Trump’s Renewed Mandate for ‘Classical’ Federal Architecture Raises Concerns

Since humans first abandoned their nomadic ways and started building permanent settlements, architecture has been a powerful tool for communicating authority and ideologies. Rulers across millennia have sought to shape national identity through construction—the “architecture of power” has long served as a vital tool for authorities to influence public opinion, convey values and mold cultural mindsets. In the hands of dictators, architecture has not infrequently become a propaganda machine for empire-building. Notably, when Mussolini and Hitler rose to power, they both sought to shape national character by calling for a return to Classical styles that referenced the monumental construction of ancient Greece and Rome.

“We build in order to fortify our authority,” the latter said. When he commissioned Albert Speer to plan Germany’s new capital, he wanted buildings that would give the world “a taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich” and “the feeling that one is visiting the master of the world.” Mussolini, for his part, used the Classical motif and identification with ancient Rome to frame his fascist regime as the rightful heir to the Roman Empire. Architecture was deployed to justify a fascist national power anchored on the glory of Italy’s past—the country could reclaim that past through “the use of Ancient Roman examples to create a new sense of discipline, militarism and order.”

In light of such historical precedents, some individuals and groups have raised concerns about President Donald Trump’s reinstatement of the “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” memorandum—a 2020 executive order mandating the use of a “classical style” that “commands public admiration.” Issued on January 20, just a few days after the inauguration, it recommends advancing “a 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.”

The memorandum was quickly met with criticism from the American Institute of Architects (AIA), which warned that it posed a direct threat to creative freedom. “AIA is extremely concerned about any revisions that remove control from local communities; mandate official federal design preferences or otherwise hinder design freedom; and add bureaucratic hurdles for federal buildings,” the organization declared in a January 21 statement. The AIA further argued that federal architecture should first and foremost serve the communities that use these buildings—not the ideological preferences of a single administration.

The 2020 executive order also faced significant criticism from U.S. architects, who viewed it as a dangerously regressive maneuver that stifled creative freedom and injected nationalist overtones into architectural policy—and indicative of government overreach. The text of the original order, which was repealed by President Joe Biden early in his term, reads in many ways like a propagandistic essay, filled with rhetorical flourishes dressed up as historical analysis: “Ancient Greek and Roman public buildings were designed to be sturdy and functional, while also beautifying public spaces and inspiring civic pride,” the order claimed, later referencing medieval and Renaissance architecture as proof that monumental buildings have always served “public purposes.” It also took not-so-subtle digs at modernist architecture, stating that contemporary design “sometimes impresses the architectural elite, but not the American people who the buildings are meant to serve.”

More controversial was the original executive order’s insistence on architectural designs that “respect the regional heritage and align with America’s classical traditions.” But what, exactly, constitutes these “American classical traditions”? The order conveniently sidesteps the fact that early U.S. architecture was little more than a Neoclassical remix of Andrea Palladio’s work—filtered through 18th-century British tastes and the Romantic revival of an idealized classical past. Palladio himself, the official architect of the Venetian Republic, was already working off the Roman playbook, adapting it to the needs of his time. The Palladian style spread across Europe before reaching the U.S., largely thanks to Lord Burlington’s influence in Britain.

Founding father Thomas Jefferson, an art lover who was passionate about classical culture, found in Palladio’s Four Books on Architecture a style he felt could convey a sense of balance and harmony in a country that was at the time troubled by ongoing division. That’s why the White House is draped in Neoclassical grandeur that draws from the Palladian vocabulary, its pronaos—that stately porch supported by columns—framing both the North and South entrances. As the order itself notes, the founding fathers wanted federal buildings that would “inspire the American people and encourage civic virtue,” which is why both President George Washington and Jefferson modeled key government buildings after ancient Athens and Rome.

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But that initial adoption of the Neoclassical style in the United States eventually branched into many eclectic interpretations, and so it is perhaps unsurprising that the executive order’s definition of “Classical” is vague at best and confusing at worst, encompassing Georgian, Greek Revival, Gothicism, Beaux-Arts and Art Deco styles before broadening even further to specify that “Traditional architecture” includes all “the historic humanistic architecture,” from Gothic and Romanesque to Pueblo Revival and Spanish Colonial—anything, really, so long as it predated the modernist era. Interestingly, that era marked the moment when the United States began to significantly contribute to the history of international architecture.

The order specifically calls out the Brutalist style, which grew out of the early 20th-century modernist movement and became very popular in the postwar race for urbanization and production thanks to architects like Hungarian-German U.S. naturalized citizen Marcel Lajos Breuer (designer of New York’s iconic Breuer, which has housed the Whitney, Metropolitan and Frick collections and is now home to Sotheby’s) and Paul Rudolph (who designed the building that houses Yale University’s School of Architecture), among others. Additionally, the order outright forbids the “Deconstructivist” style, which emerged in the late 1980s as a radical break from architectural orthodoxy. Built on postmodernist principles, Deconstructivism championed discontinuity and fragmentation over the symmetry classical purists revere. Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) was a foundational text, while architects like Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry and Daniel Libeskind became some of the most recognizable figures in the field. The outright rejection of both Brutalism and Deconstructivism had an eerie historical echo: the Third Reich targeted the Bauhaus movement, condemning its functionalist, minimalist aesthetic and branding it “degenerate.”

For decades, the U.S. government has favored a more flexible approach. The Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, published in 1962, encouraged modernist styles over classical pastiche, arguing that government buildings should reflect contemporary design rather than be locked in historical mimicry. The modernist embrace of innovation was seen as an expression of the new American genius. The recently released memorandum calls for revisions to the Guiding Principles that would, so it seems, significantly narrow the scope of the kinds of buildings capable of ennobling the United States.