Truth is beauty, beauty is truth
Trump has given an order that federal buildings from now on have to be beautiful.
But then…beautiful according to whom? Trump? But…
Donald Trump decreed on Monday that all new US federal buildings should be “beautiful”, in a long-expected executive order which excoriated architectural modernism but stopped short of demanding that all such projects should be in the classical style.
So he’ll allow for some in the modern vulgarian goldy goldy goldy style?
When a draft of the order first surfaced, in February, critics reacted with horror to its promise to “make federal buildings beautiful again” by mandating a return to “the classical architectural style”.
So there’s no beauty in this?
Ten months later, and with the end of Trump’s time in office looming, the finished order arrived.
Its text extols examples of classical US public architecture including “the Second Bank of the United States in Philadelphia, the Pioneer Courthouse in Portland, Oregon, and the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse in New York City”.
“In Washington DC,” it adds, “classical buildings such as the White House, the Capitol building, the supreme court, the Department of the Treasury and the Lincoln Memorial have become iconic symbols of our system of government.”
Therefore, be it hereby decreed, all new buildings have to look like a blend of those five structures. (The Lincoln Memorial is not a building. It’s big like a building but it’s open to the elements. It’s a structure.)
Given his career in real estate developments marked by a love for gold, gilt, black marble and baroque excess, not to mention the brutal treatment of beloved old buildings, Trump’s professed love for classicism has attracted critical comment.
Dude wants to control everything, in perpetuity. He can’t.
Oh Look: it’s the “box with added pillars” style!
Trump, who replaced this with this.
I once read something written by a British writer which said that the only public cause Prince Charles hadn’t been horrible at was architecture. If we overlooked what he had to say about homeopathy, we’d find that he’d been rather sensible about what was going wrong with the way the buildings were looking.
Maybe Trump is hoping to be mistaken for royalty.
I have nothing against classical style, and love many of the older courthouse buildings, but to decree that all the buildings must look like that? To set time in stone, with nothing changing? And, like you said, do I think everyone else should live by my version of what’s beautiful? In that case, all buildings would be built to look like wetlands, forests, and prairies. Maybe an ocean or two. Dolphins (yes, love them). Devil rays. Milkweed in fruit, with the open pods spilling out the fuzzy seeds inside. (Hey, not such a bad idea.)
If Trump was on the way in instead of out, now would be the time to invest in gold stocks. Gold-plated everything; tastefully done, of course.
Someone suggested that Tr*mp decorate his apartment in the style of Gaudí, but he misheard.
Sastra, that British writer wmust have read Charlie-boy’s words on architecture through some very rose-tinted glasses. Charles loathes what the modern architects have made of London, famously dismissing several new buildings as ‘carbuncles’.
I have a copy of his 1989 book, A Vision of Britain, somewhere in the loft, although the title is a bit of a misnomer as the book is rather London-centric. It contains several artists impressions (mainly) of London’s historic areas, each with a transparent overlay of how the areas looked after modernisation to demonstrate how the new buildings have either hidden or replaced – but in his view ‘ruined’ – all that he loved about the capital. In that sense, he was squarely aligned with Trump.
Graham Douglas – ha!
I once thought, when I read more science fiction than I do now, that a truly great, advanced culture (I’m more reluctant to use “civilization” than I used to be) would be almost invisible, because it was so fully integrated and harmonized with the environment from which it sprang. It would have a minimal environmental footprint and be symbiotic and mutualistic rather than extractive and expoiltative. Such a society would recognize the moral worth (and not just the economic utility) of the other beings with which it shared its planet, realizing that they too are travelling their own, unique evolutionary pathway and that those journeys are also worthy of respect and reverence. Seems to me that the world was once filled with such advanced cultures, but we have driven most of them to extinction since the development of agriculture…
…not Bruce: That was rather lovely!
One of my favorite little amusements is THIS SITE. https://mcmansionhell.com/
Given the holiday season, todays featured house is especially special! :)
I love some modernism in certain settings. My dream house would be to pay for a Medium to bring back from the dead Pierre Koenig so he could design for me a “Case Study House” but in Northern California.
One does have to admit that the ideological nonsense that the architectural profession is prone to has led to some horrible, horrible buildings. Almost uniquely horrible in Western history. Living in the SF Bay Area, I still am amazed that someone hired Thom Mayne to design the Federal Building in San Francisco. It literally looks like something The Borg would build. Or maybe Te Leviathan, God of the Labyrinth, from Hellraiser 2. The tower looks like it is about to shoot out a laser beam and incinerate anyone nearby. And the winds….the damn thing creates a horrific wind tunnel. Even pre-Covid, nobody ever used the bleak, windswept plaza, even with hundreds of workers in the building. By working in a long established language, one can avoid the worst offenses caused by vulgarians like Trump. Architecture is not a purely creative “art”. It is also a social act. Despite the bleatings of its high priests.
When Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin visited the UK in 1956 Anthony Eden didn’t agree with Khrushchev about most things, but they found common ground in their opinions of modern art , which they both thought was awful.