This essay and others are published in Medium.com

In the simple days before covid, the destruction of the economy, nationwide protests, police riots, bible photo-ops, and a summer of what will be an experimental transition to a new way of life, architecture occasionally mattered. Back then, something as seemingly trivial (compared to other transgressions) as an executive order demanding a neoclassical style for all federal buildings could actually provoke a critical response, including mine, below.

Arguing about architectural style will seem quaint when we try to solve the current life threatening problems exacerbated by our architecture, but I would argue that it is still useful to compare the recent past with the future currently rushing into frame. As a measure of just how quickly we have (and will) change, the split between our recent concerns and our upcoming ones reveals a whiplash of focus in a profession that isn’t built to evolve on a seasonal fashion calendar. But now it must.

February 5, 2020 seems like a lifetime ago; we had heard of coronavirus but couldn’t fully imagine its impact on us (or U.S.), much less the global meltdown it precipitated. The previous night Donald Trump delivered his State of the Union where he spent 20 seconds on coronavirus and more than 3 minutes on that national icon Rush Limbaugh, out of his 1 hour 18 minute speech.

That next morning he had time to cobble together a draft executive order demanding that Federally financed buildings be in a Neoclassical style (Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again was his brilliant branded slogan, what a wordsmith). It was also the day Mick Mulvaney (remember him!?) held a briefing for members of Congress about the virus, sparsely attended, he said, ‘because of the impeachment’ whatever the fuck that meant. I’m pretty sure Richard Burr attended that briefing, just before he dumped more than $1M in stocks in anticipation of the upcoming crash. By the end of that week Trump was predicting the miraculous disappearance of the virus in April due to warm weather.

Ahh, good times.

Trump’s neoclassical order was the architectural equivalent of white supremacy; a retreat from the confusing multivalence of today, based on a fearful nostalgia for a past, that fits neatly into a limited world view. Nice foreshadowing, Donnie, given what has happened in the few short months since then.

Trump is not the first to pine for the simplistically familiar, however laden with unintended meaning it might be. Infamously, Prince Charles (of the UK) and Albert Speer (of the Third Reich), two figures who loom large in government mandates on architectural style, also seemed to think that only the past can be prologues of the future. Literally. As in ‘this is the state style’, as a denial of the future, or even the present.

Mies van der Rohe, and others, had tried to sell modernism as the right architecture for the Reich, but it’s not surprising the Reich went with ludicrously scaled-up classicism; the Venn diagram of Power and Past (“you know, like Rome, but bigger”) was almost too easy to sell.

The Prince just wants things to be as they were, too, but of course he essentially lives in a bubble defined by a history of (white) supremacy. It’s no coincidence that the Prince and our own Dear Leader both inherited what they imagine is their right to opine about appropriate architectural style. While anyone can have an opinion, only the truly entitled (inherited wealth being the touchstone of entitlement, and white-male-inherited-wealth being the gold standard of entitlement) seem to think their opinions should be codified into mandates. It tracks; these are dim-witted (and in one case likely inbred) nostalgics, with no particular imagination or view of the future except that it should look a lot like the past (‘we’re going to the moon’…by 2024?). They share a (mostly fake) interest in the common folk, along with a genuine interest in extra-marital affairs and family crests. But the Prince does know how to wear a suit, play polo and learned to fly helicopters in the military, so I think he wins the competition for the classiest waste of space.

Dear Leader’s connection to Albert Speer should be obvious; their buildings are all tributes to a single (terrible) man. Speer’s were dedicated to last century’s incarnation of evil; it remains to be seen if Trump takes his place as the worst human being in this century (though he is rapidly moving away from the pack into the lead position). Denial is another shared trait, with Speer trying to rewrite his past to avoid admitting he knew about and participated in the holocaust, and Trump making an art of denial (“the call was perfect”, his “Swedish” roots, his weight, his opposition to the Iraq War, and virtually every rancid act he would rather not acknowledge).

Just to close the triangle on upwardly failing, soulless wastrels; the Prince actually praised the bombing of London as preferable to modern architecture! His tribute to the Reich;  “When it knocked down our buildings, [at least] it didn't replace them with anything more offensive than rubble” is almost Trumpian in idiocy and blasphemy. Charles’s great-grand-uncle, King Edward, the Prince of Windsor, almost certainly said something similarly off-handedly forgiving to the Third Reich (at least according to The Crown) so this could be a family problem.

Trump’s attraction to shiny objects has pretty much defined his developer output; glitzy, reflective and gold trimmed monstrosities, some by semi-respectable architects like Philip Johnson (whose own fascination with fascism is minutely explored by Mark Lamster in his landmark book) corrupting their own ideologies to work with ‘the chosen one’. So what prompted Trump to switch his allegiance from glassy towers to limestone hulks?

It may be that living in the White House has given Dear Leader a taste for the elegance of the past, as befits his royal status.
Or it might be that he is simply doing what he does best; issuing contrarian orders to a gob-smacked (elitist) public. His revocation of Global Entry for New York airports shows just how petty his revenge can be.
Maybe this is a way to confound his competition, making it even harder for competing developers who fill DC with buildings to house lobbyists.
Or did Obama approve of DC Modern, mandating that Trump take the opposite view?

So many possibilities, so few honorable motives.
There is, of course, a serious discourse to be had about style, state mandated or otherwise.

I always argued that ideas, not style, mattered most. But my old partner (he was old and it was a long time ago) at Pentagram, Theo Crosby, made the point that ‘style drives industry’ though he would say ‘style drives craft’. Without style, and by style Theo really meant decorative style, we lose craft; plasterwork, custom tile, terrazzo, stained glass, stone carving, metal casting, heavy timber joinery, mosaics, and I could go on but you get the point. It is decorative style that supports these viable craft industries; take them away and those skills atrophy like the Roman mastery of concrete, disappearing for a thousand years.

For Theo there was never any question of what to do with original classical buildings like the Parthenon; they had to be accurately reconstructed like new and painted as they were originally. We all know this about Greek classicism (gaudy colors, painted statues that Michael Jackson was so kind to remind us of) but we all pretend that it was as white as, well, modern architecture, or neoclassicism (or white supremacy). Theo’s view is both shocking and extremely logical, especially coming from a seminal modernist who edited AD magazine and dreamt up the 1956 This is Tomorrow exhibition (yet ended his career rebuilding the Globe Theater as an exact replica a few yards from where the original sat).

But neoclassicism is different. Wherever true classical architecture was part of the built patrimony of a nation neoclassicism might make some sense, but for us (in the U.S.) it’s the style of an insecure nation; appropriating a demos past to aspire to a democratic future. Just look at US currency; it’s hopelessly retrograde, and nearly all adorned with buildings (and most of those neoclassical) as evidence of a true republic. We counterfeit the past, in part, to create a backstory more substantial than is strictly accurate. It’s a simulacrum of a past, in the context of a modern monetary system, not unlike a modern apartment building with a glitzy, mirrored interior slathered with gold and filled with fake French furniture. Sound familiar?

[My fave quote from DT was, when asked how many rooms his Trump Tower apartment had (he had varied the number considerably in the past) he said “as many as they will print”, perhaps the most honest and revealing thing he ever uttered.]

The standard bearers of modern architecture, as seen in the reaction of the Architectural League, the New York Times and others, to Trump’s announcement aren’t wrong. It just can’t explain why we admire consistency of style in the past (New York of the 1930’s and 1940’s, Chicago of the turn of the last century, Boston of the 19^th century) but not as a viable approach today. Consistency and a universally accepted language of architecture does wonders for the city; Soho’s cast iron, Park Avenue’s apartment buildings, Padova’s arcaded streets, the Rue de Rivoli, Regent Street and myriad other architectural high points define a past we still find attractive, even preferable, to our own moment. So why not appropriate these styles for today?

The past, architecturally, was about creating a common sense of visual order, a sense of social cohesiveness, building as a civic act of civic art (for civil civilization, to play out all the words with the same Latin root, civis, or ‘citizen’). Today we look at every creation, even shoulder to shoulder in dense arrays, as an expression of individuality. A gridded city like New York can absorb an enormous range of variety without losing the sense of ‘civic mindedness’ but it will eventually become a World’s Fair of competing egos if we graph the present into the future. And Trump has been a willful, even enthusiastic, participant, remaking the city in his own image.

In 1980 I was working at an architectural firm ensconced in the pointy cap of 730 Fifth Avenue, originally the Heckscher Building, later the Crown Building, designed by Warren and Wetmore (architects of Grand Central Terminal, the Yacht Club and myriad other icons). From our balcony we could gaze across the street at the Bonwit Teller building, an art deco block (originally by Warren and Wetmore and later restyled by Ely Jacques Kahn) watching it disappear at the direction of Donald Trump, boy developer. The Metropolitan Museum requested the two remarkable carved bas-reliefs and ornate metal entrance grill, to which Trump agreed. He jackhammered the artwork and cut up the grill for scrap later calling them worthless, to save less than ten thousand dollars (he later inflated that to half a million dollars). With such exquisite landmark preservation credentials is it any wonder he is promoting America’s architectural past?

Trump’s inability to do anything outside his narrow slit of self-regard is in part why we are now in the worst hit city, in the worst hit nation, in the worst global disaster since the last world war. Architecture is about to become a more intrusive foreground element in our lives as we attempt to reconstitute our former existence. And it won’t be in the neoclassical style.

Buildings don’t work in our new reality as currently configured.

Maybe we are all about to be upgraded to business class, as distances grow wider to permit social distancing and safer, cleaner environments. Having spent centuries compressing the space required for living, working, playing, eating, entertaining, etc., all in the name of the market economy and a ‘machine for living’, we may need to waste a lot of space to avoid mass death. This reaction to the current virus won’t be the only time we are similarly challenged. Changes will help save us now, and likely in the future. As William Hasseltine wrote, this won’t be the last, or most deadly, pandemic we will see in our lifetimes. 

“It is only a matter of time before a coronavirus that is far more lethal and contagious than this one emerges to ravage the world’s population,” says Haseltine. “When that happens, we will no longer be talking about a global death toll in the ‘mere’ hundreds of thousands.” He also suspects the world is overdue for a deadly influenza outbreak capable of removing one to two billion people from the planet.

While we may criticize ourselves for always fighting the last war, rather than imagining the next one, this is a sobering reminder of why we need to permanently change our ability to survive this and the next disasters. Architecture will play a defining role in how we live from this moment on, and it won’t be the first time.

Automats, those remarkable dispensaries of food from little cubbyholes accessed with some combination of nickels, were all white glass, porcelain enamel polished stainless steel and terrazzo for a reason; they represented a new wave of ‘sanitary’ restaurants that broadcast their cleanliness via their design. The illusion of food untouched by human hands (except yours) was, of course, a bit exaggerated. At the moment the cubbies spun around for reloading, you got a momentary view, like a focal plane shutter, of the kitchen behind the bank of dispensers. It was, as I remember, filled with African American men in white aprons working in a similarly white-tiled kitchen. The elimination of wait staff and the large interior spaces almost make sense as answers to today’s restaurant quandaries; interior spaces are limited (and have ventilation issues), kitchens are too crowded to comply with social distancing and the whole choreography of the served meal, until now, includes a series of moments that won’t keep customers and staff safe. It is an untenable arrangement.

If you believe that architecture, as Le Corbusier did, is the ‘masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light’, then it may not seem to have much with solving our current problems.

But, if you believe that architecture is a generator of social structure, enabling (or preventing) positive social interaction at work, at home, at play and in public then it seems clear that architecture is either part of the solution or a big part of the problem.

I chair the James Beard Foundation’s Restaurant Design Awards Committee, parceling out a trio of awards to the nation’s best designed new restaurants. That was then; today it would be as tone-deaf as a critical food review for a restaurant that can barely afford to reopen. Like most design awards, for things too large to pick up and hold in your hands, architecture is judged via photos, drawings and written narratives. It amounts to judging photography and the most photogenic decorative elements of a place, an unavoidable distorting of the actual impact of a real space in real time.

Design awards today should support the industry, not create a rarified design elite. Design awards, if they continue at all, should celebrate design solutions to reopening safely in the wake of the pandemic. It’s an entirely different focus and one that is inclusive rather than exclusive.

Similarly, architecture should respond to the new reality of public safety and social justice rather than continue in the pre-pandemic mode of form-based competition. As much as I love architecture as an expression of form, as experimentation in ideas, as works of art, it will democratize architecture to begin to see it as solving problems that save lives. Socially driven design has always been there, but never has it been quite so critical in an immediate sense. Covid and the current protests could rescue architecture from its current bifurcation of ‘small-a-architecture for them’, and ‘capital-A-Architecture for us’. These twin traumas could, at its best, realign architecture to solve common problems, do social good and therefore be judged on a universal standard. 

As the world returns to work, to school, to play, to travel, to meet, to navigate a new social paradigm, architecture can unify, protect, inspire, and help make humanity (and civis) feel safe and secure. It is a moment of potential transformation.

Or it could relapse to the image-driven, photo-op competition where looks alone matter. I vote to transform the profession, as the profession transforms the built environment, to value social impact at least as much as artistic impact.

I wouldn’t count on that if we rely on the American Institute of Architects. Five years ago I wrote, after Michael Kimmelman’s column, how the AIA refuses to prohibit its members from designing execution chambers! Death Chambers! If ever there was an easy get, a clear case to revise immoral behavior, a simple gesture to stop creating the Architecture of Fear, this was it. According to Michael Kimmelman’s latest column the AIA has finally acknowledged, at this extraordinarily late date, that maybe, just maybe, they were wrong. 

They were wrong, period, and it shouldn’t take historical events to recognize and acknowledge that. To be clear, any architect designing instruments of oppression, death, injustice, or supporting those who do, is more like Albert Speer than someone licensed to provide for public health, safety and welfare. 

Fortunately we don’t rely on the AIA to guide us morally or ethically. We will see, and soon, just how the profession responds to a world in the grip of real fear and righteous anger.