‘God-Knows-What-Kind-of-Classic’

On January 20, 2025, the day of his swearing-in, Stephen Ehikian, the new head of the General Services Administration—the agency responsible for overseeing, among other things, the design of government buildings—received a memorandum from the White House directing him to submit “recommendations to advance the policy that [new] Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage.” The memo was titled, “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.” Well, who could argue with that?

Many people, it turned out. The American Institute of Architects responded sternly: “AIA supports freedom in design and is extremely concerned about any revisions that remove control from local communities or mandate official federal design preferences that hinder design freedom.” Since the White House memo specifically mentioned “procedures for incorporating community input into Federal building design selections,” the concern about community control seems misplaced. As for defending design freedom, that sounds noble, like defending freedom of speech, but an architect is not a soapbox orator—and never has been.

In 1664, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s chief minister, invited Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the most celebrated artist in Europe, to design the new wing of the Louvre Palace. Bernini spent five months in Paris, sculpted a bust of the king, drew up plans for the palace, and, following a formal cornerstone-laying ceremony, returned to Rome. Construction did not commence immediately, however. Colbert was not satisfied with Bernini’s proposal, and two years later, he formed a French team to prepare a brand-new design; the result was the magnificent east front of the Louvre. Another example. In 1907, the fabulously wealthy Harold McCormick of Chicago hired Frank Lloyd Wright to design an immense country house on Lake Michigan. It was Wright’s largest residential commission to date, but McCormick’s strong-willed wife, Edith, a daughter of John D. Rockefeller, took one look at the plans and nixed the project. “It is very nice for the mountains,” she said, “but hardly the thing for Lake Forest.” A year later, Charles Adams Platt was commissioned to design a beautiful Italianate villa and garden that were more to her taste. The architectural client, unlike the customer, may not always be right, but she always has the last word.

In December 2020, in the final weeks of the first Trump administration, the White House issued an executive order (later withdrawn by the Biden administration) aimed at promoting classical architecture as the official style for new federal buildings in Washington, D.C., and for new federal courthouses elsewhere. The reaction of the architectural media to the present memorandum has been equally alarmist. There are few objections to respecting regional and traditional heritage; it is the word classical that rankles. “Classical Architecture Mandate for Federal Buildings is Back on the Table as Trump Returns to the West Wing,” read the headline in Architectural Record. “Trump Reinstates Executive Order Mandating ‘Classical’ Architecture for Government Buildings,” read the ARTnews headline. “Trump signs order mandating classical design for new federal buildings,” echoed Britain’s Architects’ Journal.

The headlines were deceptive. There is no new executive order and no mandate—or at least, not yet. The memo in question was a presidential action, a lesser form of directive generally lacking legal force. It is unclear exactly how regional, traditional, and classical heritage are to be respected. Whereas regional and traditional are fuzzy terms, most people have a distinct image of what is meant by classical—big Roman columns. Indeed, many of the alarmist articles about the White House memo were illustrated with photographs of Washington landmarks such as the White House or the Supreme Court Building. But are monumental porticoes and Corinthian columns really what classicism is about?

In 1982, the Greek architect Demetri Porphyrios published his seminal essay, “Classicism Is Not a Style.” His point was that classicism has always represented above all an architectural sensibility that “naturalizes the constructional a prioris of shelter by turning them into myth.” In other words, classicism is about elevating building construction into art. This simple objective has served creative talents as dissimilar as Michelangelo and Bernini, Christopher Wren and Karl Friedrich Schinkel, as well as Thomas Ustick Walter, the architect of the dome of the U.S. Capitol. The Capitol dome dates from 1866, but it is not necessary to go back 160 years to find worthy examples of classical federal buildings. During the decades immediately preceding the Second World War, leading American architects—and their clients—were rethinking the established classical tradition in radically novel ways. If the present administration intends to revisit classicism, it would be useful to look at federal buildings from this fecund period, not only as precedents but also as a jumping-off point.

The National Academy of Sciences Building (1924) is on Constitution Avenue, facing the National Mall. At the time of its construction, the Commission of Fine Arts, which had final approval of the design, was concerned that the building complement the newly completed Lincoln Memorial—that is, it should be classical. The architect, Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, had other ideas. He imagined “a building of the irregular character … practical and convenient as may be, without regard for symmetry.” Goodhue was a free spirit. Unlike most leading architects at that time, he had not attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Indeed, he had not gone to any university. A natural talent, he had risen rapidly through the ranks of apprenticeship. Perhaps this contributed to his pragmatic view of the building art. “All rules in architecture save absolutely basic ones are outside the subject,” he once observed, “and the ‘five orders’ are entitled to no more veneration than all other good constructive form.” Over a prolific career cut short by his untimely death at 54, he was responsible for St. Bartholomew’s church in Manhattan, the campus of the California Institute of Technology, the Los Angeles Central Library, and the Nebraska State Capitol.

Goodhue was not a card-carrying classicist, but neither was he a modernist. For one thing, he did not reject history: “The big universal progress in art moves on the wings of tradition,” he wrote lyrically in a 1916 article. For another, unlike European modernists, who demonized ornament, he regularly employed a team of artists who favored figural decoration. In the National Academy of Sciences Building, for example, the painter Hildreth Meière included allegorical female figures representing Earth, Air, Fire, and Water in the tiled dome of the Great Hall, and the German-born sculptor Lee Lawrie created massive cast-bronze front doors with bas-reliefs that portrayed Euclid, Galileo, and Newton.

The bas-reliefs and murals—even the ironwork—celebrated the sciences. The exterior of the building was more restrained. Goodhue did his best to accommodate the Commission of Fine Arts, switching from concrete (his first choice) to white marble and designing a symmetrical façade, although he resisted the commission’s suggestion to add a Corinthian colonnade. Nevertheless, because the upper floor was designed as an attic, and the windows of the lower floors were treated as unified slots, the three-story building had a monumental presence. The result, an intentionally unpretentious and astylar building, is classical in spirit though not in detail. Goodhue mischievously characterized it as “God-knows-what-kind-of-Classic.”

The Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building, built a dozen years after the Academy, stands next door. Its architect was chosen through an invited competition. Although there was no question that classicism was the desired style, the competition brief hedged slightly: “Aesthetic appeal should be through dignity of conception, proportion, scale and purity of line rather than through stressing of purely decorative or monumental features. … The use of columns, pediments, and other such forms may be altogether omitted and should be restricted to the character of the building as above described.” The runners-up were John Russell Pope, who was completing the classical National Archives Building near the eastern end of the Mall, and James Gamble Rogers, who is best known for his Collegiate Gothic structures at Yale but had recently built a neoclassical library for Columbia University. Whereas both architects included classical motifs in their designs—fluted Doric columns (Pope) and stylized pilasters (Rogers)—the winner of the competition, Paul Philippe Cret, followed the brief’s suggestion to the letter.

Cret, a transplanted Frenchman and a prize-winning graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts, was a serious classicist—of a particular sort. He had burst on the scene some 25 years earlier with the Pan American Union Building, a richly ornamented structure that also faces Constitution Avenue, but had, since its completion, come to champion what he called New Classicism—buildings that were classical in proportion and composition but without the attendant details. This is sometimes referred to as stripped classicism, although ungenerous critics derided Cret’s austere version as “starved classicism.” Stripped or starved, his Federal Reserve building did not include porticoes, colonnades, pilasters, or pediments, and the rare classical reference was so abstract as to be almost unrecognizable. Cret’s treatment of the façades was similar to Goodhue’s: tall windows in a two-story base with an attic, giving the impression of a colonnade—sort of. Symmetry governed the calm composition of white marble. The templelike central entrance pavilion, which had square piers instead of columns, gave pride of place to the Fed’s boardroom—the cockpit of the global economy. The only figural decoration on the main façade was the sculpture of a fierce-looking American eagle perched above the entrance, the work of artist Sidney Waugh. The austere, no-nonsense architecture effectively communicated—and still communicates—money, power, and governmental authority, which may be why the building appears regularly on the news whenever the Fed raises or lowers the bank rate. Timeless is a shopworn description, but it fits.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt visited the newly opened Federal Reserve in 1938 and wrote about it in her nationally syndicated newspaper column: “I think the building’s exterior is very beautiful and have admired it often, but I was equally impressed by the interior. I was assured, rather apologetically, that the space taken up by the very fine staircase could not have been utilized in any other way. I gathered they had, perhaps, been criticized for thinking too much about beauty and too little about utility. Surely, this country has learned that we must meet both needs in public buildings.” She added, “Unless we satisfy our sense of beauty in a public building, we have failed in one of its most important functions.” Sound familiar?

The 1920s and 1930s were a challenging time for architects. Along with economic booms and busts, architectural ideals were changing. At roughly the same time as Bertram Goodhue was building the National Academy of Sciences, Walter Gropius was designing the Bauhaus in Germany. The changing Zeitgeist affected American architects no less than their European counterparts. But unlike the European avant-garde, American architects were content to work within an established tradition, even as they modified its conventions. Buildings such as the National Academy of Sciences and the Federal Reserve are notable for their coherent, moving, and long-lived simplicity, and especially for their particular and very striking combination of tradition and modernity, of architecture and art. They represent a particularly American brand of modern classicism—or should it be called classicist modernism?

A third example of modern classicism is the Depression-era Nix Federal Building in Philadelphia, which was completed in 1941 and occupies half a block on Market Street. The architect was Harry Sternfeld, a student of Cret and later his colleague at the University of Pennsylvania. Sternfeld was not a national figure, but he was an accomplished designer, and in the Nix Building, he went even further than his teacher in pursuing a pared-down classicism. A five-story symmetrical limestone block housing federal offices sits atop a two-story granite base that contains public spaces—a courthouse, a post office. The windows are separated by vertical strips of stone that hint at pilasters, although there is no fluting, only three vestigial stripes that suggest art deco streamlining rather than antiquity. Otherwise all is abstraction. This sort of architecture is sometimes called moderne, and modern it was; the structure is a steel frame encased in concrete, and the building was centrally air-conditioned.

A prominent feature of the Market Street façade are two large granite bas-relief panels flanking the entrance to the courthouse. The larger-than-life figures, the work of sculptor Donald De Lue, are a young man representing Justice and a bearded elder representing Law. The post office entrances, which are around the corner, are flanked by bas-reliefs of scenes portraying postal delivery: a mailman picking up letters from an urban mailbox; a cowboy delivering mail to a desert mailbox; a snowy Alaskan scene with a hooded Eskimo and sled dogs; and a tropical setting representing the Panama Canal Zone. The artist was Edmond Amateis, and like De Lue, he was commissioned by the federal government’s Section of Painting and Sculpture, which was situated in the Treasury Department, of all places. There is no classical precedent for such prominent figural ornament. The pediments of ancient Greek and Roman temples sometimes contain sculpture, and Renaissance buildings have human figures on the roof parapet, but you have to go back to Gothic cathedrals and Baroque churches to find façades with such dominant sculpture. Meaningful ornament of the sort that adorns the Nix Building is not uniquely American, but it does mark a uniquely American moment. Market Street, once the city’s main shopping thoroughfare, is today a shadow of its former elegant self—the Nix neighbors are a Popeye’s and a parking lot. Yet thanks to its severe architecture and expressive art, the courthouse holds its own. It is a somber survivor of a period when federal public buildings really were “visually identifiable.” And beautiful.

There are several lessons here. As Porphyrios observed, classicism is a sensibility, and over the centuries, it has taken many forms: more or less pure, more or less monumental, more or less ornamented. Classicism encompasses an architectural language, and like a spoken and written language, it is both rooted in the past—we can “read” old buildings just as we can read old novels—and hybridized by a changing present. That is the paradox of a revived modern classicism—it will be a fusion of new and old. Classicism is particularly suitable for civic buildings, which are declarations of public rather than private virtue. “Classicism is a discipline which requires a certain humility,” wrote Paul Cret, “an abandonment of too much personality or, as we moderns put it, an abandonment of the modern exasperated ‘self expression.’ ” A little more humility and a little less self-expression in our federal buildings today would surely not be a bad thing.