Cries of horror followed the leak of a draft executive order proposing a federal commitment to classical and traditional vocabularies of architecture.
One month later, First Lady Melania Trump posted images of progress on the new White House tennis pavilion. It is, as it turns out, a classical tennis pavilion.
Its many critics seem uncertain as to whether to classify it as Tuscan or Doric; its admirers insist that it is a handsome but otherwise perfectly ordinary example of its kind. But a classical tennis pavilion nonetheless, under construction within the White House grounds—while the world outside surrenders to the terrors of a pandemic.
Insert here comparisons to Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burns, or Marie Antoinette wearing her shepherdess costume at Versailles.
Both of these scenarios, it must be noted, are primarily fictional constructs. One of the dangers of the current political morass is that the general distaste for anything emerging from the White House makes it harder to identify bad arguments. And when it comes to this debate, there are plenty of bad arguments to be had. Some of them are even promoted by national institutions.
These arguments include a good deal of bad history—not least, the usual references to totalitarian regimes. Yes, when the Third Reich wished to convey a message of legitimate authority, it appropriated the classical vocabulary. But when it built machines for mass murder, it turned to an architecture that was closer to modernism, and sometimes even suggestive of Brutalism. Those of us trained within a modernist hegemony, or possessed of a soft spot for Brutalism, may wish to guard against too facile an association between architectural language and morality.
Other comparisons go further, associating the classical tout court with imperialism, Eurocentrism, and white supremacy. This selective deployment of associations is at best bigoted—no less so if that bigotry is unintended. At worst, it imposes its own form of historical violence, more pernicious for being unrecognized. It diverts attention from the ways in which our own architecture has failed to deliver on the liberating promises of inclusivity.
After all, if we could so easily resist imperialism, Eurocentrism, and white supremacy, each of us would face a moral obligation to tear down a large number of New York City’s public schools, libraries, and post offices. But where to stop? Architecture’s more recent history is hardly a record of untainted virtue. One might go so far as to suggest that expressions of piety provide convenient cover for the imposition of a less visible violence—one that imposes the discipline’s own unacknowledged prejudices onto the city at large. Exposing that violence is among the real challenges facing us today. But that would require us to wrestle with the historical legacy of our profession. And historical rigor is not, right now, the discipline’s strong point.
But the unanimity of outrage should at least provoke curiosity. After all, at the precise moment at which the AIA “strongly opposes” something, that thing suddenly becomes quite interesting. When the AIA is joined in strong opposition by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Architecture Lobby, that opposition becomes suspicious—all the more so when it is found to advocate for something resembling the status quo of professional interests.
This at a moment when it is clearer than ever before that the status quo is complicit in the design of a built environment that is pathologically wretched—socially fractured, politically short-sighted, economically unsustainable, ecologically bankrupt, materially flimsy, spatially junky, and intellectually vacant.
Could it be the architects who have been fiddling while the city burns?