A former colleague of mine was fond of saying “Politics is more important than architecture.” Perhaps, in the short term; but long term architecture outlasts politics, and therefore its impact is greater over time. That being said, architecture is not immune to politics, and can itself be political in both the broad and specific senses. Politics being rooted in the polis, architecture has been political in the sense of urban, rooted in the city, for thousands of years. But there are complex problems in associating a particular kind of architecture (a language or style) with a particular kind of politics (a party or philosophy), for the same reasons that it is difficult to associate language with politics. Still, certain words, or even phrases, can be condemned for their association with nefarious politics: arbeit macht frei, for example. And Southern plantation architecture is difficult to dissociate from slavery, or Albert Speer’s work from Nazi Germany. Where, then, are the legitimate associations and disassociations? Is the German language forever tainted by Nazism, or classical architecture by slavery?

What is especially worrisome, partly for its lack of historical credibility, is the notion that classical architecture is conservative. While the caricature of a classicist in Peter Keating that Ayn Rand offered in The Fountainhead may not be so far from the reality of early twentieth-century America, it hardly defines Jacopo Sansovino’s radical interventions in Venice’s Piazzetta di San Marco, Bramante and Michelangelo’s St. Peter’s, or Giulio Romano’s Palazzo Te, much less the adventurousness of a Borromini, Guarini or Vittone. For the Renaissance humanist tradition, what we call classicism wasn’t done because it was “traditional,” but because it was good, and beautiful. Indeed, the traditional was often despised for precisely the reasons it is espoused today: familiar, conservative, eschewing invention.

That is not, of course, to say that there is no conservative classicism. Indeed, there may be too much of it today. But the history of classicism is not inherently conservative, at least as it was practiced by the greatest of the tradition. A danger of classicism ossifying into conservatism is that becomes directly tied to a particular politics, and will live or die with it. That’s a political risk as much as an architectural one. Exclusively architecturally, conservative classicism locks it into a continuous loop of repetition, and like a photocopy several generations removed from the original, it loses both clarity and quality.

What’s the answer? Knowing the history for one, and accepting its lessons: copying the past was for amateurs and beginners; the good in architecture was subject to constant debate and revision; the language was a means, not an end. Architecture should respond to transcendent ideas, not the dog whistle of demonizing Modernism. The battle for beauty will be won by aesthetic arguments, not by reference to tradition—because, frankly, not all traditions are good traditions.