Archforum

In November, US voters elected Donald Trump to a new, nonconsecutive term. The Developer in Chief will take the initiative to shape, and slash, policies in ways that stand to imperil the infrastructure of civic life. His various, nebulous campaign pronouncements included ending regulations related to housing construction, ramping up fossil fuel production, removing green energy incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act, and imposing staggering tariffs on imports. If Trump’s first tenure was marked by ambitions to erect a “magnificent” border wall and an executive decree to institute classical architecture in the design of federal buildings, what might his second bring? We ask our respondents to see through the fog of uncertainty to analyze the political terrain on which the future will be determined.

Until biomimicry proponents figure out how to grow buildings from mushrooms and algae, steel remains essential for construction. If Trump doubles down on the widespread 25 percent steel tariffs he first imposed in 2018, will it affect the construction industry this time? Yes, but probably not directly and not in a way that is likely to greatly affect procurement, processing, or construction.

One reason for this is that steel makes up only 4 percent of the construction costs of a typical multistory, steel-framed building. Currently, the US produces roughly two-thirds of the steel it needs. Averaged out, a 25 percent increase in the cost of imported steel, for example, might only raise construction costs about 0.6 percent. That’s a pinprick.

Building industry workers should, however, be wary of the effect of subsequent tariffs on jobs, in steel and beyond.

Trump uses tariffs, in part, rhetorically for effect at home and abroad and as a negotiating chip with other countries. At home, tariffs are falsely portrayed as supporting workers’ interests and used to align union support with protectionist national policies (e.g., to revive the rustiest of Rust Belt industries) and against international worker solidarity. In fact, the Trump tariffs killed American jobs. The 2018 tariffs quickly added 4,800 steel mill jobs (an increase of about 1 percent) and spiked revenue for steelmakers in the United States. However, for every job producing steel there are roughly eighty jobs that use steel as an input. Tariffs raised US steel prices; this put American fabricators of downstream steel products at a competitive disadvantage, globally prompting layoffs far in excess of the jobs created.

Abroad, tariffs were broadly imposed and then selectively rescinded, reimposed, etc., as
part of ongoing horse-trading. (Trump’s tariffs on China in particular did impact stateside construction projects, but more so by pushing up the cost of fabricated assemblies such as furniture and equipment beyond project budgets. This forced project managers and procurement agents to scramble to resource items from other countries, such as Mexico and Vietnam.) Tariffs helped Trump negotiate favorable trade deals. However, negative effects included reduced foreign demand and higher prices for US consumers, plus knock-on costs resulting from retaliatory tariffs.

Most of the job losses in steel and other manufacturing industries were due not to offshoring, but to automation. Since the 1980s, the industry has transitioned from producing steel from iron ore and coal in old hulking mills to producing steel primarily by recycling scrap at smaller, more numerous plants known as “mini mills.” Mini mills, which produce 70 percent of the steel coming from the United States—up from 47.5 percent in 2001 and 10 percent in the 1970s—are largely automated and nearly exclusively nonunionized.

Will Trump have learned that the low hanging fruit of industrial capitalism can’t be unplucked? It’s likely he will continue to hawk protectionism and, when reindustrialization again arrives DOA, revert to policies of neoliberal accumulation through dispossession in order to lower costs for developers. This will entail imposing downward pressure on wages. And while Republicans have tried to spin tariffs as a climate issue, arguing that industry at home is cleaner than that abroad, falling profits will spur reversing environmental, public health, and worker safety regulations as well.

Additional tariffs will indeed affect workers in the building sector by eliminating jobs, raising living costs, and jeopardizing public welfare and climate reform. For that reason, they should be a central concern for labor organizers and Just Transition advocates and an issue around which they should work to align their messaging. — ALTERNATIVE BUILDING INDUSTRY COLLECTIVE

Before the election, I took cold comfort in the fact that Donald Trump was bad at his job. His last term was horrific, but he failed to sign a single significant piece of legislation, outside the budget, into law. I was especially interested in Trump’s housing policy, given that he was the world’s most famous landlord, but there wasn’t much there, aside from the “Opportunity Zones” in his tax cut—a scheme to cut taxes for real estate investors in lower-income areas.

Come January, Trump will be back in office and MAGA Republicans will control Congress, including the Senate, and the Supreme Court. This is an entirely different scenario. Half the voters chose a candidate whose explicit promise was “mass deportation,” and everything about the transition so far implies that he will try to deliver on that cruel and unusual platform.

New York City has over half a million undocumented residents. When ICE calls our mayor (Eric Adams now, perhaps someone else soon), they will face a choice: to abet this massive human rights violation by allowing deportation squads into our homeless shelters, schools, hospitals, and public housing developments or to put up a fight and face the consequences.

If the mayor stands up for immigrants, Trump and Congress may deny the city billions of federal dollars. Much of this would specifically hamstring our housing programs: code enforcement, public housing, rent assistance, subsidized housing construction, homeless shelters. If those funding streams dry up, the city cannot simply raise its own taxes to make up for the gap—those are largely controlled at the state level, and the governor may not oblige. Conditions will suffer, and the mayor could be pilloried for prioritizing migrants over longer-term New Yorkers.

If the mayor enables Trump’s mass deportations, the city may be rewarded with additional federal funds to use on housing and other infrastructural projects. Will we finally jump-start affordable housing production with the money we receive for facilitating a humanitarian disaster? This would be social housing of the national socialist variety. Then again, Project 2025 calls for a wholesale gutting of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the federal agency that funds public housing and rental assistance, so perhaps the cuts will be coming whether or not the mayor embraces the president’s expulsionist agenda.

The MAGA right’s victory ensures that for the next two years, at least, protecting immigrants and expanding affordable housing—two top goals for New York City progressives—will be in tension. We cannot sacrifice our neighbors, but we likely cannot avoid federal penalization. If we can summon the strength to fight federal fascism, we must expect retribution, and we must organize to ensure that it does not further retrench the nationalist turn in public sentiment.
— SAMUEL STEIN, HOUSING ANALYST

The San Diego–Tijuana border, where we live and work, is a microcosm of all the injustices
and indignities experienced by vulnerable people across the world. We write just a few miles from Trump’s child detention centers, which will forever stain this period of American history. We relive the spatial legacy of his “beautiful wall” every time we cross the border—a thirty-foot-tall slap in the face to our neighbor, with whose destiny our own is deeply intertwined. Alongside activists on both sides of the wall, we struggled against Trump’s presidential prerogatives, which sought to criminalize migrants and undermine the shared interests and aspirations among those who inhabit this beleaguered civic space. We partnered with frontline agencies to co-develop the UC San Diego Community Stations network of sanctuary spaces—including Santuario Frontera, the largest migrant sanctuary in the US–Mexico border region—where universities and border communities regularly meet to share resources and build capacities for political action.

Despite, or perhaps because of, these experiences, we felt the 2024 presidential election results to be a massive blow against common sense. We had always assumed that a politics of privilege that denigrates aspirations for equality and collective well-being, brought so vividly into the public light, so visibly to the powerless, would be met with repulsion and resistance among marginalized sectors of American society. And yet we witnessed stunning waves of acquiescence and overt support among low income, racially diverse voters; young voters; women and the working class—people whose lives, and whose families’ lives, have been impacted for generations by social injustice, racism and misogyny, deregulation, infrastructural defunding, and the erosion of the social safety net.

We believe that architecture can help us reconstruct a damaged and distorted collective imagination. Against so much disinformation, we can expand the role of design to imagine a
new civic education that renders the complexity of what’s coming in Trump’s second term more accessible and actionable for people. And our demand for reform and reparation can begin in our own design practices and creative processes.

Mass deportations are set to begin in January 2025. As those around Trump prepare their ground plan, we brace ourselves for unprecedented political violence in the border region.
We anticipate that the UCSD Community Stations will become even more important as part of a cross-border coalition of care and sanctuary to support bottom-up social organization, community protection, and local knowledge that renders visible the operations of unjust power.
— TEDDY CRUZ, ARCHITECT, AND FONNA FORMAN, POLITICAL SCIENTIST

Social reproduction was on the ballot.

Donald Trump and J. D. Vance are the most hardcore defenders of patriarchy poised to further erode women’s freedom to choose abortion. Abortion rights are popular, and the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, spoke about them more compellingly than any presidential candidate in history, calling attention to the women who died in hospital parking lots because of Trump’s antiabortion fanatics on the Supreme Court. Yet
the Democrats did not win the election. There are several reasons why—and there is much to learn from this miserable electoral misadventure.

Many pro-choice voters protected their freedoms while also voting Republican—as they were able to do in the seven states with referenda on the ballot protecting abortion rights. The election showed not that Americans don’t support women’s freedom—quite the opposite—but that other social reproduction issues were equally salient.

Inflation, for example, is a social reproduction issue in an almost painfully literal way. The increasing costs of groceries, energy, and housing made many Americans worry that they could not reproduce themselves and the lives of their families.

As well, one of Biden’s best social reproduction policies—the child subsidy—substantially reduced child poverty when it was in effect but caused pain when it expired. In fact, voters who had received it proved more likely to move from Democrat to Republican in the midterms, suggesting how galling it is to have social democratic benefits taken away.

Already, Zohran Mamdani, running for mayor of New York City, is putting universal childcare at the center of his campaign. With Trump fixing to eradicate the Department of Education while most Americans remain devoted to their local public school, public education, too, looks like fertile ground for realignment. During the Trump era, the left would do well to keep fighting on this terrain.

— LIZA FEATHERSTONE, JOURNALIST

Trump’s first term was characterized by an escalation of the culture war. In architecture, this conflict assumed the form of a facile dichotomy between “traditional” building styles versus “modernism,” the battle lines drawn on aesthetic rather than material grounds. Much breath was wasted, including by yours truly, poking at the hypocrisy laden in this dichotomy. While this critical activity did serve a secondary purpose in educating the public about design values (we still shouldn’t cede architecture to the Right), it was absolutely ineffective in either diffusing the culture war element of it, or as a basis around which architectural workers could mobilize in opposition to Trump. The nonconsecutive-term president is far more than the buffoonish philistine liberals like to depict him as. He is more energized this time around and plans on looting what is left of the American state and its institutions for the gain of the few at the expense of the many. We are living in a time of profound irony, disinterest, and despair; the contradictions in capitalist society are becoming more explicit and destabilizing. Faced with such conditions, the critic of our times must still believe in a better world when doing so is more difficult than ever. We must agitate, not only against Trump, but against total resignation. That will mean reactivating, and exceeding, the good that actually came out of 2016—the rise of socialist politics, which touched architecture in a very impactful way, whether in criticism and academia or in labor organizing at design firms. Momentum was slowed greatly by the pandemic and the complacency of the Biden years, and things will be hard going. The only bright side is we are wiser than we were eight years ago. — KATE WAGNER, CRITIC

Within a day of the election, Trump watchers dug up a 2023 video in which the once and future reality-TV-star-cum-president proposed a “great American state fair” to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary, complete with permanent exhibitions and pavilions that would “promote pride in our history.” It sounded a bit like the world’s fairs, our greatest squandered gifts from our would-be ennobled predecessors, the Tartarian Empire. Tartaria is architecture’s preeminent conspiracy theory—the belief that a world-spanning, hypertechnologically advanced imperium responsible for the grandest of premodern edifices was diabolically scrubbed from the history books. The general consensus in a few corners of the internet was that Trump’s great American fair would be the reveal party for America’s first Tartarian president, pulling back the curtain on centuries of hidden history and spectacularly colliding the Venn diagram of MAGA supporters and Tartarian theorists, whose ranks have been moving closer and closer in recent years.

Tartarian “theory” doesn’t need Trump to persist. In a brighter timeline where he lost the election, you could imagine a slow and more concentrated boil of transgressive plotting, a bit like how Pizzagate and QAnon needed a violent and high-profile botched op to double the resolve of their faithful. But Trump’s boosted media presence and ability to direct culture war battlefronts will shape Tartarian speculation immensely, giving its partisans the opportunity to spread it to a wider audience and evolve different strains appropriate for new social contexts, from iNtElLeCtUaL dArK wEb forums to the Facebook posts of an underemployed new mom in your hometown, desperately trying to squeeze an MLM for grocery money.

Tartarianism is really just conservative antimodernism, only juiced up with more gonzo and action-packed protagonists and antagonists. And since culture war is the singular terrain of politics our center-left and reactionary political coalitions care to fight on, its appetite is enormous; architecture is headed into the maw, seasoned with tales of gold domes that generate electricity, hovercraft, and space-age star forts. Academia’s perceived cultural alienation and critique of feel-good American hegemony have made it a soft target, but this has often been confined to the liberal arts department. But I’d suggest that Big Government, in its various guises, will worm its way into design studios across the land. At private institutions such as Notre Dame or SCI-Arc, agitation will likely take its cues from media-manufactured hysteria. Funding could very well be withheld at state schools with federally unsanctioned pedagogy, but that would likely entail conservatives having to explain the world’s most esoteric culture war to your grandparents, which may yet be hilarious. — ZACH MORTICE, CRITIC

“There are two kinds of music,” the saying goes, “good and bad.” It’s most reliably attributable to Louis Armstrong, though Duke Ellington and Jimi Hendrix and nineteenth-century romantic composer Gioachino Rossini have all also been credited. The plurality of genres and styles practiced by its putative authors proves the truth of the remark. Rock isn’t any better or worse than classical; both can fulfill or fail their assignments. Formal and stylistic choices are otherwise morally neutral. (In the language of the ancient Romans, de gustibus non disputandum—one cannot argue about taste.) The very act of centering style in design discourse, though, is not morally neutral. The telling of architectural history has long been so narrow and exclusive precisely because the descriptive taxonomy and prescriptive enforcement of styles can so effectively be an exercise of social and political power. If, like Philip Johnson, you wish to be a kingmaker in a tiny but heady realm, you reduce a movement to a style, reduce the modern to the modernist, and to allegedly successive eras anoint heirs.

Conquering by dividing is a technique of fascists: Invent the culture war, wedge issue, scapegoat, Other—to distract folks from their own individual or collective consciousness, conscience, constitutional rights and responsibilities, or economic self-interests. To argue for classical against rock is to disempower music itself. The December 21, 2020, presidential executive order designating “classical” architecture as the preferred style for federally funded construction presaged the brittle pieties and conformist shibboleths that characterized the events of seventeen days later. (It also anticipated that day’s eighteenth-century cosplay, which, apropos of trad aesthetics, disguised the nihilistically innovative as the reassuringly conservative.) What’s being divided and conquered by such an order is architecture itself. Architecture correctly understood not as a stylistic exercise but as a social practice—in service of human rights to liberty, sustainability, beauty, and bodily autonomy, plus freedom from want and fear. Design is humanity’s most direct mechanism for building, from the bottom up, the world as it should be out of the world as it is. Designers who spend their time strenuously abhorring classicism or modernism, understood as genres or styles, have been bamboozled away from the power tributary to that self-evident truth.

This side of the atom bomb and the Spanish flu, we are all modern. It can be an interesting and defensible action to build a classically styled building in our modern world—Demetri Porphyrios’s 1992 pavilion at lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City is an example—but the modern ethos of the duty of form to function ever more applies. These days, the prevailing function of the building sector is planetary ecological repair. The most important thing about Stanislaw Z. Gladych’s 1967–1974 FBI headquarters building on Pennsylvania Avenue is not—Tucker to the contrary—that this august half-century-old masterpiece happens to be in the Brutalist style (albeit with surprisingly classicizing proportions, massing, and detailing). It’s that it already exists. To demolish it in favor of an exurban compound, a proposal lately fashionable as a means of chastening the bureau, would constitute an indefensible squandering of embodied
 energy and carbon. It would also, ostensibly as a matter of security, remove a public organization from a public eye. And so from such historically urban actions as ceremonial witness and encamped protest. Such indifference to the common good and enthusiasm 
for the sweeping gesture, familiar from any number of regimes and reichs of the past, suggest a new saying: Beware politicians who can read floor plans.
— THOMAS DE MONCHAUX, CRITIC