Should Trump decide how our federal buildings look?
The White House has announced an executive order called "Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again" which would establish neoclassical architecture as the default for all federal buildings, e.g., courthouses, post offices. Will MFBBA become an acronym like MAGA indicating a time when the country was falling under the sway of a despot who wanted to remake an imaginary US to his own personal taste? Now that Trump has been exonerated in the impeachment trial he feels free to attack another element in the culture wars: how our world looks. Does anyone remember when Prince Charles tried this? There are very good reasons to have contemporary architects pay attention to context but that doesn't mean they have to conform to a certain style. Its true mistakes have been made. But styles go in and out: a Paul Rudolph's Government Service Center in Boston, now endangered after being reviled for many years, is now newly beautiful in the eyes of many lovers of brutalism.