While the original architect of Donald Trump’s ever-expanding ballroom steps down and preservationists panic over the fate of New Deal murals inside the Social Security Administration building, the president gushes about painting the granite Eisenhower Executive Office Building white, “fixing” the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, and erecting his own Arc de Triomphe.
To peruse the plans for a Trump-era capital district alongside the General Services Administration’s list of assets identified for accelerated disposition – the federal buildings slated for off-loading – is to discern a diagram of Trump’s values.
Like all fascists’ aesthetics, Trump’s gaze is backward to an idealized “classical” age and forward to a time when he, the Great Man, is immortalized in stone and gold. Everything that does not fit this vision must be renovated, razed or sold to the highest bidder.
In March, the General Services Administration published a list of 443 properties it wanted to dump. A day later, bad press – or as the GSA put it, “overwhelming response” – moved the agency to reduce the number to 320 and a day later, to take the list down altogether. It’s back again, with 45 properties and no stampede at the door. Oddly, nobody wants a courthouse in Medford, Oregon.
Many of the buildings, like the brick and concrete Coast Guard headquarters in Boston or the monolithic William O Lipinski federal building in Chicago, are unremarkable.
There are garages and warehouses in the mix. Lesser structures in Hawaii, Nashville, or Portland are dear only to local historians and preservationists.
But other properties on the block are gems of America’s architectural history and its collective heritage. They are not Trump’s to dispose of, like battered file cabinets or obsolete computers. They belong to us.
The Robert C Weaver building, headquarters of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (Hud), is widely considered a brutalist masterpiece, its tapered pedestals and softly arced shape showcasing what one art historian called architect Marcel Breuer’s “heavy lightness.” The Wilbur J Cohen federal building – perhaps the most distressing of the dispositions – or disposessions – was built both to house the Social Security Administration and to celebrate the act that created the program in 1935. The building’s “commanding limestone facade combines prewar Art Moderne and stripped classicism with a subtle Egyptian flair,” says the Architect’s Newspaper. The sumptuous interior features bronze doors, Vermont verde marble panelling and a central flight of yellow-bronze escalators.
And then there’s what’s on the walls: The lobby of the J Will Robinson federal building, in Utah, houses Early and Modern Provo, Everett Clark Thorpe’s 1941 expressionist mural, commissioned by the treasury; reminiscent of American painter Thomas Hart Benton, it depicts a nuanced history of the city, including a white settler making a vow to the Native Americans that viewers know would be broken. Inside the Cohen building, meanwhile, are some of the country’s most important New Deal murals, including works by Ben Shahn, Philip Guston, and Seymour Fogel. Historian Gray Brechin calls it the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal”.
But whether they are celebrated or despised, the theft of these buildings from the public domain is more than a matter of brick and mortar. The selloff erases the home town face of the federal government, literally alienating it from the people it serves. It’s hard not to imagine that is part of the plan.
Furthermore, these works stand for something. Most bear the mark of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal or the post-second world war period when human progress seemed limitless, and leaders of both parties believed that government should try to maximize it.
Fogel’s mural Wealth of the Nation symbolizes the New Deal faith in science, engineering, and manual labor; his Security of the People, picturing a mother with a baby, children studying and playing, and a man reading at a fruit-laden table, illustrates the wellbeing a benevolent state can provide.
Breuer’s Weaver building was designed in 1965 to meet the “guiding principles for federal architecture” published by John F Kennedy’s administration – to “reflect the dignity, enterprise, vigor, and stability of the American National Government” and “embody the finest contemporary American architectural thought” – and extol Hud’s mission of urban renewal.
The public-minded optimism embodied into these structures is not just symbolic; it’s material. The construction of Philadelphia’s US Custom House under the Works Progress Administration, for instance, employed 4,000 people for two years and helped hoist the city’s economy out of the Great Depression.
Belief in science, muscular government, the dignity of labor, urbanism, and contemporary creativity: the values of modernity, coupled with commitment to the greater good, are antithetical to all that Trump is.
Meanwhile, in the spirit of his executive order “Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful”, Trump is remaking the District of Columbia in his own image.
The Eisenhower Executive Office Building, slated for a paint job, houses the treasury department, among other offices, but it is no architectural treasure. When it opened in 1888, Mark Twain called the Napoleonic pile the “ugliest building in America”– just Trump’s kind of place. A white coat does not promise improvement, however. Even Fox News’s Laura Ingraham wondered whether it might look like a “big white blob”.
The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool upgrade appears so far to involve nothing more than raking muck from around the edges. Eleven months into his term, Trump blames his predecessor for the eyesore.
The ballroom approaches groundbreaking, with a new architect signed on (the first one is facing concerns about his professional standing). The watchdogs are sedated. When the East Wing was a heap of rubble, the president fired six of the seven members of the US Commission of Fine Arts, whose job is to advise officials on design and aesthetics in public structures and spaces. Suddenly a rule-follower, Trump now plans to bring the new blueprints to the National Capital Planning Commission, chaired by Will Scharf, his former lawyer. Scharf worked on the supreme court case that got the president criminal immunity for official acts. If his administration can kidnap citizens off the streets, surely the president can knock down some fusty rooms and raise a 90,000-sq-ft monstrosity in their place.
The next item on the agenda, a neoclassical triumphal arch, would be topped by a gold Winged Victory figure flanked by two eagles. Sited in the traffic circle at the Arlington Memorial Bridge, its largest version would dwarf the Lincoln Monument. The arch is supposed to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary. But like Trump’s two military parades, it has a more mortal honoree.
“Who’s this for?” asked CBS News’s Ed O’Keefe, noticing the maquette in the Oval Office.
Trump replied: “Me.”
In 1968, New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable praised Breuer’s Hud building as “a handsome, functional structure that adds quality design and genuine 20th-century style to a city badly in need of both,” rather than “some half-baked adaptation of the grandeur of the past.”
Trashing monumental public works while building cheesy monuments to himself, Trump denigrates both history and the future, the collective heritage and the idea of modernity itself.
“We have spent too many decades mistaking the superficial forms for the essential spirit and forfeiting the Capital’s greatness,” Huxtable added. The sentence could describe Trump’s Washington – and his mingy, me-first American ideal.
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Judith Levine is a Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism
