Federal design guidelines for government buildings aren’t normally front-page news. But a draft executive order that aims to rewrite the rules for federal buildings is attracting widespread attention in architectural circles and outside them. (On these pages, Kate Wagner has already offered a well-stated case against the order.) If enacted, it would abandon the open-minded and diverse approach that has shaped federal courthouses and complexes for the past 50 years. Classical elements that draw upon Greek and Roman sources would become the default style instead.

I confess to no small amount of affection for classical designs, which makes Washington, D.C., a particularly nice place for me to live. I’ll take the gleaming edifice of the Supreme Court building over the sterile harshness of the Hubert H. Humphrey Building, which houses the Department of Health and Human Services, any day of the week. That affinity is exactly why the order strikes me as a mistake—and why anyone else who appreciates those influences on American civic architecture should also oppose it.

The proposed executive order bears the title “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” a gaudy riff on Trump’s 2016 campaign slogan. It would require new federal buildings in and around Washington and federal courthouses nationwide to be classical in nature. The order takes aim at two particularly midcentury trends that dominated federal buildings in the late-twentieth century. “Architectural designs in the Brutalist and Deconstructivist styles, and the styles derived from them, fail to satisfy those requirements and shall not be used,” the order states.

For almost 60 years, the government has adopted a laissez-faire approach when it comes to designs for new federal buildings. The draft order seeks to rewrite the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture, a 1960s-era federal policy paper that explicitly renounced the idea of a specific federal style and opened the doors to new approaches. “The Guiding Principles implicitly discouraged classical and other designs known for their beauty, and declared that design must flow from the architectural profession’s reigning orthodoxy to the federal government,” the proposed order explains.

The order, if signed by Trump, would roll back that approach by constraining future federal buildings to fall within a poorly written mandate: “Architectural styles—with special regard for the classical architectural style—that value beauty, respect regional architecture, and command admiration by the public are the preferred styles for applicable federal buildings.” When renovating or altering existing federal buildings, government planners would also be required to study the feasibility of redesigning them to fit the preferred aesthetic.