Not content with paving over the Rose Garden lawn, Donald Trump is now insisting that all federal buildings in the nation’s capital must meet his ye-olde design standards.
Trump signed a presidential order on Thursday titled ‘Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again’ to ensure that courthouses and government office buildings in Washington, D.C., are to his liking—and stick with the White House aesthetic.
His order complained that the Design Excellence Program established in 1994 while Bill Clinton was president resulted in federal buildings that “sometimes” impressed the “architectural elite” but not the American people. “Many of these new Federal buildings are not even visibly identifiable as civic buildings,” he stated.
The president now wants federal buildings to “embrace classical architecture to honor tradition, foster civic pride, and inspire the citizenry.” He said the “timeless architecture” of the White House and the Capitol Building is to be the “preferred and default” style for federal buildings in Washington.
The order also targets federal buildings with a modern or brutalist design, such as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which is relocating to Virginia. HUD Secretary Scott Turner told Fox News in March he was working in the “ugliest building in D.C.” It is also known as the Robert C. Weaver Federal Building.
In a fact sheet to explain the aesthetics of the new order, the White House pointed out that in the 1960s “traditional” designs were replaced with modernist and Brutalist ones, claiming the move was “deeply unpopular.”
The 10-story HUD building was finished in 1968 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.
“A majority of American taxpayers want classical, regionally inspired public buildings that beautify public spaces, and their government should respect their preferences,” the fact sheet claims.
Any designs that deviate from Trump’s “classical architecture” blueprint with brutalist, deconstructivist, or other modernist designs will now be flagged with the president, who says buildings must “convey the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American government and command public respect.”
In his order, Trump says he wants buildings to appeal to the general public, but clarifies that group does not mean “artists, architects, engineers, art or architecture critics, instructors or professors of art or architecture, or members of the building industry.”
He also lists some of his favorite styles of “traditional architecture” as Gothic, Romanesque, Second Empire, Pueblo Revival, and Spanish Colonial. At the top of Trump’s hit list was the “Deconstructivist architecture” movement of the 1980s, complaining that it featured “fragmentation, disorder, discontinuity, distortion, skewed geometry, and the appearance of instability.”
In his second term, Trump has already given the White House a makeover to suit his personal style. That has included gold ornaments and photo frames, and cherubs shipped in from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach.
Trump had the Rose Garden lawn paved over and is planning to build a ballroom in the East Wing of the White House that will cost $200 million.
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