Nobody ever accused President Trump of having a refined aesthetic sensibility, but he knows what he likes, and it’s clear what it means. This became apparent again when the White House announced that he intends to build a $200 million, 90,000-square-foot ballroom where the East Wing of the White House now stands.
The project, designed by the traditionalist architect James McCrery II, will be built in the style of Gilded Age neoclassicism, complete with arched windows, chandeliers and Corinthian columns. “Its theme and architectural heritage will be almost identical” to the existing building, said the White House in a statement. (Many architectural preservationists have already expressed their concerns about the ballroom addition.)
Of course, it looks to be closer to the spirit of Mar-a-Lago or perhaps the Willard Hotel, but it matches what Mr. Trump has already begun doing to the White House, glamming up the Oval Office and paving the Rose Garden. And it coheres with his 2020 “Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” which attempted to put an end to modernism in government buildings. This order drew applause from many on the right, who see a return to Western heritage styles of architecture, and a rejection of brutalism and other modern styles they associate with political systems they reject, including socialism, as a way to return us to more traditional values.
Mr. Trump is right to try to reclaim meaning in American architecture, to identify some kind of coherent national identity. It’s hard to argue that modernist architecture, with its rigid aesthetic, lack of clear meaning, and disconnect from the human scale has been up to the task, even as the left tends to prefers it. Take the example abstract lump that is the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago is supposed to look like, much less what it means. That seems telling.
How then, might we forge a consensus?
The meaning of any style is mutable and imprecise, especially with time. In fact, the now-beloved brutalist Yale School of Architecture was apparently lit on fire by student activists in 1969, in protest of faculty firings and an urban planning department out of touch with local communities.
Casa del Fascio, a literal fascist lair in Como, Italy, was designed by the legendary Italian modernist Giuseppe Terragni. The Nazis liked neo-classicism, but so did the architects of the Carnegie libraries.
The nonprofit National Civic Art Society, which helped draft the 2020 Trump mandate, believes nontraditional architecture has “created a built environment that is degraded and dehumanizing.” Certainly, more traditional architecture is more familiar, and there is comfort in that. Mr. Trump’s planned ballroom declares itself and its values.
But the search for a national architecture should not be a simplistic nostalgia for any past period. In the 19th century, historical forms were often recycled without purpose, leading to a parade of styles only loosely related to any particular place or meaning in society. By the turn of the last century, with the formation of independent nations as empires crumbled, there was an effort to create a “national architecture.”
Neoclassicism will not be that for the United States, but the search for meaning is a noble and timely one. The great Catalan architect Lluís Domènech i Montaner once noted, while pondering what a national architecture for Spain might mean, “Only those societies that are without firm convictions or fixed ideas and fluctuate between today’s beliefs and those of yesterday and have not faith in tomorrow are unable to write their history in durable monuments.”
This period saw a hybrid of the qualities of classicism with its search for meaning and narrative, mixed with a desire to be contemporary and find meaning for the society of its time, not of the Gothic or the ancient Greek. A third thing was arrived at: not neo-classicism and not simple modernism, but a hybrid that can grab the national consciousness or identity to create something of lasting meaning — the image of society built through a national symbolism, but made with the most contemporary materials available at the time.
How might that apply to America today? It is not an easy question. Would any consensus be possible? Would we divide ourselves between a blue-state modernism — technocratic, aloof — and red-state neoclassicism? And then, nationally, ride the partisan swings of each election cycle? Or is something possible that unites us in some kind of search for meaning? How do we decide what our national symbols are, even? The U.S. Capitol has images of U.S. cash crops such as corn and tobacco designed into some of its columns. The new White House ballroom seems inspired by a high-end hotel event space. That carries meaning, too.
Maybe we should be reminded that aesthetics and symbolism do not dictate policy. They are tools that can suggest meaning and identity, but this process is fraught. Before we become firm on a national aesthetics — or have them handed down by executive order — we must become firm on a national body of values. Only from there on can we embark on expressing it through art and architecture.
Matt Shaw is the author of “American Modern: Architecture; Community; Columbus, Indiana.”
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