I'm glad to see that federal institutions won't share styleguides with most every coffee shop and airbnb. The emerging metamodern era will be a fascinating time for design and art that oscillates between the best of the past and what has worked for humanity and the frequently described God-like technologies our species now creates. Exiting the deconstruction of postmodernism couldn't have happened fast enough and the next several decades will accelerate everything at a rate we can't comprehend. Enjoy the ride.
By itself, your comment is an ad hominem fallacy, suggesting guilt by mere association, but without evidence or argument. Overusing that fallacy for the past four years is a major reason the Democrats lost the last election. Even school children recognize it is a bogus cheap shot. Nazis, like the rest of the world, hated modernist architecture because it hated family, history, beauty, and morals, and turned architecture into mere "machines for living" (Le Corbusier). Nazis also hated modernism because Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus movement were rival socialists of the communist sort. Both movements, politically and architecturally, were totalitarian to their core. For Trump to urge a return to the American heritage in civic architecture is a positive cultural revival, but also a rejection of the recent progressive, leftist advocacy of the two forms of European socialism that inspired the mass killing of their own citizens and the holocaust against Jews, Ukrainians, those with disabilities, and the weaponizing of the justice system against political opponents. That actually makes him an anti- Nazi-socialist.
It worries me that you seek out fine examples of earlier architecture and equate modern architecture with brutalism and blank masses. Perhaps you lack confidence in the core strength of an argument for beauty, elegance of form, and human scale. But you shouldn’t. You should extend this gracefully to modern buildings that exemplify these virtues from Frank Lloyd Wright to Gaudi to Mies.
Yes, using brutalism as stand-in for all modern and post-modern architecture and leaving out the authoritarian love of Greco-Roman architecture is a choice. Not a good one.
He’s specifically speaking about GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS. Any examples of a non-brutalist or plain uninspiring glass and steel modern government buildings built in the last 50 years? Probably very few if any.
The building was owned by Genesco, whose president was John Hanigan, a known "turn-around" specialist who took over companies, sold off its assets and reduced costs by firing employees . It was Hanigan who shepherded the demolition plan through the NYC planning board. But instead of doing the demolition and new construction, which would have meant creating something instead of destroying it, Hanigan took a quick profit by selling to Trump.
Further, in order to build Trump Tower, Trump bought the air rights from Tiffany's, the building next store. The air rights purchase insures that Tiffany's, an historic building in its own right, is preserved in perpetuity.
As Paul Harvey would say "Now you know the rest of the story."
Trump promised to save the sculptures on the facade of the building, but decided to renege on that promise because he didn't want to spend the money to save them. Their destruction was Trump's decision alone.
You're repeating from Wikipedia, which itself repeats a claim from a New York Times hit piece written in October 2020, just prior to the Presidential election.
There is no controversy. Trump promised the Art Deco reliefs and grill work to the Metropolitan Museum IF, and only IF, they could be preserved at a reasonable cost.
Since the reliefs were carved into the facade of the building and were located 8 stories above street level, estimates to remove them without breaking them were unreasonably large. Removal would have required closing 5th Avenue to both vehicle traffic as well as pedestrian traffic for two weeks, heavy duty cranes to lower slabs of limestone weighing close to 20 tons each and transportation of the heavy stones to the Museum.
It's unfortunate the artwork was lost. However, where was the Met Museum, an institution dedicated to the preservation of such artwork? When told preservation was too expensive, did they step up and cover the cost? Again, we have the rest of the story. No they didn't. But hey, why tell that part of the story when the goal is to bash Trump.
I have not read the Wikipedia article. My information is from contemporary reporting. My goal is to tell the truth.
"Reasonable cost" is the key phrase here. The truth, as you have verified, is that Trump chose not to save the sculptures because he, a self-professed billionaire, didn't want to spend the money to do so.
You've proved my point.
For people like Trump art is only a commodity, a number to be calculated against profit and loss, and whether it serves to glorify their ego. Anyone who has watched him dispassionately over the last four decades knows this.
Wrong again. Trump wasn’t “Trump” at that point in his career. In fact, the Bonwit Teller / Trump Tower project was his first construction project in New York City. It was 1980 and he was in his early thirties. He was just starting out and very far from a billionaire. So, yes, the cost of removal mattered at that point.
Real estate development in NYC is a nightmare, from community board review, setback requirements, air right assembly, ULURP, the logistics of bringing huge girders and beams onto an island using tunnels and bridges. My point - to add to that complexity by asking the City to approve shutting down Fifth Avenue just south of 57th Street for two weeks? That would have been absolute chaos.
If Trump was guilty of anything, it was being young and naive enough at that point to think such a thing as saving those reliefs was even possible.
I can't figure out which I'm happier about: that we're going to again construct beautiful governmental buildings, or that the nihilists are crying about it. I WANT to be happier about the beauty. But the idea that the haters might jump off a cliff and spare us their toxic anti-humanism is just too delicious.
Most people in my hometown have pictures of the "Old Town Hall" hanging on their walls, emblazoned on coffee mugs, or tucked away somewhere else. It's a symbol of our town. Everyone loves it, but no one has actually seen it. Like many classic buildings, it was torn down in the 60s and millions were spent to erect something utterly anonymous and lacking in dignity. Most people couldn't even tell you were our civic center is anymore.
Government buildings are ecclesial and liturgical spaces. Getting your driver's license, signing a marriage license, becoming a citizen, trying a murder case, voting on where our tax dollars go—all of these meaningful rituals tie together the life of our community. Our spaces must aspire to reflect the significance of these actions. They should inspire people's involvement.
Instead, they seemed designed to repel us through their banality and apathy—perhaps so people can make decisions and beaucracy can continue without the having to deal with nuisance of the public.
Today, people are hungry for spaces that make them feel more rooted and more human. You can see the interest people are taking in real estate, flipping properties, interior decorating, and making spaces that make them feel more alive. This directive is a good one. As someone who studied and loves the work of Christopher Alexander, this news gave me a lot of hope.
Trump, the man who destroyed an Art Deco masterpiece to replace it with the abomination that is the Trump Tower, who has lied and cheated his way to the presidency, who is the personification of gaudy bad taste, would not understand the kind of ideals you ascribe to Classical Architecture.
He knows nothing about history. He scorns our democratic institutions and the rule of law. He is even now in the process of upending them.
What he does understand is the symbolism of what he's seen in the movies. Classical Architecture is where the money and power reside; it reminds him of the days of despotic rulers, who commanded frenzied mobs screaming for blood and death. He models himself after those despots. We've seen it all unfolding on live TV.
Trump is the Caligula of our age. Don't project your own idealism onto his motives.
My observations are based on Trump's own words and actions. They are not opinions. Cold hard facts, not idealistic fantasies, are what will save our civilization from devolving into chaos that now threatens it.
We can't have beautiful architecture without the infrastructure of a stable and equitable society to support it.
Grand public buildings are nothing but hollow shells if the people who work there don't serve the best interests of the people who elected them. Civilizations crumble when the rich prosper in palaces and the people who created their wealth for them struggle to put food on the table. It has happened time and time again.
The story of Classical Architecture is more than just aesthetics, it's the story of the civilizations who created it. Politics is a word we use to describe the governance of those civilizations. You can't understand the former without understanding the latter.
So opting for ancient classical themes gives more civic pride than original American works? What’s wrong with Post Modernist/Deconstructionism of Frank Gerry or Eric Own Moss? There are several examples of styles that excel here in the USA. Why be stuck in the past?
Can you actually imagine 100 years from now everyone longing for the beauty of brutalism? Will people want to build structures to recapture the essence of Grave's The Portland Building or Boston City Hall? I just don't see it. There is a time and a place for everything, but some things beg not to be repeated.
Personally I find some brutalist buildings, including Boston City Hall, quite beautiful. Not all, but some.
That said, their symbolism is all wrong for public buildings. Brutalism is the architecture of power divorced from civic accountability. The architecture of faceless bureaucracy. Classical architecture, in contrast, is the architecture of a democratic republic.
Yes I can. If it invokes thought and conversation 100 years from now, all the better. There are those who like the federal buildings on Independence, but I find them depressing and void of any imagination. They embody what our federal government is, warehouses of bureaucracy with no one thinking toward that point in the future, like 100 yrs from now. Federal buildings don’t have to live in the 50ies in order to operate now.
I’ll have to politely disagree with you here - on some points, at least!
There is a deeper reason behind the shift towards neoclassical styles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For European empires, it was a process of teleological mimicry, a way for the global hegemons to place themselves as the successor to the Graeco-Roman tradition.
This both justified and naturalised their dominance over much of the world. It was a way to display a largely imagined heritage and legacy of exceptionalism within the urban landscape, asserting their position in a fictional line of succession dating back 2,000 years - how could imperial subjects and the domestic working classes hope to challenge such an entrenched system of power and dominance?
It is this system that I believe Trump is attempting to place his regime within. Without wishing to seem too hyperbolic, an association with the Roman Empire has been a fixation for many dictators - it is Mussolini who ordered the excavation of much of the original Classical architecture we see in Rome today.
I’ll be writing a longer piece about this, if anyone is interested - check back on my page next Friday!
Everything has always gotta be about those deplorable oppressors justifying their settler colonialist power, which was tooooootally unique in history, and which they exercised solely from the wickedness of their small bigoted hearts. Am I right, or am I right?
I didn’t mention anything about bigotry or wickedness, but okay?
The fact is that this emulation was a conscious effort on the part of rulers during this period, which did go hand-in-hand with attempts to draw on ideas of Greek and Roman heritage as a way to enhance their cultural prestige. This is not unique (and nor did I say it was!) - the Romans emulated Hellenic culture, and the Greeks adopted various Egyptian and Persian aesthetic styles as well.
It is that fact that it is NOT unique which allows us to consider this within the wider context of colonialism. This is something that empires do, and have always done. An empire requires a system of ideological singularity in order to survive - this is the dynamic that I believe Trump is trying to tap into with this executive order.
Interesting post, except where you use the Chicago Federal Center, a van der Rohe masterpiece and one of the most beautiful blocks in one of America's great cities, as an example of an "upsetting" building for federal workers. I would be immensely proud to walk through that lobby every day.
Did not know about this. It's sad for people who embrace Brutalism and what can be seen as uninspired or ugly. For the rest, it seems like a welcome development.
Good post. I thought it was interesting when architecture became a sticky point of complaint by Conservatives. I do like the theory of Federal buildings being ornaments of a nation and the emphasis on them standing a part. Makes sense.
I'm glad to see that federal institutions won't share styleguides with most every coffee shop and airbnb. The emerging metamodern era will be a fascinating time for design and art that oscillates between the best of the past and what has worked for humanity and the frequently described God-like technologies our species now creates. Exiting the deconstruction of postmodernism couldn't have happened fast enough and the next several decades will accelerate everything at a rate we can't comprehend. Enjoy the ride.
The Nazis banned modern art and architecture, too.
The Nazis drank water as well, thats crazy right?
Good grief!!!
By itself, your comment is an ad hominem fallacy, suggesting guilt by mere association, but without evidence or argument. Overusing that fallacy for the past four years is a major reason the Democrats lost the last election. Even school children recognize it is a bogus cheap shot. Nazis, like the rest of the world, hated modernist architecture because it hated family, history, beauty, and morals, and turned architecture into mere "machines for living" (Le Corbusier). Nazis also hated modernism because Walter Gropius and his Bauhaus movement were rival socialists of the communist sort. Both movements, politically and architecturally, were totalitarian to their core. For Trump to urge a return to the American heritage in civic architecture is a positive cultural revival, but also a rejection of the recent progressive, leftist advocacy of the two forms of European socialism that inspired the mass killing of their own citizens and the holocaust against Jews, Ukrainians, those with disabilities, and the weaponizing of the justice system against political opponents. That actually makes him an anti- Nazi-socialist.
Idaho man uses big words to say he’s a Christian nationalist.
That's what you took from this? How?
you'll hang your hat on anything that can be remotely connected to the Nazis so deep is your TDS
It worries me that you seek out fine examples of earlier architecture and equate modern architecture with brutalism and blank masses. Perhaps you lack confidence in the core strength of an argument for beauty, elegance of form, and human scale. But you shouldn’t. You should extend this gracefully to modern buildings that exemplify these virtues from Frank Lloyd Wright to Gaudi to Mies.
Yes, using brutalism as stand-in for all modern and post-modern architecture and leaving out the authoritarian love of Greco-Roman architecture is a choice. Not a good one.
He’s specifically speaking about GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS. Any examples of a non-brutalist or plain uninspiring glass and steel modern government buildings built in the last 50 years? Probably very few if any.
STFU bro.
He had no qualms about destroying the Bonwit-Teller building on 5th Avenue where his Trump Tower was built.
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/donald-trump-bonwit-teller-friezes-met-2132673
The building was owned by Genesco, whose president was John Hanigan, a known "turn-around" specialist who took over companies, sold off its assets and reduced costs by firing employees . It was Hanigan who shepherded the demolition plan through the NYC planning board. But instead of doing the demolition and new construction, which would have meant creating something instead of destroying it, Hanigan took a quick profit by selling to Trump.
Further, in order to build Trump Tower, Trump bought the air rights from Tiffany's, the building next store. The air rights purchase insures that Tiffany's, an historic building in its own right, is preserved in perpetuity.
As Paul Harvey would say "Now you know the rest of the story."
Trump promised to save the sculptures on the facade of the building, but decided to renege on that promise because he didn't want to spend the money to save them. Their destruction was Trump's decision alone.
You're repeating from Wikipedia, which itself repeats a claim from a New York Times hit piece written in October 2020, just prior to the Presidential election.
There is no controversy. Trump promised the Art Deco reliefs and grill work to the Metropolitan Museum IF, and only IF, they could be preserved at a reasonable cost.
Since the reliefs were carved into the facade of the building and were located 8 stories above street level, estimates to remove them without breaking them were unreasonably large. Removal would have required closing 5th Avenue to both vehicle traffic as well as pedestrian traffic for two weeks, heavy duty cranes to lower slabs of limestone weighing close to 20 tons each and transportation of the heavy stones to the Museum.
It's unfortunate the artwork was lost. However, where was the Met Museum, an institution dedicated to the preservation of such artwork? When told preservation was too expensive, did they step up and cover the cost? Again, we have the rest of the story. No they didn't. But hey, why tell that part of the story when the goal is to bash Trump.
I have not read the Wikipedia article. My information is from contemporary reporting. My goal is to tell the truth.
"Reasonable cost" is the key phrase here. The truth, as you have verified, is that Trump chose not to save the sculptures because he, a self-professed billionaire, didn't want to spend the money to do so.
You've proved my point.
For people like Trump art is only a commodity, a number to be calculated against profit and loss, and whether it serves to glorify their ego. Anyone who has watched him dispassionately over the last four decades knows this.
Wrong again. Trump wasn’t “Trump” at that point in his career. In fact, the Bonwit Teller / Trump Tower project was his first construction project in New York City. It was 1980 and he was in his early thirties. He was just starting out and very far from a billionaire. So, yes, the cost of removal mattered at that point.
Real estate development in NYC is a nightmare, from community board review, setback requirements, air right assembly, ULURP, the logistics of bringing huge girders and beams onto an island using tunnels and bridges. My point - to add to that complexity by asking the City to approve shutting down Fifth Avenue just south of 57th Street for two weeks? That would have been absolute chaos.
If Trump was guilty of anything, it was being young and naive enough at that point to think such a thing as saving those reliefs was even possible.
You mean this thing? https://drivingfordeco.com/stewart-and-company/
Just one ugly building replacing another one.
Granted, there were some nice sculptures and elements that should have been saved... But the building in its entirety wasn't worth saving.
I can't figure out which I'm happier about: that we're going to again construct beautiful governmental buildings, or that the nihilists are crying about it. I WANT to be happier about the beauty. But the idea that the haters might jump off a cliff and spare us their toxic anti-humanism is just too delicious.
Both are positive developments. You can be double-happy today.
Most people in my hometown have pictures of the "Old Town Hall" hanging on their walls, emblazoned on coffee mugs, or tucked away somewhere else. It's a symbol of our town. Everyone loves it, but no one has actually seen it. Like many classic buildings, it was torn down in the 60s and millions were spent to erect something utterly anonymous and lacking in dignity. Most people couldn't even tell you were our civic center is anymore.
Government buildings are ecclesial and liturgical spaces. Getting your driver's license, signing a marriage license, becoming a citizen, trying a murder case, voting on where our tax dollars go—all of these meaningful rituals tie together the life of our community. Our spaces must aspire to reflect the significance of these actions. They should inspire people's involvement.
Instead, they seemed designed to repel us through their banality and apathy—perhaps so people can make decisions and beaucracy can continue without the having to deal with nuisance of the public.
Today, people are hungry for spaces that make them feel more rooted and more human. You can see the interest people are taking in real estate, flipping properties, interior decorating, and making spaces that make them feel more alive. This directive is a good one. As someone who studied and loves the work of Christopher Alexander, this news gave me a lot of hope.
Trump, the man who destroyed an Art Deco masterpiece to replace it with the abomination that is the Trump Tower, who has lied and cheated his way to the presidency, who is the personification of gaudy bad taste, would not understand the kind of ideals you ascribe to Classical Architecture.
He knows nothing about history. He scorns our democratic institutions and the rule of law. He is even now in the process of upending them.
What he does understand is the symbolism of what he's seen in the movies. Classical Architecture is where the money and power reside; it reminds him of the days of despotic rulers, who commanded frenzied mobs screaming for blood and death. He models himself after those despots. We've seen it all unfolding on live TV.
Trump is the Caligula of our age. Don't project your own idealism onto his motives.
Why such harsh words, politics should not enter into this conversation! And...
you are wrong.
My observations are based on Trump's own words and actions. They are not opinions. Cold hard facts, not idealistic fantasies, are what will save our civilization from devolving into chaos that now threatens it.
We can't have beautiful architecture without the infrastructure of a stable and equitable society to support it.
Grand public buildings are nothing but hollow shells if the people who work there don't serve the best interests of the people who elected them. Civilizations crumble when the rich prosper in palaces and the people who created their wealth for them struggle to put food on the table. It has happened time and time again.
The story of Classical Architecture is more than just aesthetics, it's the story of the civilizations who created it. Politics is a word we use to describe the governance of those civilizations. You can't understand the former without understanding the latter.
Classical Architecture is based on mathematical principles that span many lifetimes. Classical principles in Architecture give us Humans a feeling of
belonging, a feeling of " what a nice room, what a nice place to be in"...
To foster this feeling has to do with understanding the above. Once we abandoned the principles, we abandoned the connection of Human to
Architecture. This has nothing to do with Politics, it has to do with understanding the principles.
This post is about a executive order issued by a President regarding public architecture funded by tax dollars. That’s pure politics, Helga.
You can always recognize the nihilists by their ressentiment.
ORANGE MAN BAAAAAD!!!1!!
Golden-age fallacy
The opening illustration makes a strong argument by itself.
Trump and politics aside, it’s a contest between graceful classicism, or something like it, and an oversize refrigeration unit. “Brutalist”, indeed.
Really good article. I welcome the upcoming return to traditional architecture and hopefully this is the beginning of the end for Post-Modernism. 👍
So opting for ancient classical themes gives more civic pride than original American works? What’s wrong with Post Modernist/Deconstructionism of Frank Gerry or Eric Own Moss? There are several examples of styles that excel here in the USA. Why be stuck in the past?
Can you actually imagine 100 years from now everyone longing for the beauty of brutalism? Will people want to build structures to recapture the essence of Grave's The Portland Building or Boston City Hall? I just don't see it. There is a time and a place for everything, but some things beg not to be repeated.
Personally I find some brutalist buildings, including Boston City Hall, quite beautiful. Not all, but some.
That said, their symbolism is all wrong for public buildings. Brutalism is the architecture of power divorced from civic accountability. The architecture of faceless bureaucracy. Classical architecture, in contrast, is the architecture of a democratic republic.
Yes I can. If it invokes thought and conversation 100 years from now, all the better. There are those who like the federal buildings on Independence, but I find them depressing and void of any imagination. They embody what our federal government is, warehouses of bureaucracy with no one thinking toward that point in the future, like 100 yrs from now. Federal buildings don’t have to live in the 50ies in order to operate now.
Yes trump famously known for his taste and well curated live of classical architecture. Nothing screams philosophy and beauty like a giant Trump sign
I’ll have to politely disagree with you here - on some points, at least!
There is a deeper reason behind the shift towards neoclassical styles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For European empires, it was a process of teleological mimicry, a way for the global hegemons to place themselves as the successor to the Graeco-Roman tradition.
This both justified and naturalised their dominance over much of the world. It was a way to display a largely imagined heritage and legacy of exceptionalism within the urban landscape, asserting their position in a fictional line of succession dating back 2,000 years - how could imperial subjects and the domestic working classes hope to challenge such an entrenched system of power and dominance?
It is this system that I believe Trump is attempting to place his regime within. Without wishing to seem too hyperbolic, an association with the Roman Empire has been a fixation for many dictators - it is Mussolini who ordered the excavation of much of the original Classical architecture we see in Rome today.
I’ll be writing a longer piece about this, if anyone is interested - check back on my page next Friday!
Everything has always gotta be about those deplorable oppressors justifying their settler colonialist power, which was tooooootally unique in history, and which they exercised solely from the wickedness of their small bigoted hearts. Am I right, or am I right?
I didn’t mention anything about bigotry or wickedness, but okay?
The fact is that this emulation was a conscious effort on the part of rulers during this period, which did go hand-in-hand with attempts to draw on ideas of Greek and Roman heritage as a way to enhance their cultural prestige. This is not unique (and nor did I say it was!) - the Romans emulated Hellenic culture, and the Greeks adopted various Egyptian and Persian aesthetic styles as well.
It is that fact that it is NOT unique which allows us to consider this within the wider context of colonialism. This is something that empires do, and have always done. An empire requires a system of ideological singularity in order to survive - this is the dynamic that I believe Trump is trying to tap into with this executive order.
Interesting post, except where you use the Chicago Federal Center, a van der Rohe masterpiece and one of the most beautiful blocks in one of America's great cities, as an example of an "upsetting" building for federal workers. I would be immensely proud to walk through that lobby every day.
Did not know about this. It's sad for people who embrace Brutalism and what can be seen as uninspired or ugly. For the rest, it seems like a welcome development.
Good post. I thought it was interesting when architecture became a sticky point of complaint by Conservatives. I do like the theory of Federal buildings being ornaments of a nation and the emphasis on them standing a part. Makes sense.