually want to go? The short answer is probably not.
It goes on to cite buildings that have “little aesthetic appeal,” saying that the government has effectively stopped constructing “beautiful buildings that the American people want to look at or work in.” (One such building it calls “universally cherished”? The Eisenhower Executive Office Building built in 1888, which American author and satirist Mark Twain called “the ugliest building in America.”) While the draft order talks a lot about aesthetics and “national values,” what it doesn’t mention is how those spaces are actual workplaces that federal employees have to use every day and the public has to visit. So would buildings constructed under new guidelines be places where the American people actually want to go? The short answer is probably not.
The draft order defines “classical architectural style” as a derivative of the “forms and principles of classical Greek and Roman architecture” but also cites Renaissance, Enlightenment, and even 19th- and 20th-century architects who have used classical design motifs. (Think back to your art history days: columns, cornices, colonnades, porticos, and friezes of antiquity-era temples should come to mind.) Because the style has been used and reused so much over the millennia, it can be tough to pin down. In addition to classical architecture, it favors traditional, “humanistic” styles, such as Gothic, Romanesque, and Spanish colonial (like Mar-a-Lago).
Classical design is fundamentally different from what we see in contemporary work spaces. A classical building does have some pros, according to Sarah M. Whiting, the dean and Josep Lluís Sert professor of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. A classical building might have an “elegance for entryways” that she says serves it well for public spaces and have grand open spaces (like atria) that work well as communal, shared spaces. But from there, adherence to a classical, symmetrical style poses some problems for modern workers and visitors alike.