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The Capitol Building in Washington, DC. Photo Nicolas Raymond, via Flickr.
Ten months ago, a draft executive order leaked from the Trump administration, aiming to “make federal buildings beautiful again” by mandating they be in classical styles. Now, outgoing president Donald Trump has officially signed the order on “promoting beautiful federal civic architecture.”
All buildings costing over $50 million to design and build, the text says, should hew to classical designs and be “visibly identifiable as civic buildings.” Within the District of Columbia, “classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings absent exceptional factors necessitating another kind of architecture,” it says.
Trump Signs Order Requiring Classical Architecture for Federal Buildings
21 Dec 2020
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday requiring federal buildings be constructed in the style of American classical architectural codes.
Following decades of modernist, brutalist, and deconstructivist designs for federal buildings, Trump has issued an order that will return federal architecture to its original ethos of classical, Neoclassical, Art Deco, Georgian, Greek Revival, and Beaux-Arts that was preferred by many of the Founding Fathers.
“[Notable Founding Fathers] wanted America’s public buildings to inspire the American people and encourage civic virtue,” the order states. “President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson consciously modeled the most important buildings in Washington, D.C., on the classical architecture of ancient Athens and Rome. They sought to use classical architecture to visually connect our contemporary Republic with the