Trump is right about beautiful buildings

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.

The Founding Fathers, states the executive order, consciously modelled the buildings of Washington DC on those of antiquity. If architecture maketh the man, then the grace, order and sense of proportion of these temple-fronted buildings would elevate every citizen who saw them. For a halcyon century-and-a-half, it says, American federal architecture was characterised “by beautiful and beloved buildings of largely, though not exclusively, classical design”. 

Beautiful and beloved no more. Since the Fifties, the torch has passed to modernism. These buildings are at best undistinguished, at worst unappealing. As with similar examples here in Britain, they have been mostly unpopular with the public, the very people they ought to serve and inspire. The Brutalist Department of Health and Human Services building, designed by Hubert H Humphrey, and Robert C Weaver’s Department of Housing and Urban Development building (think concrete egg cartons) come in for a drubbing.

In future, classical architecture is to be preferred. The touchstones are Greek and Roman antiquity, the Renaissance and the architecture of the Enlightenment. Brutalism, Deconstructivism, disorder, discontinuity, distortion and wonky geometry are out. The American Institute of Architects “unequivocally opposes” the proposal.

I never thought I’d say this, especially not of a man whose gold-and-turquoise Mar-a-Lago is done up like a sultan’s steam room, but: I (half) agree with Trump.

Not when it comes to checklists of good or bad ornament, which can only lead to frigid facadism and stale pastiche. (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian – you’re hired! Ramps, plate-glass, piloti – you’re fired!) There is something, however, in the executive order’s heartfelt cry that buildings should “uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States, command respect from the general public, and, as appropriate, respect the architectural heritage of a region”.

You can be the fiercest fire-and-brimstone atheist and still feel your soul soar below the echoing dome of St Paul’s Cathedral. You can be an off-with-their-heads republican and still find romance in Windsor Castle against a leaden sky. Even an anarchist may be stintingly impressed by the Palace of Westminster. 

Great architecture rises above bricks and mortar. It isn’t the fabric that matters, but the message. A law court should somehow convey justice, proportion and sober purpose. One of the feeblest excuses of this year, used as justification for keeping places of worship closed, is that one can worship just as well in a kitchen as in a church. Only up to a point, Lord Bishop.

While Trump’s definition of beauty is drearily narrow, he’s not wrong to believe in beauty as an ennobling force. In architecture, as in painting, sculpture, music and dance, we are raised up by grace and harmony and cast down by discordance. It matters more with architecture than with other arts. If I want to be discomfited by the video art of Bruce Nauman, I can buy tickets to his exhibition (or could, before Tier 3). If I want seats in the stalls for experimental dance contortions, then that’s my choice. But civic architecture – whether schools, libraries, police stations, local courts or council buildings – is there to serve the citizen and it ought to welcome, not annihilate with blank and thankless facades. 

There’s a case for a new aesthetic constitution. An inherent and inalienable right to life, liberty … and the pursuit of beauty.