The National Civic Art Society hails President Donald Trump for issuing his new Executive Order “Making Federal Architecture Great Again” today. The EO states that there must be a preference for classical and traditional architecture (both broadly defined) when the government is choosing designs for federal buildings and U.S. courthouses. The EO is strongest regarding Washington, D.C., requiring that new federal buildings there be classical.
The Order also amends the 1962 Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, which de facto made Modernism official. As of 2020, under the current design program at GSA, which began in 1994, and which treats the Guiding Principles as holy writ, no more than 10% of the buildings constructed have been classical or traditional.
NCAS president Justin Shubow said:
“President Trump is to be commended for requiring that new federal buildings be noble, beautiful, and admired by the general public. As the Executive Order recognizes, and as our organization has long been advocating, classical public architecture architecture is time-honored, timeless, and the mode most associated with our national values and form of government. It is quite simply the architecture of American democracy.”
Shubow continued, “Revising the 1962 Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture is a monumental development. Those principles, issued in a mere White House report on government office space, replaced official classicism (which began with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson) with de facto official modernism, and abdicated authority from the government to the (modernist) architectural establishment. According to those Principles, ‘Design must flow from the architectural profession to the Government, and not vice versa.’ The new Executive Order reverses this, placing the government—and ultimately the American people—in charge.”