Trump Once Again Issues Executive Order Promoting “Beautiful” Federal Architecture
145Jan. 22, 2025
Newly installed US president Donald Trump on Monday signed anexecutive orderpromoting “beautiful federal civic architecture.” Lest the adjective “beautiful” be perceived as being open to subjective interpretation, the order clarified, “Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.”
The memorandum directs the General Services Administration (GSA), which manages federal real estate, and federal department heads to supply within sixty days recommendations for aligning federal architecture with the abovementioned principles. The orderechoesthat issued by Trump in the waning days of his previous term, which established neoclassical architecture as the “preferred” style for federal buildings, which Trump felt should “command respect from the general public.” That iteration decried Brutalist architecture, specifically slamming the Hubert H. Humphrey Department of Health and Human Services Building and the Robert C. Weaver Department of Housing and Urban Development Building as “unappealing” and “unpopular.” The lame-duck order also decried deconstructivism, which it cast as subverting the “traditional values of architecture through such features as fragmentation, disorder, discontinuity, distortion, skewed geometry, and the appearance of instability.”
The 2020 order was revoked by then-president Joe Biden in February 2021. The new memorandum, whose wording is less forceful than that of its predecessor, arrives alongside an executive memorandum ordering federal agencies bring federal employees back into the office five days a week. Writing on his own Truth social network, Trump expressed a particular interest in constructing a new FBI headquarters in the nation’s capital, despite the fact that the decision was made under the Biden administration to move the agency out of its crumbling Brutalist DC home and into new digs in Maryland.
“THE NEW FBI BUILDING SHOULD BE BUILT IN WASHINGTON, D.C., NOT MARYLAND, AND BE THE CENTERPIECE OF MY PLAN TO TOTALLY RENOVATE AND REBUILD OUR CAPITAL CITY INTO THE MOST BEAUTIFUL AND SAFEST ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD,” wrote the president, noting that “HAVING THE FBI IN D.C. IS IMPORTANT FOR ENDING VIOLENT CRIME, WHICH I WILL DO, QUICKLY!!!” The district in 2024 saw its lowest violent crime rate in three decades.