Even more menacing than her words are the black-and-white scenes of street violence and flag-burnings, like something out of a 1960s riot. And it is all set against a dystopian backdrop of iconic modern buildings. We see the swooping lines of Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney concert hall, the New York Times headquarters, designed by the Italian superstar Renzo Piano, even Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” sculpture in Chicago’s Millennium Park, affectionately known as “the Bean.” Better get a gun!

You wouldn’t think the National Rifle Association would have a position on modern architecture. But then you’d get a gander of an incendiary new ad from the pro-gun group. In 60 blistering seconds, NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch rips into the usual suspects: Hollywood, the mainstream media, and Barack Obama, claiming they are inciting violent protests against President Trump. “They use their media to assassinate real news,” she says. “And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance . . . to smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding.”


Not long after the NRA ad, the far-right website Infowars released a 15-minute video titled “Why Modern Architecture Sucks.” In this tirade from Infowars editor Paul Joseph Watson, Modernism is attacked as “totalitarian” and “a tool of social engineering.” Piano is thrashed for three very different buildings: his Pompidou Center in Paris, the Whitney Museum in New York City, and the monumental “Shard” tower in London. The video includes a clip from a 2004 TED talk in which Boston City Hall is called “a callous abomination” so dismal that “the winos don’t even want to go there.”

Coincidence? Many architects and urbanists don’t think so. Writing for The Atlantic’s website Citylab, Amanda Hurley notes that both videos “bear the same message about modern architecture: It is the province of the liberal urban elite, and it stands for oppression.” For Trump supporters looking to arouse the base, architecture is just another wedge in the culture wars.


Mark Pasnik, a Boston architect and coauthor of “Heroic,” an admiring survey of the Modernist concrete style sometimes called Brutalism, says the buildings “are easily demonized as representing the so-called big government that the right abhors.” Because the style was popular at a time, in the 1960s, when the Great Society was investing in public buildings, he says, “they perform well as stand-ins of a perceived welfare state that is to be attacked.”

Does architecture have an ideology? It’s true that European Modernists like Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, reacting to the carnage of World War I, wanted to wipe the slate clean with a stark new kind of architecture that eliminated the ornamentation of the Classical style. But it isn’t true that the rise of modern architecture signaled the death of human values. The Modernists were optimistic, even utopian idealists, who believed good design could improve the human condition, and they embraced future-focused new technologies, materials, and plans to erase social inequities in housing, workplaces, and communities.

In fact, many in Trump’s circle (including secretary of state Rex Tillerson and CIA director Mike Pompeo) are drawn to the author Ayn Rand, whose popular novel “The Fountainhead” extols the hero Howard Roark — a visionary modern architect struggling against hidebound traditionalists. Trump himself says he identifies with Roark.

Besides, the greatest threat to human-scaled architecture and an uplifted public realm is not modern design but modern economics. The imperatives of the market argue against ornamentation or preservation of classic old buildings. That is a financial choice, not an aesthetic one. Today, quick-buck developers foist cheap, soul-deadening, environmentally harmful sprawl on communities and call it progress. Where is the conservative outrage over that?

Renéee Loth’s column appears regularly in the Globe.