Docomomo US responds and opposes Trump s new executive order for classical and traditional architecture archinect.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archinect.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
December 24, 2020
US president Donald Trump waited until his final full month in office to make a new rule dictating the look of federal buildings. Trump’s 203rd executive order, titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” seeks to establish “traditional architecture,” exemplified in Greek and Roman antiquity, as America’s official architectural brand. Backed by the National Civic Arts Society, a Washington-based group that promotes classical arts and architecture, the law is a rebuke of modernism.
Listed in the executive order are preferred building styles like Neoclassical, Georgian, Beaux-Arts, Art Deco, Gothic, Romanesque, Pueblo Revival, and Spanish Colonial. Any designs that deviate will have to go through additional hurdles to get approved. A newly-established council, chaired by a member of the Commission of Fine Arts, will have oversight over the matter. With two women on the commission finishing their term this year, the panel will be comprised of
Trump is right about beautiful buildings
Modern architects have forgotten that public spaces should uplift and inspire the human spirit
22 December 2020 • 6:00pm
Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, Palladio, Christopher Wren, John Soane, Robert Adam … Donald Trump? In the pantheon of architectural greats, the Donald is a surprise late 2020 entry. On Monday, President Trump, thinking of his legacy perhaps, issued an executive order with the title “On Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture”.
One wonders, looking at Trump Tower, a vast Darth Vader helmet on Fifth Avenue, what the aesthetic the Commander in Chief has in mind? Glass? Steel? Light-stealing skyscrapers and bully-boy lobbies? Not this time. It isn’t to the greed-is-good and bigly-is-better look of Eighties Manhattan that Trump has turned, but to the marbled harmony of ancient Greece and republican Rome.
President Donald Trump wants to make federal architecture beautiful again
The White House released a Trump-signed executive order on Monday that called for classical architecture to be used for future federal buildings
The order applauds the styles of Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts and Art Deco architecture, while criticizing Brutalism and more modern designs
It suggests that there are a number of buildings the president finds problematic, including a federal courthouse in Utah that is said to resemble a Borg Cube from Star Trek
In his own career as a builder, Trump knocked down the Art Deco Bonwit Teller to make room for Trump Tower in New York, purposely destroying art on its facade he was supposed to donate to the Met