Unless you’re a hermit, you can’t escape the built environment.
“You can put down a bad book; you can avoid listening to bad music; but you cannot avoid the ugly tower block opposite your house,” Italian architect Renzo Piano said.
Architecture can subtly, often inexplicably, affect us, making the architect’s pen mightier than the sword.
“A nation’s civic architecture ought to embody its highest ideal. Public buildings speak to who we are and who we wish to be, at least when they’re done properly,” National Civic Art Society president Justin Shubow told The Epoch Times.
We saw this after the U.S. Capitol building was attacked on Jan. 6, 2021, when both Democrat and Republican politicians talked about the desecration of this temple to democracy.
“If the U.S. Capitol had been brutalist in style, I don’t think anyone would have said that it was desecrated; you can’t desecrate a brutalist, bare concrete design,” Mr. Shubow said.
During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, the “modern era” of architecture, the General Services Administration (GSA) built more than 600 federal buildings, many of which are in the brutalist style, new at the time, which championed abstract blocks of steel-strengthened concrete. Many of those buildings can be seen in the GSA video “Democratic by Design: Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture,” in which federal architects state the principles that they’ve adhered to since 1962. The video shows the stark contrast between the classical architecture standards set by the Founding Fathers and the now overwhelming bias toward modernist design.
“The buildings we build are the connective tissues that make us a nation,” the narrator states at the start of the video.
If that’s true, then how can a nation have vast disparities in architectural styles—the classical versus the progressive—and how does this affect us as individuals and as a nation?
Our Classical Capital
America’s Founding Fathers created the nation using classic and Christian philosophical principles. Thomas Jefferson wrote to the French artist Pierre Charles L’Enfant that the Capitol’s architecture should be based on “the models of antiquity, which have had the approbation of thousands of years.”Mr. Shubow explained that Jefferson set the tone for U.S. governmental architecture when he designed the Virginia State Capitol. It’s a classical design inspired by the Maison Carrée in Nimes, France, an ancient Roman temple.
Classical artist Michael Curtis told The Epoch Times that the nation built three temples to represent philosophical questions: the question of knowledge (the Library of Congress), the question of conduct (the U.S. Supreme Court building), and the question of governance (the U.S. Capitol building).
“These are the essential questions of beauty, goodness, and truth,“ he said. ”What is our place in the universe? How do we solve these essential questions of knowledge, of conduct, and of governance?”
In his book “Classical Architecture and Monuments of Washington, D.C.: A History & Guide,” Mr. Curtis wrote: “You will notice that buildings that are true to the nation’s founding principles are beautiful, celebratory or solemn, appropriate to humanity, fitting the vicissitudes requisite of the citizen; then you will notice that buildings true to the tenets of scientific progressivism confront humanity with opposition, that they are scaled to the state, not to the citizen.”
For instance, the U.S. Supreme Court is based on a Roman basilica. To enter the court building, visitors must first ascend a number of steps, which are flanked at the top by statues of “The Authority of Law” and “The Contemplation of Justice.” Then visitors walk between high columns on top of which are pediments with sculptural reliefs depicting liberty, order, authority, and the like. Every decorative element inside, from the friezes to the busts, reinforces the cardinal virtue of justice.
Of the building, Mr. Curtis wrote, “We are meant to feel the majesty of Law and we do.”
Mr. Shubow explained that a Democrat-appointed federal judge, Jeffry H. Gallet, even wrote an essay on how people had greater decorum and better behavior in a classical courthouse than in a modernist one.
Our ‘Progressive’ Architecture
In 1901, the U.S. Treasury Department, which was responsible for federal architecture, stated that classical architecture should be the default architecture for federal buildings. However, U.S. federal architecture forever changed in 1962, when executive assistant Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a one-page directive titled “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture” in a report to the president by the ad hoc committee on Federal Office Space.Moynihan’s principles specified that there be no official style of government architecture and that architectural designs should flow from the architects to the government and not the other way around.
Mr. Shubow said: “The government was allowing modernist architects, who were by far predominant in the profession, to dictate what was being built. It was an application of authority and this application continues today.”
He stressed that Moynihan’s “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture” has never been codified into law or instituted through an executive order. But the GSA, now responsible for federal architecture, uses them as a directive.
In 1968, Hungarian German architect Marcel Breuer (1902–81) designed the 10-story Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, the headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in Washington, following Moynihan’s principles. It’s a brutalist design that Mr. Shubow said “gives the feeling of a faceless, oppressive bureaucracy.”
Two HUD secretaries expressed their disdain for the building. Democrat Shaun Donovan said that “the building itself is among the most reviled in all of Washington—and with good reason,” and Republican Jack Kemp described it as “10 floors of basement.” Visitors comment on how hard it is to find the entrance to the featureless building, creating discomfort, confusion, and alienation before even entering the department.
Modern architects understand the psychological effects of their designs.
Swiss French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (1887–1965), commonly known as Le Corbusier, once said: “I myself am installed in a windowless air-conditioned office, a kind of cell. My visitors are conscious of this fact, which makes them speak concisely and to the point.”
Le Corbusier was a pioneer of modern architecture, including brutalist architecture.
In contrast, Mr. Shubow highlighted Alabama’s Greek-Revival Tuscaloosa Federal Building and Courthouse built in 2011 as an exception to the modernist hegemony. How did these federal buildings in Tuscaloosa escape the modernist fate? Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) told the GSA that he wanted a classical courthouse. On Sept. 15, 2023, the buildings were renamed the Richard Shelby Federal Building and Courthouse.
Marking the occasion, Chief U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Alabama L. Scott Coogler, who was also involved in the building’s conception, said in a statement, “The neo-classical design inspires both judges and juries and will continue to do so for decades to come.”
Mr. Shubow said: “I think it’s important for Americans to feel like we are still in the first republic. In other words, our system of government has not fundamentally changed since the country was established.”
People visit buildings such as the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorials in quintessentially American places that show the continuity of tradition. The Jefferson Memorial and the U.S. Supreme Court buildings were built in the modern era, but they are completely harmonious with the U.S. Capitol building, he explained.
Architectural Uprising
In 2020, the National Civic Art Society hired The Harris Poll to conduct a survey of Americans’ preferences in federal architecture, and the survey found that 72 percent of Americans favored traditional architecture for federal office buildings and U.S. courthouses. The poll included wide majorities across all demographic groups, including socioeconomic status, political party, race, and ethnicity.Politicians are pushing for a revival of the Founding Fathers’ vision of federal architecture. In 2020, President Trump signed an executive order, “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.” Although President Joe Biden canceled it shortly after he entered office, two 2023 bills incorporated the order’s policies.
On June 13, 2023, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) introduced the ‘‘Beautifying Federal Civic Architecture Act of 2023’’ bill to the U.S. Congress. At about the same time, Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) introduced a companion bill (H.R.3627), of the same name, to the House of Representatives.
Both bills state, “Federal public buildings should—uplift and beautify public spaces; inspire the human spirit; ennoble the United States; command respect from the general public; be visually identifiable as civic buildings; and as appropriate, respect regional architectural heritage.”
The bills require that classical and traditional architecture be the preferred style of federal public buildings around the country and the default style for federal public buildings in Washington. Under the new bills, a public consultation process would occur before the selection of an architectural firm and design style.
Mr. Shubow noted that, after a 2023 Government Accountability Office report on federal buildings, the GSA agreed to change its processes and procedures to require that the public be consulted on federal public building design decisions. This is an important factor because “when you enter a building, you’re entering the mind of an artist—you’re living in their mind,” the classical artist Mr. Curtis said.
“Architecture can either give people a sense of permanence, of stability, of a belief in the existence of the truth, the beautiful and the good, or it can undermine. It can demoralize,” Mr. Shubow said.
We cannot change our built environment, but we can pressure our representatives to hold federal architecture to our nation’s highest ideal, as our Founding Fathers intended.
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