President reportedly wants to mandate return to ‘classical architectural style’, according to draft order

This article is more than 7 months old

This article is more than 7 months old

Donald Trump wants to “make federal buildings beautiful again” by mandating a return to “the classical architectural style”, according to a draft executive order obtained by Architectural Record on Tuesday.

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The Record reported that it had obtained “what appears to be a preliminary draft of the order”.

Under the order, it said, the White House would require a rewrite of the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, issued in 1962, “to ensure that ‘the classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style’ for new and upgraded federal buildings”.

Confirming to the Guardian that the Record was reporting a genuine draft document, the Pulitzer prize-winning architectural critic Paul Goldberger said the problem with the order was “not with classical architecture per se”.

It was, he said, that “the mandating of an official style is not fully compatible with 21st-century liberal democracy”.

The Guiding Principles were written for John F Kennedy by the New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who died in 2003. They explicitly say “an official style must be avoided” and that new buildings should reflect their own time.

“Design must flow from the architectural profession to the government and not vice-versa,” Moynihan writes. “The government should be willing to pay some additional cost to avoid excessive uniformity in design of federal buildings.”

On its website, the American Planning Association calls Moynihan’s work “the cornerstone of the General Services Administration [GSA] Design Excellence Program”, which the APA says “elevated attention to design and the integration of planning, architecture, public art and the landscape into a public realm of beauty and utility”.

Before entering the White House, Trump was for nearly 50 years a real estate tycoon not noted for using the classical style in his residential and commercial buildings, favouring standard steel-and-glass modernism instead.

The Trump Organization, the president’s family business empire, has been criticised for its brutal treatment of older buildings which come under its sway, for example the Bonwit Teller building in New York.

But the draft Trump order on a return to classicism is reportedly entitled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” – in echo of Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again”.

It reportedly argues that when designing and building the federal capital in Washington in the late 18th century, America’s founders “embraced the classical models of ‘democratic Athens’ and ‘republican Rome’ … because the style symbolized the new nation’s ‘self-governing ideals’”.

Pointing out that neoclassicism was simply the dominant architectural style of the time, the Record also said the draft order criticises the GSA Design Excellence Program “for its failure to re-integrate ‘our national values into federal buildings’”, which have too often been “influenced by brutalism and deconstructivism”.

The US federal building in San Francisco (2007), the US courthouse in Austin, Texas, (2012) and the Wilkie D Ferguson Jr US courthouse in Miami (2007) are reportedly cited as having “little aesthetic appeal”.

The Record said the draft order uses words used by Moynihan – “dignity, enterprise, vigor and stability” – but says brutalism and deconstructivism “fail to satisfy these requirements and shall not be used”.

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Goldberger said that in the realm of public architecture, Moynihan was “the most important officer of the federal government since Thomas Jefferson”. The Trump order, he said, appears to “twist and contort … his language to do precisely what he warned against”.

Goldberger questioned whether the leak of the draft order would “frighten” the administration away from making it a reality or perhaps “embolden” it to push ahead with the change.

The Record noted that David Insinga, the GSA’s chief architect and director of the Design Excellence Program, resigned his post last week. It also noted the appointment to a key presidential commission of Justin Shubow, the president of the Civic Arts Society and an opponent of much modern architecture in the public sphere, including a new federal memorial to President Eisenhower, designed by Frank Gehry and soon to be unveiled in Washington DC.

The Guardian has requested White House comment.