Executive Disorder

You cannot build “traditional” public buildings without public money to build them with, or civil servants to put in them, or public business to conduct in them. As all these things are anathema to the anarcho-capitalist deviants presently gratifying themselves upon the levers of power, there can be no point in reissuing the order—nor can there be any point in mounting a sustained critique of the order, beyond what was said before: that it is very expensive to build classical buildings (good ones, that is); that it was already allowable for the feds to build them, under GSA’s 1962 “Guiding Principles” that stipulated no one “official style,” but also did not bar any particular style; that it is slander on the good name of classicism to make it an instrument of authoritarianism, which confessedly it sometimes has been, though really through no fault of its own, and anyhow there is no point arguing taste. There is no point, not even in giving additional hell to the people, the Washington, DC–based National Civic Art Society (NCAS) specifically, who formulated the original order and have been its foremost champions. I know their kind, and I can honestly state that, notwithstanding certain peculiar habits (e.g., walking around at times with their hands dangling in front of them, Mr. Burns–fashion), they are mostly just old men who like old buildings, and are harmless when left to their own devices.

If only they would be. One of the hallmarks, surely, of the present historical moment in the United States is the way it has rendered monstrous so many phenomena that once appeared—not attractive, exactly, but only quaintly unappetizing. The bedsheet-blinded windows behind the sagging row-house porch; the VFW’s dim fluorescent marquee; the religious program on the taxicab radio; the barstool philosopher, four o’clock–ish, just getting started: A substantial portion of what once seemed eccentric marginalia, the sort of thing Greil Marcus called the “old weird America,” takes on a sinister valence, bares its yellow teeth. The defection of a few opponents of modernist design to the cause of ultra-nationalism is no longer news, and was never terribly surprising to begin with—but what is remarkable, and what could make a useful object of inquiry, is how this development has paved the way for a new, very different cohort of familiar cultural actors to follow the same course. Architecture, rarely ahead of the curve, was in some sense the first on the scene with this one, and it offers a test case for how intellectual naïfs can succumb to the politics of power. It also shows why doing so is such an extraordinarily bad idea.

Lyndon B. Johnson was known to lambaste vacillating politicos by comparing them to a country schoolteacher he’d known back in Texas: When asked if the world was round or flat, the teacher replied, “I can teach it either way.” Architects, for the most part, are country schoolteachers through and through—from their first grad-school pin-up to their last two-stage selected international competition, design professionals are in the business of guessing what their clients want and rapidly tailoring their views to the occasion. In his 2021 novel The Masterplan, author Reinier de Graaf (a longtime partner at Rem Koolhaas’s firm OMA) tells the story of a young European, heir to a legacy practice, dispatched by his famous father to a remote African republic where he and his visionary urbanist schemes are slowly ground under by the machinations of the local regime. “Success,” in the protagonist’s mind, “was the ultimate divorce of cause and effect”; the attainment of it, for the architect, would be its own justification.

A related ethic—“The first principle of architecture is to get the job,” as nineteenth-century great H. H. Richardson supposedly put it—prevails throughout the building biz, and has compelled its US representatives to pursue work with any number of disreputable foreign states. (Certainly de Graaf’s roman has more than a few real-life clefs.) Yet intriguingly, the capital-P Profession has stood fairly pat against political thuggery at home: Responding to the initial order, the American Institute of Architects fired back that communities “should have the right and responsibility to decide for themselves” what buildings are right for them; the more recent proto-EO has elicited similar objections, including from modernist preservationist group Docomomo, which pronounced itself “deeply concerned.” The industry’s resolve is very much to its credit, confirmation of its status as a bastion of liberal opinion in which reactionary sentiment, though doubtless lurking, is generally considered gauche. Of course, given the dependence of many practitioners on public commissions, opposition to slash-and-burn fiscal policy is also very much in their own interest. Things could change, but few are likely to embrace a program that tells them what to build and then does not pay them to build it. There is, again, no point.

There may be some point, commercially speaking, for the narrow wedge of the trade that can and does design old-timey-looking buildings. In addition to the NCAS, a loose institutional affiliation (the University of Colorado, Denver’s Center for Advanced Research in Traditional Architecture; the Institute of Classical Art and Architecture, with chapters nationwide; the design schools at Notre Dame, at Kansas’s Benedictine College, and at a handful of others) has helped to nurture and sustain a modest but thriving professional ecosystem of more than adequate competence. Ranging from high-end boutique studios like Peter Pennoyer’s in New York to workmanlike omni-builders such as Charlottesville’s DGP Architects, the offices active in this space could be prospective beneficiaries of a shift in policy, in the form of increased visibility and prestige if not actual federal contracts. It is notable, however, that few if any of these firms, many of which were doing just fine thank you before the order, have spoken out in favor of it; on the contrary, the administration’s heavy-handed approach has exposed deep fissures in the trad camp. Former NCAS board member Christine Huckins Franck resigned her post in 2020 over the issue, writing later that “style-based criteria [are] antithetical to the classical tradition,” and would do little to counter her colleagues’ “marginalization” by the design world at large.

Unfortunately, for others in Franck’s ambit, marginalization is warrant enough. “The AIA represents the architectural establishment, which is modernist,” said NCAS hetman Justin Shubow, speaking in an interview earlier this year; he went on, explaining that the aesthetic prejudices of architectural insiders have engendered a closed system, one in which “mega-firms have been benefiting from the gravy train.” No country schoolteacher, he—for Shubow, who was the chief author of the early draft order, and for the classical contingent who agree with him, the neglect of their tendency by the Pritzker Prize jury is a badge of honor, proof of their dedication to a lofty ideal. Of course, if all this sounds familiar, it ought to: It is the lingua franca of the right-wing culture war, the put-upon, ingenuous outsider giving what for to the self-dealing elite. And in architecture, as in so much else, it is a war without winners.

Under no circumstances should the NCAS or its fellow travelers be confused with the online retro freaks—the Atlantean conspiracists, the paleo-imperial true believers—who insist that everything constructed since 1940 is part of a giant Bolshie plot. No: Mainstream traditionalists who would endorse style-by-fiat are not ideologues but amateurs, so blinded by vanity and ressentiment that they cannot see they have gotten into bed with wackos who are busily eating their lunch. In early March, the Musk-ified GSA reported that it had identified “440 non-core assets . . . across the nation” that it is looking to sell to the highest bidder. Which buildings are these? We don’t know; the names of several dozen were briefly posted to the internet, then taken down; as of this writing, a partial (and still expanding) list is back online. Yet if the initial inventory is any indication, multiple National Register–listed structures with no guaranteed landmark protection are on the chopping block, including the Greek Revival US Court of Military Appeals Building (1910) and the stripped-classical Department of Agriculture Building (1908). Those ornamental bas-reliefs are pricey to maintain. Should a private-sector buyer decide to junk them, it’ll be tough rocks. Should no private-sector buyer show up, they will turn to dust.

So much for the return to the glories of yesteryear.

It gets worse: At the direction of their masters on Pennsylvania Avenue, agencies government-wide are moving to ban the use of words like “sustainability” and “resilience”; in so doing, they undermine a key argument for the preservation of historic buildings, and for the designing of new ones in the manner of the pre-air-conditioning past. Speaking of, environmental retrofitting has been an essential tool for financing the restoration of older buildings; it too is now out the window, with revelations in March (in Architectural Record) that GSA is stiffing contractors for already completed work. Really, one could pull almost anything from the grab bag of cockamamie initiatives being stuffed through Congress and the courts, on transit or trade or taxes, and quickly discover that no cogent image of the future American landscape comes into focus, much less a beautiful one. The rubes in the trad lobby have been snookered—though their final betrayal is yet to come. At the very least, when it arrives, they won’t be alone.

This fact was driven home to me a few weeks ago during a publishing function in Manhattan, at Ground Zero no less, when a colleague and I stepped outside followed by a third man we did not know (mid-twenties; ginger; cold sores), who tottered over to us and announced that he “bet” he knew “who you guys voted for.” His meaning was plain, but just to show he could stick the landing he proceeded to tell us exactly who he voted for, in a tone so outrageously arch it was impossible that he was being anything other than sincere. He was obviously hoping the disclosure would get a rise out of us, and rather than oblige him we changed the topic. I mentioned that I wrote about architecture—at which point Big Red suddenly softened.

“Dude,” he said. “I fucking love Paul Rudolph.”

The subject of a recently-closed retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rudolph (1918–1997) was an exponent of a hard-charging, Promethean variety of late modernism, one that sought to reinvigorate the social mission of the early-twentieth-century masters with structural daring and muscular forms, typically shaped from piles of raw concrete. Classical, it wasn’t—nor was he: Though given somewhat short shrift at the Met, Rudolph’s contradictions were many, among them his sexuality, his capacity for lyricism and camp as well as gravitas and heroism, and an authentic love for pre-modern art and architecture unclouded by nostalgia. At his Yale School of Architecture, casts of antique friezes line the walls of the stark interior, togaed statuary poised under the great central skylight.

Often right, sometimes wrong, Rudolph saw both the complexity and the candor of his buildings as essential to the creation of a more robust, more inclusive democratic polity. “If we are to reach any kind of Golden Age in building and design in this country,” he declared in 1963, “it will have to come through good, old-fashioned honesty.” For good and ill, Rudolph’s was a deeply American vision, an architectural analogue to Johnson’s Great Society—and for that reason, among others, his buildings and those similar to them are targeted for the ash heap under the emerging state-style apparatus. Brutalist architecture (Rudolph seldom if ever referred to his work as such, but the shoe more or less fits) was singled out for scorn under the 2020 order, and is overrepresented on the recent GSA hit list. Through June 30, the curious can get a look at what we stand to lose at the National Building Museum, where the exhibition “Capital Brutalism” chronicles the poured-in-place monuments around the National Mall and beyond, as well as the ways they might be adapted to the needs of tomorrow—if they survive.

I suppose I might have recommended the show to the florid young Rudolph enthusiast downtown. I could have pointed out the paradox of his (completely earnest, I’m convinced) love of Brutalist design and his (also genuine) approval of the lawless fanatics trying to undo its legacy. I do not know that this would have done him any good, but it might have been worthwhile as an exercise—for me—in trying to distinguish sin from sinner. Heaven knows there are a lot of the latter running around nowadays.

It is strange to think that, back when the renegade anti-modernists first allowed themselves to be conscripted into the ranks of the alt-right (as it was then called), they were nearly if not quite alone in offering a degree of polish to the proceedings. A couple of self-styled thought leaders aside, the overall tenor of the red-hat operation was thoroughly boorish; most in that continuum would have hated Rudolph, except that none of them knew who he was. How things have changed: My interlocutor was one member of a large and diverse constituency of urban sophisticates who espouse comparable positions, not infrequently in the same gratingly defiant terms. We can skip a full taxonomy of the faux-peacenik gallerists, contrarian critics, opportunistic publishers, and apolitical-only-not-really filmmakers who are riding on this particular wagon, or at any rate waving merrily as it rumbles along. Suffice it to say that their artistic inclinations are often in the direction of the avant-garde, the transgressive, and the abstract, and that the irony of finding themselves cheek by jowl with elements wholly opposed to those qualities doesn’t much occur to them. When it does, it may only tickle them slightly.

But while they would no doubt giggle at the bow-tied dweebs of the NCAS, and shrug off their desire to knock down a few concrete buildings, the revanchist hipster culturati might want to give their architectural counterparts a closer look—not so much for what they think, as for what is about to become of them. For they share the same illusion: that their vaunted nonconformism and independence of thought, so much at odds with the (admittedly) stifling progressivism of many of their peers, will somehow spare them from the disaster ahead.

They are wrong. The suborned classical-design types are already finding themselves pulled under the wheels of a rising domestic autocracy, just as surely they would if they threw in with some tinpot dictatorship abroad. This political order has grown only more vicious since it landed on the East Portico four years ago, an episode that ought to have demonstrated pretty definitively that it does not care about architecture, or architects, or their ideas or their well-being, any more than it cares about the well-being or ideas of anyone else. It cares for power.

This doesn’t end well. Those who enjoy shuffling cultural deckchairs on an economic, geopolitical, and ecological Titanic must believe they will get something out of it, however fleeting and intangible. In the end, the most they get will be the same thing all of us will get, no matter our politics or our preferred style of architecture. It will be waste and ignominy and scandal and anomie and ruin. From the nightmare of power without law, there is no escape through art.

You could try being mod and trad—though even then, the most you can hope for is a good zinger on your way out the door. In 1938, Russian poet Osip Mandelstam died on his way to a gulag, his classically inspired verses deemed at once too archaically pure, and yet too radically innovative for the new society he intended them for. Five years earlier, he had memorialized the despot who would ultimately decide his fate in a stinging bit of invective. “His fingers are fat as grubs,” he wrote. “And the words, final as lead weights, fall from his lips.”