Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the White House Watch newsletter for freeYour guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the worldAmong the avalanche of executive actions which spilled forth after Donald Trump’s second inauguration as US president was the return of an idea he’d tried in December 2020 (though it barely lasted a couple of months, and certainly did not lead to any buildings): a memorandum titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Architecture”.For “beautiful” read “classical”. But for “classical” read what, exactly? Is the US government really going to go all Beaux-Arts? With sculpted friezes and domes, mosaics and Corinthian columns? It’s not cheap, this stuff.The right loves a little classicism. It always has. It stands in their minds for class and conservatism and drawing a line back to the ancient world. That the Capitol and the White House were built in part by enslaved labour and that Hitler and Mussolini loved a classical column once tainted any hints of classical revivalism. Now that the US government is determined to abandon any hints of “wokeness”, we needn’t really worry about that any more.Trump’s taste is also a reflection of a much larger trend of what we might call right-wing revivalism. In Budapest, Viktor Orbán is rebuilding the old castle district to its Habsburg pomp, so that it is becoming difficult to tell what is old and what is new. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has been Bauhaus-bashing, suggesting modernism “displaced local architectural traditions”. And social media is flooded with memes of classical buildings and white marble sculptures as ciphers for the “purity” and supposed superiority of western culture.There are bad neoclassical buildings just as there are bad modernist buildings. You cannot make it a stylistic binary: Corinthian columns good, curtain walls badSuch rhetoric is cultural dog-whistling. As the Oscar-tipped film The Brutalist — starring Adrien Brody as a postwar Hungarian-Jewish émigré architect — points out with such clarity, much of the distaste for modernism is a not-so-veiled attack on its many Jewish and often communist theorists, protagonists and patrons. Those associations have stuck around, incredibly, for a century and modernism is still seen by the right as somehow alien.Yet America became the default home of modernism, the nation where it achieved its apotheosis. Midtown Manhattan or downtown Chicago or the affluent mid-century houses of southern California are arguably the zenith of modernism, albeit stripped of its early ideology (when the concerns of its often left-leaning architects tended towards social housing and a more egalitarian society). The world went modern not because of the Bauhaus but because US big business adopted and embraced modernism so completely and so seductively.And that success included, of course, one Donald Trump. The president, who made his name in real estate, was an enthusiastic erector of generic high-rises. You will find no classical porticoes, no sculpted friezes on Trump’s towers. They are all resolutely late-modern, unadorned, shiny extrusions of steel and glass. At least, on the outside.In his brilliantly waspish book, From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), Tom Wolfe wrote: “Every great law firm in New York moves without a sputter of protest into a glass-box office building . . . and then hires a decorator and gives him a budget of hundreds of thousands of dollars to turn these mean cubes and grids into a horizontal fantasy of a Restoration townhouse.”He might have been writing about Trump, whose own taste in interiors veers towards Versailles. There is this strange disconnect between the predilection for classicism and the gaudy golds and mirrors of dictator-kitsch, and the practicalities of modern construction, geared towards repetitive floor plates and curtain walls.The right’s position is that federal buildings should be recognisable, grand, and should inspire awe. In fairness, it might be time to introduce a little nuance here. Neo-classicism and the Francophile Beaux-Arts style were the default language of government architecture, right from Antebellum to the early 1950s. And it was, in its way, an apolitical choice. Much of the biggest and best classically inflected architecture dates to the New Deal 1930s, when Franklin D Roosevelt used the construction of vast new government buildings as an employment and training programme, employing stonemasons and carvers, mural artists, sculptors and metalworkers. And a great deal of it is nearly indistinguishable from what the fascists were doing across the Atlantic, even down to the imperial eagles and fasces carved on to the facades and the friezes of heroic workers.But Trump is not Roosevelt. His is a small-government public realm. What, exactly, is the government proposing to build? Probably mostly data centres to support its $100bn AI programme. Will these be dressed as classical temples?Certainly you can still build in a classical style. There are a few architects who specialise in it and others who are happy to be chameleons. But it is expensive, time-consuming and it is difficult. And it often arrives with the weird assumption that to be traditional, or classical, or not-modern is enough to make it beautiful. It is not. There are plenty of bad neoclassical buildings just as there are bad modernist buildings. You cannot make it a stylistic binary: Corinthian columns good, curtain walls bad.When far-right and neo-Nazi groups gather across the US, they often alight on classical buildings as a background, as they did in Charlottesville in 2017 and Nashville, Tennessee, the following year — Grecian temples as symbols of western civilisation. And the images from the assault on the Capitol remain indelibly seared in the collective consciousness. Likewise, Hollywood directors have displayed a penchant for blowing up those classical edifices: the Capitol, the White House, the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. Classicism represents permanence — and Trump’s garish schtick yearns for something more substantive. But dressing up as Ancient Greece in the age of Trump looks like cosplay.Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning
