Public Art Should Please the Public
A democratically elected government should design buildings that don’t alienate the citizens who pay for them
President Trump signed a flurry of executive orders on Inauguration Day, covering topics as diverse as border security, free speech, climate change, drug laws and architecture.
Wait, architecture?
It should be no surprise that a real estate developer would be interested in buildings, something Trump telegraphed in the final year of his first term. His 2025 order “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” makes much the same argument as that of 2020: “Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.”
Compared to statements Trump makes hourly, it hardly seems controversial. Yet, like everything else involving our 45th and 47th president, controversy erupted anyway. The American Institute of Architects immediately condemned the order, noting its “strong concerns that mandating architecture styles stifles innovation and harms local communities.”
Mandating style guidelines is not some Trumpian conceit but is common throughout American history. New Orleans wouldn’t allow a postmodernist Popeyes in the French Quarter, and Santa Fe bans neoclassical structures anywhere in the city. Members of the AIA are free to design all the hideous buildings they want, just not at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.
Anyone who’s studied this branch of art history will know that architects are a surprisingly ideological lot. The Bauhaus school architects were dedicated Weimar socialists, Le Corbusier a national socialist and Oscar Niemeyer a communist. The leftist legacy lives on in the current design elite. And they loathe tradition.
Architecture critic Robert Bevan sniffed, “[T]he traditionalist lunatics have succeeded in taking over the asylum. Reactionary ideas hostile to the cosmopolitan, to Modernism, to modernity itself, are in the ascendant.”
One critic for The Nation claimed Trump’s goal wasn’t to encourage beautiful buildings, but “to make historical architecture on the whole inextricable from Eurocentric white supremacy.” A similarly ideological take fueled the statue desecrations of the George Floyd protests, toppling or vandalizing statues not only of Confederate generals and war dead, but of abolitionists, Spanish authors and the Great Emancipator himself.
The art world has grown angrier with Trump’s purging of the Kennedy Center board, claiming the Smithsonian has "come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology," and threatening the funding of other arts institutions. Contra critics, traditionalists haven’t launched a new culture war, but merely joined the decades-long fight.
The war on tradition doesn’t attack only our political, economic or social norms but any material symbol of those norms. Hence the violent attacks on statues and paintings. And of all public art, the most obvious and ubiquitous is architecture.
Once, federal buildings more or less adhered to neoclassicism. But the 1960s and ‘70s introduced brutalism, an ugly, dehumanizing style worst exemplified by the J. Edgar Hoover Building housing the FBI. The structure is straight out of Orwell, an intimidating concrete fortress of G-men that intimidates the public into looking away. Its anti-human design prevents any street-level public use with a moat surrounding three of its sides and security installations everywhere else.
In other words, the FBI headquarters perfectly encapsulates Brutalism, a style that replaces all decoration and beauty with megatons of bare concrete manhandled into cold geometric forms. Beloved by socialist ideologues, this utilitarian style resulted in little but dreary blocks of low-income housing from Chicago to London to East Berlin.
Brutalist structures are not only ugly, they suck the beauty, life and joy out of everything around them. The only people who appreciate these desiccated slabs of despair are self-appointed architectural elites who wish to impose their “rationality” and “order” upon a cowed public.
But shouldn’t a democratically elected government design buildings that don’t alienate the citizens who pay for them? To this end, the National Civic Art Society and the Harris Poll surveyed which style the public preferred. The results were overwhelmingly in Trump’s favor.
More than 7 in 10 Americans (72%) want a traditional look for federal buildings, including people across political parties and all demographic groups, including gender, age, region, household income, education and race.
But, surely, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Of course, those knuckle-dragging Philistines don’t find beauty in the stained gray slabs of Boston City Hall. But, as even the AIA’s Peter Miller puts it, “[T]he beauty and craftsmanship of a 14-century duomo in Siena will bring me to tears of emotion. A Daniel Libeskind building will not.”
Neuroscience has proved that humans respond more positively to symmetry, fractal patterns, and designs promoting natural materials and forms. Traditional architecture also builds at a human scale with an eye toward comfort. These buildings are designed in harmony with the human body, using proportions pleasing to the eye and spaces that feel welcoming and intimate. Rooms are designed to foster interaction and communication, with a balance between public and private spaces. Windows are placed to frame beautiful views and allow natural light to flood interiors, creating a sense of openness and connection to the outside world.
By contrast, modernist and brutalist designs often prioritize efficiency and abstraction, while the raw, unrefined surfaces and heavy, imposing forms create a sense of alienation— which may be one reason why so many public housing projects of the past 60 years are not only ugly but have fallen into disuse. In an authoritarian context, this is a feature, not a bug—the architectural equivalent of “a boot stamping on a human face—forever,” to reference Orwell once again. But it doesn’t fit a democratic society in which the government is subject to its people.
It’s worth mentioning that more conventional structures tend to be far more adaptable and sustainable. Natural materials like wood, stone and brick have proved to be remarkably durable and capable of withstanding the test of time. These materials age gracefully, developing character and charm as they weather the elements.
Modernist and brutalist designs, on the other hand, employ concrete, glass and steel, which not only are more energy-intensive to produce but deteriorate more rapidly. Even if people like the hulking FBI HQ, they shouldn’t like the vast concrete chunks that regularly fall off. The building literally is trying to kill passersby. Talk about brutal.
But what most grates on architectural elites is traditional buildings’ deep connection to past generations and the societies they inhabit. Buildings from previous eras carry the stories of their construction, the artisans who crafted them and the political, social and economic forces that shaped their design. This historical connection fosters a sense of continuity and belonging, reminding us of our shared heritage and cultural identity.
While some modernist monstrosities may express certain ideals of their time—functionality, progress, social revolution—they disregard the history and traditions that have shaped our communities. They intentionally dislocate the public from time, culture and the surrounding environment.
A respect for tradition isn’t turning the clock back, it merely introduces the past to the present in an evolving conversation. Brutalism and, to a great extent, modernism want to cancel the past entirely. It is always Year Zero and everything that came before must be rejected with extreme prejudice.
As Dostoyevsky wrote, “[B]eauty will save the world.” And it’s well worth fighting for.
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