President Biden Revokes Trump s Controversial Classical Architecture Order wemu.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from wemu.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Rebuilding a culture of beauty
Tuesday, December 29, 2020 |
Robert Knight - Guest Columnist Knight
In order to achieve equality, everything had to be leveled and replaced with the gray, lifeless forms of a totalitarian society.
President Trump thinks we should stop paying for ugly government buildings.
On December 21, he announced the formation of a “President’s Council on Improving Federal Civic Architecture.” He wants more of the kind of buildings that tourists flock to see and fewer that resemble Soviet-style “brutalist” designs.
In 2007, my wife and I were in Warsaw, Poland for a World Congress of Families conference. During our cab ride from the airport, we saw miles and miles of ugly modernist architecture foisted on the Polish people by their communist masters.
Architecture Groups Call on Biden to Revoke ‘Classical Buildings’ Executive Order
This is one of the many lame duck executive orders President Trump has issued recently.
Architecture organizations are imploring the incoming Biden administration to rescind the executive order President Trump issued on Monday that requires classical architecture to be the preferred style for federal buildings.
The directive applies to all federal courthouses, agency headquarters, federal public buildings in Washington, D.C., and all other federal public buildings that cost or are anticipated to cost over $50 million to design and build (excluding infrastructure projects and land ports of entry). A draft of the order, initially titled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” was leaked to the publication the
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered as follows:
Section 1. Purpose. Societies have long recognized the importance of beautiful public architecture. Ancient Greek and Roman public buildings were designed to be sturdy and useful, and also to beautify public spaces and inspire civic pride. Throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, public architecture continued to serve these purposes. The 1309 constitution of the City of Siena required that “[w]hoever rules the City must have the beauty of the City as his foremost preoccupation … because it must provide pride, honor, wealth, and growth to the Sienese citizens, as well as pleasure and happiness to visitors from abroad.” Three centuries later, the great British Architect Sir Christopher Wren declared that “public buildings [are] the ornament of a country. [Architecture] establishes a Nation, draws people and commerce, makes the peo