Return to Order? American Federal Government Architecture in the Trump Age 

Edward Dimendberg

Each day, the consequences of Donald J. Trump’s re-election as President of the United States become more evident—not only for Americans but also for people around the interconnected world. Although the disruptive effects of the economic and foreign policies of his administration receive constant attention, their equally disruptive impact on architecture in the US obtains less notice.

Each day the consequences of the reelection of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States become more evident not only to Americans but to people across the interconnected contemporary world. Although the disruptive effects of the economic and foreign policies of his administration receive constant attention, their equally disruptive impact on architecture in the US obtains less notice.
Tariffs on imported Canadian lumber or materials from other countries will inevitably drive up the costs of domestic construction. Clean energy alternatives such as solar and wind power dependent on technologies imported from China will become more expensive, just at the moment when their use is growing and dependence on fossil fuels diminishing. As already high interests rise due to the greater yields paid by US Treasury bonds to attract nervous investors, real estate financing and mortgage rates will climb, dampening both development and home ownership opportunities. It is an open secret that undocumented workers are heavily represented in the construction industry and increases in labor costs following more restricted immigration will be passed along to clients. Building housing--especially affordable housing—a dire problem the nation’s first real estate developer President ignores--will slow even further.
Yet the most visible of these changes are likely to manifest in the realm of US government architecture. As the Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) slashes the federal work force, the federal government’s real estate office portfolio is also shrinking. Buildings are being vacated and entire agencies are being relocated from Washington DC to other cities, ostensibly to obtain cheaper office space but surely as well to cut jobs, if not eliminate the physical proximity of centralized government workers that allegedly benefits the “deep state” the administration has pledged itself to eradicate. When during his first term Trump moved the Bureau of Land Management from Washington to Grand Junction, Colorado, 87% of its workforce retired or resigned, thus crippling the agency responsible for administering one eighth of the nation’s landmass.
In 1978 President Jimmy Carter issued an Executive Order (EO) mandating government offices acquire space in urban areas so as to make them attractive places to live and work and “improve the social, economic, environmental, and cultural conditions” of cities. By contrast, during his second campaign, Trump pledged to move 100,000 federal jobs outside of Washington “to places filled with patriots who love America.” On April 15, he signed the “Restoring Commonsense to Federal Office Space Management” Executive Order overruling Carter’s and also Bill Clinton’s 1996 directive to locate government operations in historic properties and now the policy is to instead “select cost-effective facilities and focus on successfully carrying out their missions for American taxpayers.”
In the years following the Second World War, much architecture commissioned by the federal government was undistinguished work churned out by large firms. A first attempt at programmatic change was the 1954 initiative by the US Department of State to commission such modernist architects as Eero Saarinen and Walter Gropius to design embassies and trade on their prestige in the pursuit of soft power. Efforts to raise the level of domestic architecture continued with the adoption a year later by the National Parks Service of its Mission 1966 initiative to accommodate the growing number of visitors to popular destinations such as the Grand Canyon, the Everglades, and Yosemite. By hiring talented architects such as Richard Neutra and Anshen & Allen, the project introduced modern buildings often of high quality into landscapes and communities outside of urban areas.

Seven years later, the spirit of these programs was codified in the architecture policy for the General Services Administration (GSA), often referred to as the landlord of the federal government, as formulated in the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, a 1962 report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then Assistant Secretary of Labor under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and later Senator from New York. In addition to reaffirming the importance of commissioning art in federal buildings —a legacy of the Roosevelt New Deal era—the principles unambiguously defended the creative freedom of architects: “The development of an official style must be avoided. Design must flow from the architectural profession to the Government, and not vice versa. The Government should be willing to pay some additional cost to avoid excessive uniformity in design of Federal buildings. Competitions for the design of Federal buildings may be held where appropriate. The advice of distinguished architects ought to, as a rule, be sought prior to the award of important design contracts.”
Drawing upon “the finest contemporary American architectural thought,” buildings commissioned by the GSA “must provide visual testimony to the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American Government.” Notably absent in the document is any reference to a single historical or period style. The architecture requisite for democracy was understood as continually evolving and responsive to contemporary needs and culture: “It should be our object to meet the test of Pericles’ evocation to the Athenians, which the President [Kennedy] commended to the Massachusetts legislature in his address of January 9, 1961 : “We do not imitate-for we are a model to others.”
The public servant who did more than anyone to implement these ideas was Edward Feiner, Chief Architect of the GSA from 1996 to 2005 and co-creator with Marilyn Farley in 1994 of the “Design Excellence” program that sought to elevate the quality of government architecture. Paradoxically, although the title of Chief Architect had been abolished in the 1930s, Feiner never sought to become “architecture czar” and in the more than 140 buildings and courthouses he commissioned his unwavering commitment to stylistic pluralism that ran the gamut from contemporary to regional to historical styles was never in doubt. Under his guidance, architects such as Richard Meier, Thom Mayne, Arquitectonica, Antoine Predock, Ralph Johnson, Laurie Hawkinson and Tim Smith-Miller, and Harry Cobb obtained commissions and the quality of federal architecture dramatically rose and remained at a high level after his departure from the agency.

Female architects Carol Ross Barney and Julie Snow joined what until then largely had been a boy’s club and proved gender diversity and merit were not incompatible.

No government building program responsible for thousands of commissions could reasonably be expected to deliver work that pleased everyone—let alone one masterpiece after another--yet the credibility and professionalism of the Design Excellence program commended respect among many architects, as well as a belief that no single inside clique was receiving all of the work.

Looking back over the career of Donald Trump as a real estate developer, it is reasonable to conclude realizing buildings held in high esteem by the US architectural community played little to no role in developing his brand of insipid dark glass towers with gold signage that have been dubbed “OPEC baroque.”

Trump’s interest in architecture became more evident during his first term as President when on December 21, 2020 he issued the “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” Executive Order. It is unlikely that any government document before or since has contained so detailed and misguided a presentation of architectural history. Alongside discussions of the 1309 Charter of Siena and Christopher Wren are critiques of Brutalism, a bête noire defined as “the style of architecture that grew out of the early 20th-century modernist movement that is characterized by a massive and block-like appearance with a rigid geometric style and large-scale use of exposed poured concrete.” For the sake of the Executive Order, a richly variegated movement is identified with the Hubert Humphrey Building in Washington, headquarters of the Department of Health and Human Services. This late building by Marcel Breuer completed in 1977 receives particularly harsh words, ignoring that Brutalism was being reassessed by the global architectural community even as it was under construction.

The “Deconstructivist” architecture that emerged during the late 1980s fares even worse. This tendency is described as undermining “the traditional values of architecture through such features as fragmentation, disorder, discontinuity, distortion, skewed geometry, and the appearance of instability,” and though such qualities themselves chafe against a unitary definition or single example, the 2007 Morphosis-designed San Francisco Federal Building (formerly the Nancy Pelosi Federal Building) is understood to exemplify it. In an alternate reality, a presidential administration dedicated to disrupting the status quo might value an aesthetic of rupture.

As a reaction to a very small sample of buildings commissioned by the GSA, the classical architecture of “Ancient Athens and Rome” is henceforth to be the style of choice for all courthouses and agency buildings, all government buildings in Washington, and any costing more than $50 million in 2020 dollars, since it is most likely to “uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States, and command respect from the general public.” Although buildings in a modernist style supervised by the GSA sometimes reference classical architecture, they receive no acknowledgment in the document, thus suggesting that only the most literal imitations of older architecture meet these criteria.

Two courthouses, again a small sample size and--not surprisingly located in Red States—are singled out for praise. 

The capriciousness of the executive order and its focus on style over substance and historical accuracy is striking. Who knew that in addition to the Greek Revival or Roman precedents looked to by the likes of Thomas Jefferson classical architecture now stretches to include the eclectic oeuvre of Julia Morgan? Or the work of Daniel Burnham regarded as one of the inventors of the Chicago skyscraper? Also included among the acceptable styles is Art Deco, an odd choice, though perhaps appealing when one imagines government buildings in staid Washington D.C. resembling Manhattan’s jazzy Radio City Music Hall. But even more bewildering is the question where did Donald Trump learn about Deconstructivism?
The likely answer is from Justin Shubow, founder in 2002 of the National Civic Art Society (NCAS), who admits to having “instigated the executive order and had a hand in drafting it.” Prior to his current role as architectural advisor to the new administration, Trump appointed him chairman of the Commission of Fine Arts, a seven-member body with power to approve buildings and urban planning in Washington. After winning the election in 2020, Joseph Biden removed Shubow, which perhaps explains some of his animus toward those he perceives as members of a hegemonic liberal democratic cultural elite. Biden also reversed Trump’s order that art in government buildings convey patriotic themes and shun abstraction.
That Shubow, untrained as an architect or urbanist, lacking an advanced degree or scholarly publications, unelected to political office, and not currently a government employee, has through his proximity to Donald Trump acquired a role with the potential to disrupt and damage the architectural mission of the GSA, and government design as a whole, makes him a key person to keep tabs on. Since founding his Washington-based organization, Shubow has become the principal spokesman of a conservative understanding of the built environment that draws heavily on the ideas of Roger Scruton.
In his 1979 book The Aesthetics of Architecture, the British philosopher argues the classical tradition is the “perfect representative of all that is good in building. . . its decency, serenity, and restraint.” Architecture “can be judged right or wrong” and the aesthetic judgment it presupposes and enables “maintains an ideal of objectivity, and moreover a continuity with the moral life.” Yet to be fair to Scruton, his book is more generous to modernism than Shubow’s tendentious appropriation of it suggests. It repeatedly praises Mies van der Rohe (whose Chicago Federal Center remains a jewel in the crown of the GSA portfolio), and while opinionated, is not as ideologically strident as Shubow’s pronouncements.
In writings posted on his website, media appearances, interviews, and opinion pieces appearing in mainstream newspapers and publications, Shubow has become the most vocal and visible opponent of modern architecture in the United States and the leading proponent of the claim that during the 1950s its practitioners attained a hegemonic control of federal architecture that has gone unchallenged until his ascent. There has been some pushback against his views by the architectural community. Upon learning in 2020 of the draft guidelines, the American Institute of Architects (AIA) issued a sharply critical statement and more than 11,400 of its members--including many who admire classical architecture and draw on it in their design work--signed an online petition defending pluralism and opposing the imposition of a monolithic federal architectural style.
Individual architects, professional journals, critics, and general audience publications joined them. So did the National Trust for Historic Preservation. A Democrat in congress introduced a measure to rescind Trump’s executive order that later was challenged by a bill introduced by a Republican. Perhaps the most visible public comment was a piece by the Editorial Board of the New York Times—hardly a nest of leftwing radicals—published on February 7, 2020 entitled “What’s so Great about Fake Roman Temples?”
Responding in an interview, Shubow claimed it “was an attack on contemporary classical architecture saying, well, the founders had to reach back to the past, but we no longer need to wear borrowed clothes. I mean, I would say in response to the Times, do they think that the Supreme Court is a fake Roman temple or is the U.S. Capitol itself fake? Because obviously these buildings are not 2,000 years old.” As is obvious in the editorial in America’s newspaper of record, its critique was not of classical architecture per se but of the attempt to install it as the official style of the American government at the expense of pluralism.

Indeed, after a recent US Supreme Court decision denying legal protections to LGBTQ people, the pardoning by Trump of 1,600 January 6 insurrectionists—some found guilty of violent and murderous acts—who stormed the Capitol, and a sustained attempt by his administration and politicians in Congress to decimate the social safety net, an increasing number of Americans might well answer Shubow’s rhetorical questions in the affirmative and discern a mismatch between the allegedly democratic character of classical architecture and the increasingly undemocratic government it now symbolizes. For some citizens, both already may be fake. As their elected representatives drift further away from safeguarding fundamentals such as civil rights, education, and health care, and the Republican agenda skews toward enacting tax cuts for billionaires, invoking timeless aesthetic values has never seemed on shakier ground.
If for many Germans the legacies of classicism and neoclassicism have become inseparably fused with the Nazi dictatorship, for many Americans they bring to mind not only Washington but also the Antebellum South whose plantations and civic buildings in the Confederacy and cultural identity classicism did much to establish. Such architecture (far more complex than Shubow acknowledges) cannot be written off as simply the preferred style of Nazis or slave owners.Yet the equation Doric column = liberty is hardly axiomatic. Shubow’s crude correlation of architectural form with politics and philosophical systems would not pass muster in a student paper in an introductory architecture class. The fundamental issue involves freedom of expression and the rejection of stylistic dictates and constraints.

Every authoritarian regime--Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Stalinist Soviet Union--that abandoned architectural pluralism also forfeited at the same time democratic institutions and culminated in terror. To minimize this suggests a frightening obtuseness to real—as opposed to illusory —history.
Although ostensibly soliciting input by the general public for the design of buildings intended to “speak to the sorts of people we wish to be,” the Executive Order bars the participation of “artists, architects, engineers, art or architecture critics, instructors or professors of art or architecture, or members of the building industry; or affiliated with any interest group, trade association, or any other organization whose membership is financially affected by decisions involving the design, construction, or remodeling of public buildings.” Like the many officials in the Trump administration who deny science, Shubow is wary of expertise, unless it is his own.
Apparently, “the people we wish to be” think superfluous the inclusion, free speech, and open debate on which any democratic society rests. Legitimate differences of opinion about the respective aesthetic merits of modernism or classicism do not, of course, correlate with specific political beliefs: a modernist can be politically conservative or a classicist can be a progressive. Yet no discussion is possible if—like at many town hall meetings today convened by Republicans—gatherings are closed and entry denied to those with opposing positions. Nothing remotely similar to what now openly is being proposed ever occurred in the past, during which liberal elites allegedly held sway over the design of federal buildings and imposed modernist orthodoxy.
Trump’s Executive Order came late in his administration and little built during his first term reflects a centrally imposed turn toward classicism, the renovated tennis building Melania Trump supervised (without attribution to an architect) on the White House lawn and unveiled in December 2020 during the pandemic, excepted.

This year on January 20, Trump signed a second Executive Order reinstating the substance of the one he signed in 2020, though this time it was far shorter. As of early May, the guidelines he requested within 60 days from the GSA had not yet published. Although surprisingly few individual architects have expressed opposition to this second attempt to impose a unitary stylistic regimen, once again, the AIA protested, this time emphasizing the cost cutting so important to the administration. In letter to the GSA on March 2, its acting director Steven T. Ayers wrote, “Prescriptive style mandates stifle innovation, limit architectural diversity, and disregard the unique cultural and historical contexts of local communities. Further, classical architecture, while an important element of our nation’s architectural legacy, often demands expensive materials, longer construction timelines, and higher maintenance costs—burdens that ultimately fall upon taxpayers.”
Trump’s obsession with the home of the FBI, the Brutalist J. Edgar Hoover Building (C.F. Murphy Associates, 1975), suggests it may be among the first Washington agency headquarters whose reconstruction will be informed by his recent order.

The symbolism of designing a new head office for the national law enforcement agency in alignment with his freshly reaffirmed design principles may prove impossible to resist. On May 15 Kash Patel announced the building will be closed and its 1,500 employees relocated. Its future remains uncertain. That two American architects who designed acclaimed Brutalist architecture—Marcel Breuer and Pietro Belluschi—were European immigrants might be coincidental or indicate xenophobia among the self-proclaimed Trumpian guardians of civic architectural purity. Perhaps they find architects associated with Brutalism insufficiently American.

When Shubow and Victoria Coates, Vice President of Heritage Foundation, today best known for its Project 2025 plan that has served as playbook of the second Trump administration, advocated in a March 12, 2025 opinion piece in The Washington Post the demolition of the James V. Forestall Building (Curtis & Davis, 1969), housing the Department of Energy, now restructured so as to promote fossil fuel extraction (solar and wind power go unmentioned) and help the agency become the “technological and resource arm of the burgeoning new cold war between China and the United States,” they tipped their hand and revealed the critique of brutalism as a trojan horse for a key element of the actual Republican agenda: climate change denialism.

Yet with one significant exception, no rendering of a government building informed by Trump’s executive order has yet been published. The demolition in 1963 of Pennsylvania Station--the 1910 masterpiece by McKim, Mead & White and the major rail station in New York City—in what Moynihan called “the single greatest act of vandalism in the history of New York” is still an unhealed wound. Six decades later, it remains the Bermuda Triangle of American urban architectural redevelopment into which countless design proposals have disappeared and quarrels between property owners, developers, and government agencies have stalled improvements of a transportation hub often described as a rat maze.
The most recent person to enter the fray is Trump, who on April 17 wrested control of Penn Station and its future from the New York Metropolitan Transit Agency, citing federal ownership of the national rail line, Amtrak. Close to the surface of this decision is the enmity between his administration and New York City, most evident in the ongoing attempts by Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to abolish the congestion pricing that has reduced automobile traffic in lower Manhattan. Upon learning of Trump’s announcement and the contribution by the federal government of $7 billion, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced the state would withdraw its previously announced commitment of $1.3 billion.
In the midst of this controversy, architect Alexandros Washington working with the non-profit Grand Penn Community Alliance has circulated renderings of his proposed new design “inspired” by the original McKim, Mead, & White building that includes a train shed attached to a park and a colonnade with Doric columns on 7th Avenue. To believe a monumental civic structure and complex piece of urban infrastructure could or should be reconstructed according to its original design and not be reconceived from the ground up so as to respond to contemporary technology, needs, tastes, aesthetic conceptions, and social aspirations is to fall prey to a delusion whose unavoidable terminus is fraud and architectural mediocrity.

Shubow was an early proponent of Washburn’s design and published his encomium on the website of Thomas Klingenstein, a hedge fund manager, backer of Shubow’s organization, and board member of the conservative Claremont Institute think tank. That a civic structure of profound historical and urban infrastructural significance is being advocated by private individuals opposed to freedom of expression is troubling but not as alarming as Shubow’s proposal that its construction be fast tracked along the lines of Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” Covid vaccine development project. Although the original Penn Station derived inspiration from the Roman baths of Caracalla, the architectural predilections of Shubow, Washburn, and Klingenstein do not deserve mention in the same sentence as McKim, Mead, & White. And after the damage inflicted by the bungling of DOGE and its attempts to dismantle federal agencies at breakneck speed, the folly of rebuilding Penn Station in a similar manner is a cruel joke.
Shubow recently has been mentioned as a possible nominee by Trump to head the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), long respected for its support of individual scholars and regional historical societies. Recently, it committed $30 million from its slashed budget toward Trump’s proposed National Garden of American Heroes--an Arno Breker in Disneyland flight of fancy-- to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and, conveniently for a Republican party that is already unpopular and likely to become even more so, timed to open four months before the midterm elections that could end its majority in the US Congress. That its sculptures will be designed in a classical vocabulary is a foregone conclusion. It is an equally safe bet no Brutalists or Deconstructivists will serve on the competition jury.
What ultimately is at stake in Shubow’s project to rid government architecture of modernism? Surely not function and the creation of civic buildings capable of meeting programmatic specifications and enhancing the lives of employees and citizens. In his incessant stream of writings, Shubow scarcely mentions program, function, and the interior design of buildings, suggesting that he is, in the Italian phrase, a facadista, preoccupied above all else with external appearance and spectacle. Revealingly, apart from insisting Washington remain a museum piece, Shubow seems indifferent to urban form and such an omission suggests a belief that only individual buildings can improve cities. Nor can financial gain explain his crusade. Although he notes a courthouse can easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars, civic architectural commissions will benefit only a small number of firms. In relation to the larger economy, they pale besides the revenues of even small tech companies, let alone giants such as Meta or Google. Architects who build them are unlikely to prove useful to Republican causes, unlike the law firms from which Trump has extracted commitments of time and resources.
Trump associate Steve Bannon notoriously observed that “politics is downstream from culture” and made clear he understands the wars around identity and creative expression today raging in the United States and perhaps soon impacting its national architecture as more than hollow symbolic skirmishes. Determining who or what is American is a high stakes endeavor. Yet it is one radically at odds with advances in architecture that typically involve the movement of people, ideas, and technologies across national boundaries. The international outlook such exchanges presuppose is far removed from the monolithic classicism promulgated from above and validated by ideologically scrubbed publics insulated from professional expertise that Shubow and his associates promote.
Today conservative jurists and legal scholars, especially those associated with the Federalist Society that has provided a blueprint for many of the current administration’s policies, adhere to the doctrine of “originalism” whereby laws must be interpreted strictly as the Constitution would have been understood at the time of its ratification in 1788. That the Constitution itself never mentions originalism and the idea itself is a later interpretation unsupported by its language is a paradox conveniently swept under the rug.

When Shubow, recently dubbed “Mr. Architecture” by a French publication, proclaims the architectural styles favored by George Washington or Thomas Jefferson as most authentically American he performs a similar sleight of hand.
Henry James recognized the cul-de-sac of positing an American identity frozen in time in his epochal 1907 book The American Scene, in which he grasped the country to which he recently had returned from Europe not as “one all positive experience” but rather a “growth of immeasurable muchness,” the “mere looming mass of the more, the more and more to come.” To pretend American identity is not a continual work in progress but a finished product capturable in reassuring images is to blind oneself to its multiplicity and disengage from a complex history and the challenges of the present.
Historian Timothy Snyder argues authoritarianism legitimates ideas that once could not be expressed in public and frightens their opponents to preemptively censor themselves and remain silent. What today begins as a mandate for the design of civic buildings could easily spread to private commissions. Architects who do not design in official styles might find themselves pariahs or boycotted. What is good enough for federal agencies may seem good enough to other clients. Why should politicians in Arkansas or Texas not feel emboldened to pass legislation that also bans modern as well as contemporary architecture in their municipalities and states?
Although Shubow claims Trump’s guidelines will not prevent architects from working in modernist palettes in other contexts, such a claim rings hollow in contemporary American society where with each passing day the boundaries between public and private blur and guidelines have a way of becoming requirements. Ongoing attempts by the Trump administration to challenge scientific understandings of medicine and climate change, control universities, , rewrite American history, remove books deemed offensive from public library shelves, dictate elementary school curricula, defund the arts and humanities, and determine cultural policy at museums and performing arts institutions provide no grounds for architects to be optimistic and conclude they will be exceptions and remain able to work without interference.
For better or worse, the history of the twentieth century demonstrates trends in the United States often spread beyond its borders. Should the Shubow-Trump agenda prevail, leaders of other nations might well be inspired to follow the example of America and wrest control of civic architecture in their own countries. Today architects in the US urgently need support from members of the international architectural community. Such reaffirmations of the principles of freedom of expression advance the interests of all committed to living in an open society. The pitifully shortsighted isolationism of the Trump administration must not obscure the larger stakes of the crisis in the US for architects everywhere.
That decreases in the federal budget and fiscal austerity are main planks in Trump’s political agenda makes a spree of new government buildings unlikely in the near future. Apart from urgent projects and plum symbolic commissions, his administration is likely to build less rather than more during his second term. Is his interest since 2020 in attacking modern architecture simply a concession to cultural conservatives, or does it portend a genuine shift of taste and principles on the cusp of implementation? At the moment, it is too early to tell. In a volatile political environment that changes from one day to the next, predicting future outcomes is ill advised. Nonetheless, three scenarios (or variations on them) seem likely.

In the first, disorganization, growing staff shortages, and incompetence in the GSA coupled with value engineering would short circuit the Shubow-Trump program and result in little, if any, building. Their inflammatory ideas ultimately would be proven a smokescreen intended to distract attention from other items on the Republican political agenda. Like so much else in Trump’s administration, his architectural policy could prove more bluff and bullying than actual substance. A second possible outcome would be modest success and the sprouting of Greek temples and insipid classically styled buildings across the country. A few projects adhering to the new guidelines might even be laudable. Challenges by architects and municipalities might be litigated in the courts and yield an occasional victory for those who opt for different approaches. But the fundamental ground will have shifted.
The third and most dystopian outcome would be a successful standardization, encapsulated in the Nazi word Gleichschaltung, leading to the control and homogenization of all architecture, even buildings not commissioned by government. Local design review boards could issue codes that demand conformism, or simply grind architects down by requesting endless but time-consuming minor revisions of plans submitted for approval. Taking the lead from corporate America and business leaders that today rarely criticizes the administration, developers and institutional clients would remain silent and gravitate toward designs unlikely to prove controversial. Architects faced with the need to survive and meet their payroll would stifle their imaginations and become adept at delivering them. Those whose work provokes the displeasure of the administration could well be compelled to turn over a new leaf and design the Trump Presidential Library pro bono. And one day the contemporary architecture of the United States will have become bland and formulaic. The most dire version of this reality would involve silencing architects working in styles and modes deemed unpatriotic, beginning with those committed to diversity and who are not native born, white, male, heterosexual, and Christian. In 1960 at the height of the Algerian War while locked in bitter ideological combat with an intellectual opponent, Charles de Gaulle refused to prosecute his country’s most famous philosopher. “One does not arrest Voltaire. Even Jean-Paul Sartre is France” he explained. Architects working in a plurality of styles today in the United States might hope to encounter similarly generous adversaries. If they do not and one day find themselves regarded as foreign bodies within its national architectural tradition and dealt with accordingly, the implications for architecture and democracy in the United States and elsewhere will be chilling. There is one unavoidable imperative those who live or work in domains thus far untouched by Trump’s wrath and quest for power ignore at their own peril. They must remain vigilant and never assume as the title of the 1935 dystopian novel by Sinclair Lewis puts it : It Can't Happen Here.

The article was written in May 23, 2025. 

Edward Dimendberg (*1960, New York, US) is a historian of architecture and urbanism and Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.  He also has taught at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, UCLA, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. His books include Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity and Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images. Recently, the Getty Research Institute published his critical edition of Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Structure of the City of Two Million in Southern California by the German geographer Anton Wagner and the sourcebook Richard Neutra and the Making of the Lovell Health House 1925-35. He frequently writes on architecture in the United States for Bauwelt and his research has been supported by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Getty Research Institute, and the American Academy in Berlin.  He is currently writing a book about documentary films on architecture.