Trump has signed executive order prohibiting new federal buildings from being built in Brutalist style
Posted Dec 21, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC
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Didn’t he spend the last four years trying to build a massive concrete wall right across the continent?!
Which architectural style was it going to be? Art Nouveau?? Baroque?!
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Maybe they'll now add some unnecessary columns every few feet (but only on the American side of the border, of course). It's now a traditional massive concrete wall. :D
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Neo-Facist
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Apropos nothing, but I've always been fascinated by fascist architectures. It's not really a coherent style, but a lot of similar elements come up. They seem to love eagle motifs.
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Modern Roman Empire vibes I feel.
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There is a great photo book series of Soviet era constructions. One dedicated entirely to bus stops. One subways,etc. it’s on amazon
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Ngl, I'd dig a rococo border wall.
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Beaux-Arts, clearly.
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I read the text until I read the words 'traditional architecture' too many times and I got bored because it started to read like it was using the sort of language of those Twitter accounts I've seen - which always shockingly turn out to be run by Alt-Right weirdos - who are obsessed with posting the most cherry-picked examples of architecture they can find. They then declare anything built before c.1900 as both the most beautiful buildings ever designed and examples of the peak of human civilization; and anything built after as degenerate, hideous, and examples of the moral decay of 'Modernism'.
Also, Brutalist Architecture started in the 1950s and isn't even really employed for new buildings built in the Current Year. I'd love to ask Trump (or his staff, who probably wrote this order; or really anyone believes this stuff), how is Brutalism not part of the 'tradition' of Western Architecture now? If not, when will it be lol?
Edit: fix wording.
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It's not a new thing for them at all. The Nazi movement had made a point of denouncing the Bauhaus, a school that played an important part in the development of brutalism. When they came into power they banned the Bauhaus and persecuted those affiliated with it. Also once in power they quickly adopted a "national architecture". Modern styles were denounced as communist while the Nazis touted an architecture that was "classical" and "beautiful". In most governments we would never hear of an official architect, yet Albert Speer's role in shaping the architecture of fascism was so appreciated that he was welcomed into the inner circles of Hitler's advisors and made a minister. Emphasizing a "national architecture" is very clearly a parallel to what fascists of the past cared about. It was a way to assert a homogenous traditional culture and just another method of establishing a mono-culture tied to tradition and nationalism. It's not like "classical" and "beautiful" buildings were banned before this, it's just that Brutalist buildings can be appealing and are also often cheaper, sturdier, and simpler to build. For a party that emphasizes cutting federal funding and constant austerity encouraging Brutalism would actually make the most sense. Instead this is a very clear signal to the same rhetoric that fascists and western chauvinists have been shouting about for a century. Why the obsession with architecture? Probably something to do with how public and visible it is. For the most part you don't have to see a painting unless you actually intend to, but a building is much harder to avoid. I'm not saying that Trump is the one making this connection, but someone who is influencing definitely is aware of the connection.
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Fascinating, thank you for sharing.
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Great comment and certainly dont want to make light of it, but perhaps he is worried that a distopian dictatorship dream he is desperately trying not to lose will look like those low budget b-movies that always seem to feature brutalist government building.
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It doesn’t make sense because it isn’t supposed to ever affect policy. It’s just an empty stunt to wage a stupid culture war.
One of the basic reasons why “brutalism” in a loose sense caught on (in its worst manifestations) is because it was cheap. Cheap styles will be more prevalent than expensive ones, straight up. Now, we have all sorts of garish pre-fab construction techniques that have displaced raw concrete blocks as the cheap architecture du jour. Public buildings are not at serious risk of returning to “brutalism” in any major sense, so this is dumb and pointless
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how is Brutalism not part of the 'tradition' of Western Architecture now? If not, when will it be lol?
If you go early enough, the same can be said of styles like baroque. We all know how brutalism started.
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This is bullshit you can’t mandate architecture
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For federal buildings?
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Holy fountainhead.
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Came here to say this
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Link to the order in full:
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Looking at the list of "Approved" styles, they are mostly low on the ornamentation, and mostly taking cues from "classical" styles. Beaux-Arts is clearly an exception, and I wonder if that is influenced by Trump's own "Versailles" like tastes.
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I totally agree that it’s a moronic overstep for the government to specify what styles a government building can be built in... but I won’t lie, I breathed a sigh of relief to see that art deco was one of the permitted styles.
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Priorities, I guess.
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He has absolutely zero taste.
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And by a fantastic coincidence, I’m sure he’s willing build them....shoddily....for a price.
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It's hard to express all the different ways that I hate this. I really hate the language used in the executive order, it's so pathetically populist and the ideology embodied in it is so thinly-veiled. I'm not American so it's not directly my problem, but this sucks, and it's the type of thing is expect to see from a dictatorship in the developing world, not the country that's supposed to be the global standard bearer for the cause of liberal democracy.
I wonder if this is informed by the fact that the American right seem to have decided to demonise postmodernism in recent years. Banning styles of architecture is a great way to suppress certain schools of thought. Although the order specifically mentions brutalism, not postmodernism, so perhaps postmodernism has nothing to do with that. I'm not sure the people attacking postmodernism really understand what postmodernism is though - maybe brutalism is collateral damage in this conflict.
My country has a great postmodernist parliament building. I didn't really get it when it was first built; I felt that major government buildings should project institutional authority and command respect, much like this executive order demands. But since then I've educated myself on architecture and postmodern social theory and have come to understand how well the architecture of our parliament building fits with what our country is and what our country could be, and how unsuitable a more traditional, imposing building would have been. If some law had dictated that we had to build a more traditional building we would have been worse off for it.
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While I dislike postmodern architecture as much as premodern architecture on average, I'd agree it would be a good fit for government buildings due to its relative unimposingness compared to most styles, and potential for cultural inclusivity.
However, I think that Brutalism, for large buildings, is less imposing even than postmodern, (again on average), because while Brutalism can look grand and menacing from afar, it stays clearer of imposing entrances than most styles, preferring a human-approachable entrance, and Postmodern buildings do not always resist the temptation to build grand entrances.
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Not American, but can this even hold up? Can architecture not be considered a form of expression and is this bill not directly contravening the most fundamental cornerstone of American rights, the first amendment, and the right to free expression. I know that art is covered, why would architecture be different?
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Also not American, but I would guess that freedom of expression doesn't apply to official federal activities, just like a federal employee is probably limited in what sort of things that can talk about while on the official business, even though they have freedom of expression in their private lives.
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In a totalitarian state only the police and the armed forces are allowed to be brutal.
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Insult to injury
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Trump has done a lot of bat shit crazy things, but this? What the fuck?
Considering that Donald Trump is too stupid and ignorant to have any awareness of these styles, this may be from the genius architectural mind of Stephen Miller, who is a member of a number of neo-[redacted] and [redacted]-supremacist social movements that dabble in the applied hatred of architecture.
Architecture and slavery have a long connection in the USA. It's been suggested that the Greek architectural style that dominates DC is a deliberate 18th century propaganda effort spearheaded by southern state politicians, as ancient Greece was a model of democracy that coexisted with slavery.
Prior to the design and construction of DC, America had already established a style for government buildings, in Philadelphia. Brick buildings with white window casements and white columns. That look was rejected for the Greek classical preferred by southern slave owners.
Many of the founding father's were infatuated with the "classical" cultures of Rome and Greece. So many cities, especially near to the east coast, bear names referencing the cities and heroes of Greece and Rome, latin is very commonly used for motto's and during this times many greek and latin words began to enter into the English vocabulary. From some it was that these places were considered democracies/republics while to many others the existence and centralization of slavery in both cultures was equally if not more important.
There was even a trend of slaveowners naming their slaves Greek and Roman names (https://www.ncpedia.org/slave-names). Classical British culture, despite being that of the actual ancestors of these people, was mostly neglected in the upper echelons of culture. While poorer peoples still held many English, Scottish, and Irish traditions, among many others, the powerful who shaped our nation identified more with the ancient cultures that were so easy to romanticize (literally). The puritans on the other hand didn't care much for the non-christian cultures of the past and that is why the classical architecture is less common in the New England and much more associated with the South.
People are very vocal about architecture. It's probably a mathematical impossibility to build a new government building and not have the twittersphere and local newspaper comment section full of disapproval.
So I could see something like this as a general populist move. And it does the normal thing of hearkening back to an imagined glorious past, whilst not engaging with the reality that those styles would also have been controversial in their heyday.
In case you are not already familiar with this, I would like to point out that this is probably Parkinson’s Law of Triviality in action (also called bikeshedding). I have read a good explanation on the internet: