Justin Shubow being interviewed on the Meriweather Academy Podcast by host Warren Steury
On Wednesday, September 23, NCAS President Justin Shubow will speak at Belmont Mansion in Nashville, in an evening hosted by the Meriwether Academy on beauty, architecture, and American civic identity. The Academy is focused on character formation, adventure, and brotherhood with a five-year plan to open a boys' school in Tennessee. Reserve your seat HERE.
In advance of the visit, Justin joined Meriwether founder Warren Steury for an hour-long podcast conversation, which you can watch HERE.
Justin opens with his own unlikely path—a philosophy Ph.D. student who read Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House, wondered why the world had grown uglier after 1945, and found himself, a few months after joining the NCAS board as a volunteer, leading the national fight against the proposed Eisenhower Memorial. He is candid that he never attended architecture school, and cheerfully counts it an advantage: he was never taught that modernism is the one permissible way to build.
The conversation ranges widely. Architecture, he argues, is the most political of the arts precisely because it is inescapable—you cannot decline to walk past a building the way you can decline to read a novel. Beauty is not a matter of vanilla versus chocolate; harmony, proportion, and human scale draw broad agreement across cultures. Jefferson's Virginia State Capitol set a classical tradition that governed American public building for a century and a half. And the 1962 Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture handed design authority from the government to the architectural profession, cementing modernism's reign until President Trump's executive order reversed the language and put the American people back in charge.
Justin points to results: the forthcoming U.S. Courthouse in Chattanooga, a majestic Greco-Deco design that drew a million views when he shared it on X; the classical references that survived into Amtrak's winning Penn Station scheme after a decade of NCAS advocacy; and his new role chairing the U.S. Department of Transportation's Beautifying Transportation Infrastructure Council, which is drafting design principles for the bridges, stations, and roads we all live with.