Classical-Style Architecture Makes a Comeback

A new Trump order dilutes the role of private-sector architects, critics, and academics in the committee overseeing government building aesthetics.

A rchitecture is in the news. I’m in Houston to write about the Museum of Fine Arts’ new building, designed by Steven Holl, which opened a few weeks ago. I’ll also write about the newly renovated Rothko Chapel, which is a gem — and in Houston, too. Before I do these stories, though, I want to look at architecture news that broke a few days before Christmas.

It seems the Mall in Washington might get two new museums in brand-new buildings. And Zeus sent a thunderbolt from Mount Olympus: The classical style, dating from the time of the Greek temple, is now mandated for a swath of new federal government buildings.

The gods of Greece and Rome are smiling.

On December 21, President Trump signed an executive order requiring the classical style for all new federal buildings costing more than $50 million, all federal courthouses, and all federal buildings in Washington, excluding Smithsonian museums. Robert Ivey, the head of the American Institute of Architects, said he’s “appalled.” Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic at the New York Times, said that simply considering a mandate was “demeaning.” Reinhold Martin, an architecture professor at Columbia, said “this is an effort to use culture to send coded messages of white supremacy.” When did Columbia start hiring lunatics? NPR said it “set the architecture world reeling.”

Why are some people reeling all the time? If an asteroid hit Albany, I’d reel, I suppose. It’s 50 miles from my house. The Blitz? Yes, definitely a time for figurative and literal reeling. The Trump order? I have a more measured view. I started by reading the executive order, which I’d recommend. It’s a beacon light of clarity and reason in what I suspect is the cesspool of government gobbledygook.

The order posits that the classical style — seen in buildings based on Greek and Roman design and its Georgian Revival successors — is a familiar, broadly appealing style the public is likely to find beautiful. It stimulates civic pride. It’s considered timeless. The order cites two new buildings — federal courthouses in Tuscaloosa and Corpus Christi — as among the very few expressing the look and feel of the architecture of the Founders.

Since the legal system and the federal government descend from the Founding Fathers and Greek democracy, it makes sense to match aesthetics with ancestry. The order also permits vernacular style, which, in the West, Southwest, and Midwest, could be Arts and Crafts or adobe-style or Mission Revival from California to Texas.

The order targets and forbids the Brutalist style — massive, blocky, rigid, and mostly concrete — and what it calls “deconstructionist” architecture (not a defined style, but buildings with fragmented or geometrically skewed lines or buildings that seem to be having a seizure).

Brutalism gets a tough rap. First, it’s from the ’60s and ’70s. No one uses it now. I love Yale’s School of Architecture, a Paul Rudolph building from 1962 faced with rusticated concrete and a scale small enough to seem human. Boston’s city hall? It’s a Kallmann/McKinnell hulk from the mid 1960s worshipped by specialists but much loathed by the public as forbidding, depressing, and cheap-looking.

Many American architects misused the essence of Brutalism, the French “Brut” style, which Corbusier invented. It’s brut, or raw, which means concrete or brick, angular shapes, monochrome, and no ornamentation. American cutting-edge architects poured too much concrete, creating mean-looking buildings. It’s an aesthetic, in their hands, that’s drab and very Iron Curtain.

New buildings the order sites as notably heinous are the federal buildings in Orlando, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City. Rather than the triumph of the concrete devil, these buildings have an overabundance of glass, steel, and arbitrary, fitful appurtenances. The courthouse in San Francisco, designed by Thom Mayne, is provocative, even aggressive. Workers there hate it for its looks and ticks, the ticks coming mostly from its sustainability features. The Orrin Hatch courthouse in Salt Lake City, designed by Thomas Phifer, is an addition to an old classical courthouse. It’s handsome, but dwarfs the old building. The Orlando courthouse is utilitarian. It’s in Orlando, where everything is new. Each of these buildings cost more than $50 million.

These looks strike many as cold. It’s not that people don’t understand them. They do. They see in them a hard, scientific, even industrial sensibility. They look like office buildings, even though they might very well function effectively as courtrooms and law libraries. High-end architects want to seem cutting edge, which classicism isn’t.

The Trump order is propelled by the National Civic Art Society, a Washington-based think tank and advocacy group. It promotes classical style in public buildings for its dignity, harmony, and legibility. Like the historic preservation movement, its roots are in the outrage that followed the demolition of Penn Station in 1963. Then, New York City allowed the destruction of a grand space drawing from the ancient Baths of Diocletian in Rome, replacing it with the tacky Madison Square Garden. The NCAS is involved in many causes but is best known for championing a new Penn Station based on the McKim, Mead, and White Beaux-Arts original. I’d love to see Penn Station recreated, marble block by marble block.

The 1960s urban-renewal movement, which I experienced in its most narcissistic and savage form in New Haven, let loose the federal bulldozer on good, traditional-style buildings by the thousands, replacing them usually with expensive junk. Seeing and using these new buildings were mirthless experiences. Nothing has stigmatized contemporary architecture more than the urban-renewal atrocity.

The new order is a case where both sides have good points. I’m a Burkean. I like tradition, but I don’t revere it for itself. Burke said, “There’s no such thing as a good new idea.” I tend to agree, but the new isn’t automatically the bad, and traditionalists are sometimes viewed as dangerous radicals these days. I enjoy variety.

“I don’t care what the public thinks” doesn’t work anymore, but that’s the vibe underlying the indignation of architects and critics over the Trump order. I always resist that line of thinking, which belongs to snobs. They’re public buildings paid for by taxpayers.

There’s an aesthetic, ideological tussle between a transparent, egalitarian look, which expresses aspects of the American justice system, and the heritage-rich, dignified classical style. It’s genuine, and that’s fair. Managing the tension between the two visions doesn’t mean strangling one of them, classicism, which is almost as old as history.

Often, it works well. Sometimes, it doesn’t. In my days as a museum director, I facilitated an addition to a Georgian Revival museum designed by Charles Platt. I insisted on a contemporary style, as long as it was deferential to the Platt building. A Georgian Revival addition would have looked phony. Everyone’s happy with the result. My museum isn’t a government building, though. Its work isn’t bound in fairness, law, or justice.

Overall, I think the order is a good thing — not entirely, but I’ll take the mostly obviously good with the speculatively bad. I don’t agree that the classical style of ancient Athens and Rome is the art of dead white country-club men. Our civic order and our culture derive from Athens as well as Jerusalem, leavened and mostly enhanced here and there by other inputs. Freedom and democracy are Greek in origin. Justice, relying on reason, evidence, and truth, draws more of its philosophical ballast from Greece than from, say, Teotihuacan, Timbuktu, or Ho Chi Min City.

The Greek temple style, as adapted by the Romans and those who followed, evokes all of these foundational concepts. It makes sense at the very least for us to build courthouses in that style. I’m fine with big government projects, the $50 million-and-above projects, having classical style. Not every building will look like the Parthenon. Over 2,500 years, classical style has had a million permutations. And it’s not just columns and capitals. It’s symmetry and proportion and durable building materials, as well as an encyclopedic range of design motifs. There’s a definitive, more-or-less grand entrance.

We’re in a decidedly anti-classicism phase now. Buildings designed by, say, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, and Peter Eisenman are formless, irregular, and disjointed. It’s not only the absence of columns. Classical architecture has a pleasing rhythm alternating between support and interval. It’s dignified, yes, but also poetic. It’s opaque, and there’s something to be said for opacity. We live in a tell-all time, a blabber mouth, confessional time. Classicism reveals its contents little by little. It doesn’t glare back us like a glass box.

The proponents of the new executive order might not want to read this. I think rote classicism, the kind taught in Paris schools in the 19th century and broadly called Beaux-Arts style here, is a spent look. My conception of classicism today goes far beyond that. I think Mies van der Rohe is a classicist. The Farnsworth House has almost all the ingredients of classical style. Robert Venturi exaggerates classical elements, but so did the Roman Mannerists. Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen, and even Philip Johnson are modernists working in the classical tradition. All of these figures project order, harmony, grace, and proportion in their work.

The Trump order does and doesn’t do many things. For projects under $50 million, the design gurus can run wild. Architecture schools currently don’t offer much for students who want to focus on the classical or vernacular style. They will now. The Trump order creates a new market, and I don’t see what’s wrong with giving students choices.

Critics of the Trump order say a classical style, relying as it does on marble, granite, and limestone, will drive building costs higher. Glass, steel, and brick are cheaper, and designers and engineers will resort to Styrofoam pilasters to cut expenses. This sounds like atrocity propaganda.

The order revises the design-review process by banning private-sector architects as well as architecture critics and academics. It’s now run by the Fine Arts Commission with a strong voice from design-review committee members drawn from the general public. There’s an escape hatch, too: “Extraordinary conditions” might excuse the managers of new federal building projects from the classical style mandate.

My newest idea is giving all recipients of the COVID vaccine, which I hope includes everyone, a pocket dictionary defining superlatives so we as a nation better understand what words such as “extraordinary,” “reeling,” “raging,” “catastrophe,” and “bottomless depths never seen before” really mean. “End of the world,” for instance means “The sun ain’t gonna shine anymore.” Hyperbole runs amok, especially in the keyboard taps of young, blinkered Ivy Leaguers. “Extraordinary conditions,” as a term, means “very rare.”

My mantra in deciphering most puzzlements is “follow the money.” Almost all the marquee architects in America and Europe work in styles privileging glass, steel, idiosyncratic juxtapositions of vertical against horizontal lines, vast, open interior spaces, and a spirit of detachment. Ornament is abhorred. Roofs are flat, local culture and nature are marginalized, and form follows function.

Classical and vernacular styles don’t embrace any of this, at least readily and harmoniously, so it doesn’t interest them. Signaling heritage and tradition, the old styles hog the architect’s limelight. It’s no longer all about the architect’s ego. The big projects are where the money is.

The big firms have, I imagine, comfy relationships with the Washington bureaucrats who commission pricy buildings. They have the lobbying clout. These firms will have to forgo work or offer the old styles. I think new, boutique architecture practices will develop specializing in the styles the Trump order facilitates. That’s competition. It won’t bust a cabal, if one exists, but it will undermine and complicate a cozy way of doing business producing a product people don’t like. I think that’s fine.

The General Services Administration oversees federal building projects. It has a process for design review and standards for design excellence. The Trump order dilutes the role of private-sector architects, critics, and academics in the design-review committee overseeing aesthetics. People tapped from the ranks of the great unwashed will have a decisive voice. That’s fine, too.

Give this a few years, and let’s see what happens. If the public is horrified, the government can repeal the order. I’ll add again that my conception of “classical” is very broad. Having spent time recently in the new Steven Holl building at the MFA in Houston, I’m prepared to argue that he works in a contemporary Classical style, a bit far from the reservation but still Classical. Phidias, I think, would agree.