From Bloomberg:
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday making classical architecture the preferred style for federal buildings in Washington, a White House official said Monday.
The presidential action stops short of mandating that all new federal buildings are built in a classical style, saying merely that they must be “beautiful.”
Under the order, a “Council for Improving Federal Civic Architecture” will be formed to recommenced updates to the General Services Administration’s architectural guidelines.
The administration has been writing the executive order for months, and an early draft that would have banned modernist design prompted condemnation from the American Institute of Architects and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
“Architecture should be designed for the specific communities that it serves, reflecting our rich nation’s diverse places, thought, culture and climates,” the AIA said in a statement. “Architects are committed to honoring our past as well as reflecting our future progress, protecting the freedom of thought and expression that are essential to democracy.”
The Trump New Architectural Order has a fan
One person watching Trump’s architectural ambitions from the start was Pharos, the pseudonynmous author of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer [named after Der Stürmer the vision rag put out by Hitler’s top antisemitic scribe, Julius Streicher. After praising the effort to bring back the neoclassical, he ventures to explain why the style iis so popular among his ilk:
White Southerners are like the Italians living among the ruins of the Roman Empire. These monuments are reminders that we used to be a great people and can be so again. In the 19th century, the Southern people were a race of masters, explorers, settlers, statesmen, military leaders and orators. We see neoclassical Greco-Roman architecture and Greek and Roman place names all over the South because that’s who our classically educated ancestors admired and wanted to be like.
Also noticing the connection between totalitarianism and buildings with columns was The Architect’s Newspaper, which reported on a disturbing trend two years ago:
British magazine New Statesman recently published an article on the troubling links that tie Twitter accounts that cover traditional architecture to racist and xenophobic figures from across the web. As the article describes, some social media accounts that at first seem to simply celebrate historic structures have a tendency to veer into rhetoric that praises European culture over others and aggressively denies the impact of non-white or non-Christian people on Western design. One of the accounts profiled in the piece follows many ethnocentrist figures and has a followership that sharply denounces any attempts to include or even acknowledge global influences.
This is not the first time that neo-traditionalist architects have been tied to fascists. The accounts frequently post drawings from Leon Krier, the traditionalist architect who studies the work Albert Speer, the chief architect of the Nazi Regime. Philip Johnson was famously a Nazi sympathizer, despite being openly gay, something that would have gotten him sent to a concentration camp in Hitler’s Germany. Even Le Corbusier, that icon of modernism, apparently did not see much wrong with fascist regimes—they may have appealed to his desire for an authoritarian, top-down remake of society.
Hitler move the classical too
The link between classical architecture and fascism was made clear by Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and perhaps the closest thing the Nazi boss had to a friend, in an interview with Peter Foges, cited in Lapham’s Quarterly:
Thirty years later the Führer ordered the rebuilding of thirty German cities, and Speer’s particular mission was to reshape Berlin. “My architecture was essentially political, a display of power,” said Speer without a hint of apology. “Some clever English critic recently called it ‘total’ architecture. The Romans understood this. When they built the new marbled Rome, the Emperors Augustus and Hadrian set out to intimidate, to create awe. My Berlin was designed to do the same. It was modeled on Roman lines. A new imperial Roman city would be laid out with the main avenue being a north-south cardo maximus. This bisected a decumanus maximus running east-west, in the city center, and there, where they crossed, was the forum, where the great public buildings were positioned. Berlin was going to have that. At our intersection we were going to create a huge public forum with massive monuments and state buildings on display—the so-called opera publica. That was where the almost unbelievably massive Volkshalle was going to be. Hitler wanted it to be a copy of the Pantheon in Rome—but twenty times larger.” At this point Speer took out a drawing folded into one of the books he had fetched and spread it on the stone terrace floor. It must have measured three feet by six. “There,” he said. It was the plan, rendered in faded shades of brown and green on a scale of 1: 4,000. At the top of the by-now deeply creased architect’s sheet, it simply said: “A new plan for Berlin, based on an idea of the Führer’s, and worked out in detail by A. Speer.” “Hitler was of course a megalomaniac,” said the former Nazi Inspector General of Buildings for the Renovation of the Federal Capital, matter-of-factly.
And on a lighter note. . .
We’ll close with a graphic comment from the the editorial cartoonist of the Sacramento Bee:
Jack Ohman: Come on in. . .
eats shoots 'n leaves 
