The Civis in Civic Architecture

On the first day of the Trump Administration’s return to Washington, the White House issued a memorandum entitled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.” While the title might have been didactic, it was comprehensive. The memo called for recommendations to “advance the policy that Federal 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.” Cue the outrage.

The memo presaged the administration’s impending Uno Reverse Card played against the Biden Administration’s first reversal of the first Trump Administration’s 2020 executive order calling for the same approach. Luckily for chattering classes and self-ordained high priests of taste, whose necks must be sore from the whiplash, they will be spared the task of authoring new hand-wringing criticisms and can republish their outrage pieces from five years ago.  The memo has already driven some to make disapproving statements ranging the predictable gamut of lamenting the “[hindering] of design freedom,” comparing the president’s views to those of Stalin and Hitler, and accusing the move of “[sending] coded messages about white supremacy.” In short, tasteless, racist, and totalitarian—the formulaic reaction for almost anything the president does.

While one might be tempted to toss aside such commentary, it’s worth noting that the incident raises a crucial and sorely overlooked cultural point. The administration’s pointed interest in architecture, spanning now two terms, has been unseen for decades. Both it and the various hostile reactions touch not so much on differing views towards architecture, but the challenging of a century of hegemony in architecture theory and the reassertion of principles that have resonated throughout the centuries. It begs the question: Does America need great civic architecture? 

Such a question would not have even occurred to most people (regarding their own nations) throughout history. It would have been seen as a given that those buildings with the greatest significance in a community, meaning those concerned with divine or temporal authority, would naturally be the most notable, decorated, and glorious buildings in the community. Such an approach was fitting and proportional to the community’s reverence toward the authority housed and the rites performed within. The deficiency of the Israelites’ tent led to the construction of a proper house of the Lord in the Temple of Solomon. The Athenians crowned the highest point of their city with a collection of temples, “not less towering in their grandeur than inimitable in the grace of their outlines.” Abbot Suger, noted for his role in initiating the age of the gothic cathedrals, recognized that “the dull mind rises to truth through that which is material, and, in seeing this light, is resurrected from its former submersion” highlighting the effect of physical elements on human faculty and ordering this to the higher good of worship

Princes and potentates, too, received their architectural due. Pharaohs, doges, feudal lords, the British parliament, the Roman senate, and our own colonial assembly halls were all constructed with a sense of grandeur, or at least a measured nobility and dignity. An alternative was simply unthinkable. The importance of the task necessitated a proportional architectural form. These buildings were constructed in a plethora of styles, reflecting the range of ages and cultures the phenomena spanned. All, though, shared the emphasis and reiteration of human scale, symmetry of parts, decorative ornament, and measured proportions that help to define much of what is considered classical architecture. Windows were tall and narrow, framing the one who stands in it. The classical orders referred to the parts and proportions of the human body. The variety of carved, cast, and painted decoration, in addition to adding beauty to the building, rooted it in the viewer’s sense of scale, immediately communicating its size and, thereby, its relationship to him. 

The twentieth century witnessed a toxic combination of new architectural philosophies that deemed such approaches as anachronistic to the mechanized age and the rise of construction technologies that eliminated the traditional checks that helped to maintain a human scale. This heroic materialism was the ambition of a machine age, for which ornament, beauty, and man’s relationship to a building were deemed questions of a past age, ill-fitted to the new rationalism of progressive, twentieth century man, ever-freed from this drudgery of life by a constantly expanding panoply of technology. Ayn Rand synthesized such a view in her novel, The Fountainhead, in which the protagonist, Howard Roark, lone modernist genius, stands as a silent martyr to purity and rationalism against a corrupt cohort of traditional architects and citizens filled with jealousy and hate who attempt to thwart him at every turn. Such a view had become mainstream.

As such, newer buildings reflected prevailing thoughts, the effects of which predominate our civic spaces. Boston City Hall looms like an alien fortress, daring any citizen to enter as it governs a city known for its role in the Revolution. The Klucynski Federal Building in Chicago rises above the Windy City like the alien monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Perhaps most egregiously, the San Francisco Federal Building scars the landscape of one of America’s most beautiful cities, justly called out by name in the first executive order. These are perhaps some of the most notable examples, but the same battle is waged throughout small towns: the old town hall vs. the new, the 1980s post office, and the high school that sprawls shapeless towards the football field.

While all these commit crimes against man’s natural inclination towards human scale, understanding his place in the building, and his love of art and ornament, their offense is doubled because of their role as civic architecture. As demonstrated in previous millennia, such architecture is supposed to be a celebration of self-government, a fluorescence of the republican system, and orienting society towards a higher justice and morality that the law should emulate, a coalescing of the arts in a noble purpose. What virtually all the structures in the last seven decades have achieved is a gross neglect of the people that such institutions should represent.

Such faceless artifices pose another problem, neglecting the architectural language that has developed around our institutions. Libraries, courthouses, legislative buildings, and theaters built more than a century ago are almost all discernable as such. Those built after are so unintelligible that a bank, school, city hall, and church are virtually indiscernible from each other. Such an approach opposes civilization’s mission in bringing order out of disorder by implying that distinctions of purpose are irrelevant. It also fails in educating the citizen.

Law serves to execute justice and as a tutor to the public. Society is shaped by laws, which ought to reflect a higher ordering of morality. Architecture also serves as an educator. While the various pieces of the composition and details communicate the relationship to the observer through scale, history has imbued certain architectural forms with implications of their own. Such elements can be utilized to communicate the mission of a place further. The classical temple front of the Supreme Court Building (and countless courthouses and city halls across the country) ties the system of American justice and republican rule to its forebears in Ancient Greece and Rome and gives it a suitable gravity. Gothic college halls reflect the debt owed to the institutions’ forebears in medieval Oxford and Paris. It can even tie past and present together, as in the famous corn capitals of the columns of the Capitol Building, binding the old and new worlds together.

The argument for great civic architecture in America needn’t rely solely on the implication of order, disorder, and civilizational legibility. Simply observe the average citizen. How many people travel to Washington each year to walk among the monuments and grand halls of law? For which of the Library of Congress buildings do people wait in the hot sun to see? Where do people have their engagement and prom photos taken? What cities draw tourists in to gawk at their marvels? While those in architecture school and high-rise firms might make silver-tongued arguments from here to kingdom come, it seems that the citizen is a good judge of which civic buildings are great. A 2020 poll showed that almost three-quarters of Americans, across various subgroups, prefer a traditional, classical civic building over a modernist alternative.

Perhaps the uproar is so loud because the new gods have become old. The jig is up, and people want something beautiful for all the taxes they pay. A return to the old ways, to traditional and classical architecture, is a return to order, a return of the citizen as the measure of a structure, of an institution. If, as Protagoras says, “Man is the measure of all things,” let us hope this is a harbinger of returning to a more humane and citizen-centric order.

Paul Zepeda is an M.Arch student at the Catholic University of America focusing primarily on classical architecture and traditional building methods.