Amid this week’s presidential inauguration festivities in Washington, D.C., Donald Trump, returning to the White House for a second non-consecutive term as a convicted felon, signed a flurry of executive orders (EOs). Some, including a push to end birthright citizenship, have been deemed as unconstitutional and several others are already subject to preemptively prepared lawsuits.
Orders pertaining to the withdrawal from the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement (again) along with a sweeping pardon of the roughly 1,500 insurrectionists who assaulted police officers and ransacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, have garnered the most public outrage—and headlines. Like during the first Trump administration, modern architecture is also again under fire with an order directing Stephen Ehikian, a tech industry player serving as new acting head of the General Services Administration (GSA), to submit, within 60 days, “recommendations to advance the policy that federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.”
“Such recommendations shall consider appropriate revisions to the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture and procedures for incorporating community input into federal building design selections,” the EO continues. “If, before such recommendations are submitted, the Administrator of the General Services Administration proposes to approve a design for a new federal public building that diverges from the policy set forth in this memorandum, the Administrator shall notify me, through the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, not less than 30 days before the General Services Administration could reject such design without incurring substantial expenditures. Such notification shall set forth the reasons the Administrator proposes to approve such design.”
In an email to GSA employees written by Ehikian in his role as acting administrator, the former Salesforce VP of product does not specically mention a classical architecture mandate. But he does outline several broad orders of business, pledging that the GSA will “champion American workers, innovation, and businesses” while removing “extremist Green New Deal and ESG (environmental, social and governance) requirements from federal building construction, leasing and procurement to prioritize economic efficiency over ideological mandates.” He also commits to "right-sizing the federal office portfolio by accelerating the disposition of underutilized and inefficient buildings, reducing capital liabilities and moving federal operations into more modern and appropriately sized spaces.”
During the final weeks of his first term, Trump signed an EO mandating the use of classical architecture over modern styles for all new or newly renovated federal buildings in the nation’s capital while strongly “encouraging” the traditional style for public buildings located elsewhere. It also effectively sidelined the GSA’s contemporary architecture–championing Design Excellence Program. That move was subject to extensive outcry from the design community and elicited a formal response from the American Institute of Architects. “Communities should have the right and responsibility to decide for themselves what architectural design best fits their needs, and we look forward to working with President-Elect Biden to ensure that,” said former AIA CEO Robert Ivy. “Though we are appalled with the administration’s decision to move forward with the design mandate, we are happy the order isn’t as far reaching as previously thought.”
In the weeks after Biden took control of the White House, Trump’s classical architecture mandate was reversed, prompting praise from the AIA. The organization has yet to comment on the new EO or any other early actions by the Trump administration.
While that mandate effectively blanket-maligned most forms of modern architecture, D.C.’s wealth of Brutalist civic buildings came under particularly intense scrutiny by Trump-aligned traditionalists. (Just last year, the National Museum Building staged an exhibition showcasing the capital’s love-it-or-hate-it Brutalist heritage.)
While policy surrounding the GSA directive regarding the design of federal buildings has yet to be fleshed out, the move does have some support in the design community, including from Joe Gebbia, the RISD-educated designer-turned-Airbnb co-founder, who emoji-applauded the directive on X. In another X post, Gebbia, who is also co-founder of ADU startup Samara and a major supporter of the Eames Foundation, expressed enthusiasm for the new administration and for anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
National Civic Art Society president Justin Shubow, a key figure in the push for classical architecture mandates who was appointed by Trump as chair of the powerful U.S. Commission of Fine Arts before being forced out by the Biden administration, also expressed his enthusiasm on X. He writes of Trump: “He's going to Make Federal Architecture Great Again. Here's to democracy in design!”
