On November 22, 2025, as a part of the Venice Biennale, National Civic Art Society president Justin Shubow joined Edwin Heathcote and Kate Wagner and for a revealing public discussion on American federal architecture. Heathcote is the architecture critic for the Financial Times, while Wagner is architecture critic for The Nation and the author of the McMansion Hell blog. The Biennale's curator Carlo Ratti moderated the conversation, which grappled with the classical roots of American civic design, the meaning of architectural symbolism in public life, and whether beauty matters.
You can find the video HERE and transcript HERE.
At one point, Shubow said, "Edwin, I think you recently wrote about how at certain architecture schools, it's considered bourgeois to even design a building. I don't know if the public understands just what is going on in architecture schools. People are not learning how to design beautiful buildings. Is beauty even considered something important at all? I don't know. I think there's a huge problem here, and there are only a few schools, at least in America, that are actually teaching the sorts of architecture that makes the world a more beautiful place."
Heathcote responded, "So beauty is not part of the discourse in architecture, in literature, in art. I think probably in any cultural sphere now, beauty is not really talked about, because it's problematic. Whose beauty, I think, is the problem. So it's not just architecture, it's contemporary culture. Now you may say that's, I actually think it's probably quite a good thing we don't dwell too much on beauty in the same way that if you talk too much about beautiful people, then ugly people begin to get offended. I think it's very problematic as an idea, but I'm open to be persuaded."
What made the exchange so revealing was that all participants acknowledged an admiration for classical forms. The real point of contention emerged over the political anxieties and cultural signaling that buildings have come to carry rather than their aesthetic merits.
Interestingly, all of the panelists endorsed Art Deco, which Shubow said was the last of the classical styles. Heathcote and Wagner insisted it was modernist. Shubow responded, "The modernists [of the period] absolutely hated Art Deco. They called it the jazz style. They thought it was bourgeois. . . . It was completely ignored from their histories of what they called modern architecture. So maybe Art Deco, like a neo-Art Deco, is something that we can all get behind."
Watch the video HERE.