Trump Will Not Make Architecture Great Again

What will happen to architecture in Trump’s second presidency? This is a question that worries industry insiders and critics alike. I began my career as an architectural critic in the shadow of the first Trump administration. It became clear early on that Trump, being a developer, was keen to get involved in architectural matters. It was expected to go the way of, say, the edifice that Eric Adams built for the Turkish government, i.e., blatant bribery. Instead, he took another turn.

One of Trump’s greatest successes was fanning the flames of the culture war, and architecture was no exception. He and his party achieved this in several different ways. On the one hand, he appointed archconservatives to important advisory boards of the federal government. Here’s just one example: He invited Justin Shubov, a longtime proponent of the “traditional aesthetic”—which essentially means neoclassical architecture made with modern building materials—to the United States Commission on Fine Arts, which oversees all construction in Washington, DC. Ultimately, however, it had little effect. Trump’s executive order that “Make federal buildings beautiful again”, another attempt to inject a faux Greek aesthetic into government buildings is dead in the water, probably because he had bigger fish to fry. While he didn’t get all the marble columns he wanted, Trump won in other ways on the architectural front.

Around the mid-2010s, right-wing outlets like Fox News began to drag the field of architecture into the culture wars, best exemplified by Tucker Carlson’s arm-wringing against “postmodernism,” at the time a catch-all term for anything coded. as academic and liberal, whether it was about gender theory or literary poststructuralism. It doesn’t matter what’s there was an architectural movement called postmodernism, which in its most revanchist forms was not so politically incompatible with the aims of Tucker et al. Indeed, postmodern neoclassicism—à la Léon Krier, with his anti-modernist checkmarks, or Prince Charles’s experimentally planned town of Poundbury, with its grand gables and silly lintels—already seemed to have settled those accounts some 40 years ago, after which everyone got bored. Nor did it matter that Carlson used the word to lump together all modern and contemporary architecture regardless of period, a category that also includes most of Trump’s designs. For the New Right, postmodernism simply meant: not neoclassical, but therefore liberal and degenerate (ugh!) and, of course, depriving the world of beauty.

At the time, most critics, myself included, spent a lot of energy trying to call the right “trad guys» on their hypocrisy, lack of knowledge and complete material impossibility of their demands. (We can’t bring back all those depleted 19th-century quarries.) We’ve lost that battle. Part of what we lost was because architecture was just a front for what was essentially a broader far-right advocacy of “traditional values.” The real goal was to make historic architecture in general inextricable from Eurocentric white supremacy. The same ancient Rome that inspired Mussolini was still doing the job for Carlson and the marble bust avatars on Twitter. The problem was that if we called a spade a spade, we had already lost by simply being “woke up”. of course “Love Beauty” was not a supporter of white supremacy, are you crazy?

The right was able to capitalize on this rhetoric because there was an inconvenient truth behind it: lots of new buildings there is ugly. They are ugly, not because of a culture war, but because they are built on the cheap to best satisfy the profit motive behind real estate development as we know it. Whatever the value of traditionalism as a rhetorical cudgel, the real reason few attempt to build “traditionally” today is the enormous cost. So when architects build buildings in the neoclassical style, they tend to have a certain McMansion I don’t know what; look, for example, at the absurdly pompous Schermerhorn Center for the Performing Arts in Nashville. It didn’t matter to the culture war pundits that things couldn’t be made “beautiful” for the same reason they were made ugly—there must be an ideological conspiracy theory behind it all.

For all intents and purposes, the right has won the architectural culture war in that traditional or historic architecture has become politicized in a way that contradicts why it was built or how it continues to relate to everyday life. We haven’t figured out how to solve this problem in four years of a Democratic president; it was only a little quiet because no one was blowing on the coal. Another thing that faded under Biden was the socialist movement that brought architecture some of the most important developments of the mid-2010s. For example, the Architecture Lobby, an organization that advocates for the labor rights of architects, gained momentum in the early Trump years. Efforts to unionize architecture firms that began in the early years of the Trump administration are finally bearing fruit at offices like Bernheimer Associates. Another human rights group, Who Builds Your Architecture?, which aimed to shine a light on abuses in the construction industry, also started at the time, although sadly it appears to be defunct.

Academia has seen a huge surge in under-researched topics in architectural theory, such as work, maintenance and logistics. Architectural criticism also flourished with the development of publications such as New York Review of Architecture. Environmental organizations like the Sunrise Movement and the Green New Deal task force of the Democratic Socialists of America have sparked a flurry of activity in both political and academic circles, where people from all walks of life are organizing for things like a just transition or seeking new ways of thinking about urban ecology, transport, sustainability and energy. The Democratic presidency, combined with the pandemic, has sapped a lot of that energy. As the Biden administration failed to deliver on promise after promise, the momentum faded. Now we are left with a demoralized, exhausted and disillusioned body politic. This is the biggest obstacle facing not only architectural propaganda, but also left-wing literature.

We are smarter and better prepared politically than eight years ago. There are many strategies that we don’t need to spend time trying again and again. The Women’s March may not have mattered much, but the revival of the labor movement did. There was a lot of distracting nonsense – “covfefe” etc. and we don’t need to spend time on that in this round. Trump’s plans will be disastrous for many fields, including architecture. His tariffs will completely destroy the construction industry and make it incredibly expensive to build anything. Right now, he and Elon Musk are planning to uproot the federal government for profit, and with it any form of public infrastructure. Architecture as a profession is in the mud, new construction has already stopped since last year. Things will only get worse, as the industry is particularly vulnerable to financial shocks and fluctuations in the real estate market. without end”vibocession,” and with Trump already abandoning plans to cut inflation because it eats away at corporate profits, things are only going to get worse from here (if you’ll excuse the pun).

One thing is clear, we cannot just stand by and watch. It’s easy to throw up our hands and say, well, we tried. The thing is, we didn’t—I didn’t—try hard enough. The fire that Trump has lit in the politics of the anthropogenic environment has been an extremely generative creative and ideological force. Perhaps by the time he takes office the coals will have cooled and we may have to do some of that stoking ourselves. But before the fire warmed us. He has to do it again.