EVEN A RACIST IS FASCISTIC ONCE IN AWHILE:

People are often at their most authoritarian-sounding these days when condemning others as fascist, and this month provides a few choice examples. Donald Trump will reportedly release an executive order requesting that new federal buildings be done in a classical or neoclassical style instead of off-putting brutalist or modernist fashion, as has so often been the case for the past several decades. Contrary to the tone of much of the media coverage, this is hardly some crank or extremist position on Trump's part but a long-simmering reaction to some truly butt-ugly buildings you've paid for, structures that look more akin to fallout shelters, abandoned airport terminals, and Martian art projects than to anything recognizably and endearingly American, historically-rooted, or user-friendly.

The National Civic Art Society has championed this modest revolt against the modernist orthodoxy, but so have people like Tom Wolfe over the years, chronicling the modernists' arrogant insistence that buildings should look functional and geometric even when they aren't really all that functional, as when gleaming glass walls look so much like adjacent glass doors, with no obvious frames, lintels, or knobs, that hapless users repeatedly struggle to find the exit, as I've watched happen at the modernist temple that is the Guggenheim Museum in New York, fittingly. 

I was startled once to see panicked modernist architecture aficionados react to a very mild, low-key anti-modernist lecture as if heresy were being spouted in their midst and we should all perhaps clear out of the building early to escape it. I'd thought such debates happened in sedate, glacial fashion. The speaker was the quietest, most low-key heretic I've ever seen denounced, which is admirable, I think.

But here's a typical establishment reaction now that Trump has taken up the anti-modernist cause, in the form of the final words of a piece on the New Republic site by architecture blogger Kate Wagner: "[O]nly a specific kind of person looks at architecture and feels the need to talk about the Grecian ideal or the backbone of Western Society. That person is usually either a white supremacist, a stuck-up nitwit trapped in the 1980s, or, in the case of Trump himself, both."

This, said the architects, establishes an official style and therefore authoritarian or totalitarian in spirit. But the architects are mistaken on several grounds. First, federal buildings are a small minority of all buildings, and the order says nothing about how the other buildings should or must be built. Second, classicism in architecture is capable of almost infinite variation, such that uniformity will not result (no one has any difficulty in distinguishing the Jefferson from the Lincoln Memorial, for example, or from the White House). Third, it ignores the fact that, as a result of Moynihan's Guiding Principles, there has long existed de facto an official style, namely that which the architects impose on the government at any given time, all of it in the modern idiom with its desperate and egotistical search for originality as a virtue in itself. Fourth, it ignores the historical, and in my view aesthetic, connection between modernism and totalitarianism. Le Corbusier was a fascist, Philip Johnson a Nazi, and Oscar Niemeyer (the architect of Brasilia) a communist. The totalitarian sensibility of much modernist architecture is to me so obvious that I fail to understand how anyone could miss it. For lack of any other means to achieve grandeur, it deliberately employs sheer size and inhuman coldness of materials to achieve prepotency, in the process reducing the individual to insignificance, as mere intruders or bacteria in a Petri dish.

The Brutalist-style FBI Building in Washington (built 1963-1971). (Wikimedia Commons)

Far from being dictatorial, the order is profoundly liberating for clients, architects, and public alike. One of the arguments of the ideological modernists, and of their disciples and successors, is that, irrespective of any results from an aesthetic point of view, technology has dictated from the end of the nineteenth century onwards that we simply cannot as once we did, or in the same style. But it is clearly not the case that moderns cannot build classical buildings of distinction: the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, and the National Gallery of Art, are by no means ancient, and there are people living who remember the time before the Jefferson Memorial existed. Rejection of classicism, or of any other style is therefore a choice, not a fatality. 

The order will give renewed courage to patrons of architecture, who for a long time have been cowed by the architects' mastery of high-sounding verbiage and gobbledygook to promote their inhuman work, so much of which these days looks like a snapshot taken of a huge shack in mid-collapse during an earthquake. Patrons, like the courtiers of the Emperor with no clothes, have hitherto been afraid to confront architects for fear of appearing ignorant and unsophisticated, but will no longer have to accept the dictation of architects. Examples will show that things can be done differently, that patrons do not have to accept what Thom Mayne, the architect responsible for some of the worst of recent buildings, called "demanding art-for-art's-sake architecture that only other architects can appreciate."

Tweet   @brothersjudd