President Donald Trump's executive order mandating neoclassical architecture for federal buildings has sparked widespread criticism from the architecture community, but critics may be missing the larger picture. According to urban planning experts, the mandate serves primarily as a distraction from Trump's more substantive architectural agenda, which includes selling off government properties, militarizing American cities, and constructing immigration detention facilities.
Trump issued the executive order at the end of August, titled "Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again," requiring all federal buildings to be constructed in the neoclassical style. This mirrors a similar order from his first term in 2020. However, aside from the $200 million White House ballroom currently under construction, the order appears designed more to appeal to his political base than to initiate any serious neoclassical building program.
The administration's real architectural impact comes through different channels entirely. The General Services Administration (GSA) announced plans in March to sell 440 federal buildings under the direction of Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). While that number has since been reduced, the GSA continues pushing for major reductions in federal building inventory. This means the government is likely to sell more Roman and Greek-inspired buildings than it will ever construct.
When Trump issued his first similar executive order in 2020, the architectural establishment responded with swift condemnation. Trump declared that most modernist, brutalist, postmodernist, and deconstructivist federal architecture represented "an abominable betrayal of the republic." He appointed architecture critic and neoclassical advocate Justin Shubow to chair the US Commission of Fine Arts in January 2021, though President Biden removed him in June 2021.
Shubow has long campaigned against contemporary federal architecture, particularly criticizing Frank Gehry's Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial, completed in 2020. The critic argues that only neoclassical design can properly represent American values, though this position ignores the style's historical connections to slavery and white supremacy. From the Roman rotunda of the St. Louis Hotel in New Orleans, where slave auctions occurred in the early 19th century, to the US Capitol Building itself, built by enslaved labor, neoclassical architecture has long symbolized rule by white elites.
Trump's latest executive order attempts to justify neoclassical mandates by claiming the Founders sought to "visually connect our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity." The order presents a sanitized version of history that ignores the power imbalances and enslavement systems linking the early American republic with ancient Rome. It criticizes the GSA's Design Excellence Program from 1994 for producing federal buildings that "are not even visibly identifiable as civic buildings."
The order claims to give the "general public" power in defining federal architecture's appearance, excluding architects and architectural historians from this definition. However, it provides no mechanism for public input and offers no alternatives if citizens reject the mandatory neoclassicism. This contradiction reveals the order's true purpose as political theater rather than genuine policy reform.
Trump's actual architectural agenda focuses on projects with far greater impact on American society. His administration's largest building initiative involves constructing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention facilities, designed with chain-link fences and temporary structures that generate enormous profits for private contractors. These facilities, ostensibly for undocumented immigrants, could potentially serve broader control purposes in the future.
The administration's pro-artificial intelligence stance has also promoted data center construction across the country. These utilitarian structures, deeply unpopular even in conservative areas due to their massive energy and water consumption, will far outnumber any neoclassical buildings the government might construct. The data centers represent another form of anonymous, functional architecture that contradicts Trump's supposed aesthetic preferences.
More significantly, Trump's deployment of military personnel for urban law enforcement has transformed how Americans experience public space. Cities including Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Memphis have witnessed federal forces acting as "imperial guards," for whom classical columns and pediments serve merely as symbols. This militarization directly attacks citizens' right to freely inhabit urban areas, with the heaviest burden falling on the nation's most vulnerable populations.
Trump's international statements further reveal his true architectural priorities. His proposals for Gaza involve displacing residents so developers can build luxury towers, with no mention of neoclassical requirements. These plans, following what critics describe as a US-backed genocide, focus entirely on profit generation rather than architectural style. The proposed glass towers bear no resemblance to classical design, demonstrating that Trump's architectural interests center on what buildings do for powerful people, not how they appear.
The administration's attacks on universities and colleges threaten to place architectural education under state control, a far more serious threat than any stylistic mandate. While the White House hasn't proposed forcing schools like Columbia or Harvard to teach neoclassicism, broader attacks on free speech and intellectual freedom aim to create submission to state authority.
Urban planning experts argue that Trump's executive order serves as an authoritarian distraction, keeping the architectural community focused on defending positions that lack radical potential. The real architectural agenda involves organizing space to suppress dissent, expedite human suffering, and accelerate capital accumulation. Military boots on city streets, people confined in tent detention centers, and technology companies draining resources for data centers represent the administration's actual spatial priorities.
While historical connections exist between classical columns at 19th-century slave markets and today's White House ballroom, those decorative elements will play only a minor role in the broader MAGA-era urban agenda. Critics focusing solely on stylistic mandates risk missing the more fundamental ways Trump's administration is reshaping American space and society through surveillance, detention, and control.
