Classical architecture is our national architecture, and its reuse is overdue. It has long served the nation, but our newest government buildings serve other masters. What have we lost, how did that happened, and how can we restore it?
A national architecture consists of the buildings that a government builds to serve its purposes. Our national architecture, first formulated in ancient Athens, makes beauty visible as the counterpart to the nation’s moral good using principles founded in Nature.
Our Declaration of Independence cited “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” that became the founding principles for the new nation’s several institutions. Those institutions then naturally commissioned buildings to serve and express their roles in governing. The Founders, well educated in the classics, understood that beauty and the good were parallel manifestations of natural law principles. In Federalist #47, James Madison used words appropriate for a beautiful building when he wrote that the Constitution was proportionate, balanced, distributed, and blended with the necessary “symmetry and beauty of form.”
Among the Founders, Thomas Jefferson was the most knowledgeable about architecture. As Governor of Virginia he proposed that each of the government’s three branches would have its own building. Later, in France, when asked to provide a design for Virginia’s Capitol, he rejected current models and turned to the classical principles of geometric proportionality, adjustments to circumstances, and decorum found in “the Maison quarrèe of Nismes, one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful and precious morsel of architecture left us by antiquity.” It had “obtained the approbation of fifteen or sixteen centuries, and is therefore preferable to any design which might be newly contrived.” Jefferson knew it only through illustrations, but later, when seeing it, he proclaimed himself enraptured.
Countless classical buildings have been constructed with a limited catalogue of pieces, with classical columns as the most conspicuous. Their proportions and detailing organize or order the construction to make visible Nature’s order, harmony, and proportionality, with decorum assuring that a building’s appearance is appropriate for its rank and purpose in serving the common good. Each new classical building is based on the best available precedents of buildings serving the same purpose, with modifications guided by reasoned theory to give it the best current understanding of beauty.
This way of constructing the important buildings was simply called architecture as opposed to mere building. But in the 1700s people began exercising the option of departing from accepted practices. This notion introduced a building’s appearance or style rather than its purpose as its main identifying characteristic. Similarly eroded was the understanding that a building made visible the principles of Nature that it shared with the good. Beauty, which carried objective standards that reasoned judgment assessed, was converted into an individual judgment made in the eye of the beholder and measured by the extent of the sensate pleasure it offered. Pleasure that titillated the senses soon displaced beauty that enriches the soul and connects human nature to Nature.
Historians now began cataloguing buildings identified by their styles, and used the evidence of changing styles as evidence of humankind’s progress. Changes in style documented the three ages that followed our emergence from primitivism. The first was antiquity, whose buildings they called classical because they were the admired models of beauty. The thousand years of “barbarism and religion” that followed produced building in the Gothic style, so named to shame one of the tribes that destroyed Rome. In the most recent era, which they called the modern era, the ancient classical style was recovered and enriched with sub styles such as Baroque, Rococo, and Neoclassical. Their narrative followed these rules: one style per era; each new style makes its predecessor obsolete; when recurrences happen the style is to be identified as a revival or a neo version; and the spirit of the age commands the march of the changing styles through time.
The histories soon replaced treatises and theories which had guided architects in finding the order, harmony, and proportionality of beauty. Eager to keep in step with time’s march, they abandoned decorum that calibrated the beauty suitable for a building’s service to the common good and fitted their buildings’ styles to fit their time while also having its form follow its function. These ideas were developed on the European Continent during the long century that began in 1789. When the expanded and overcrowded cities were rebuilt with boulevards and parks and stocked with courts of justice, opera houses, and museums serving roles formerly ensconced in monarchic palaces, the revanchist governments humiliated revolutionaries by clothing their public buildings in the styles of the nation’s prerevolutionary national classicism, and entrepreneurs used new materials and technologies to build apartment building, hotels, emporiums, and railroad facilities (such as Paris’s Gare du Nord) in similar styles while tipping their hats to decorum.
While this was unrolling on the Continent, Britain and its North American colonies were otherwise engaged. Classicism had little imprint from the brief Roman presence where the foundations of law rested on Magna Carta and common law traditions and no ancient public buildings survived. Ancient classical thought became central in education, and John Locke and Montesquieu were more eagerly read than Voltaire and Rousseau. In framing the United States Constitution, the former colonials drew from ancient and modern history, from their experience with British common and statuary law, and from the practices of governing the new states and using the Articles of Confederation, and they were also well-read in recent political theory and philosophy. The result was firmly anchored in ancient natural law traditions, and so were its first public buildings.
Classical architecture had been imported to England in the 1600s and subsequently carried to the American colonies. The earliest buildings the new nation built were astringent versions of ancient and British classical buildings with their later buildings using Greek detailing suggested by Romanticism. Later in the century, American buildings strayed from the classical, but around 1900 the nation’s commitment to its national classical architecture was renewed. The 1902 McMillan Commission Plan—for restoring, modernizing, and expanding the city that Washington, Jefferson, and L’Enfant had formulated—reestablished Washington D.C.’s congruence with the nation’s natural law principles. The unified efforts of government officials, legislators, major architects, and guardians serving in protective commissions guided construction well into the Depression and produced today’s capital city.
Meanwhile, on the Continent, the two words that are united to make architecture—arche meaning the best and techne meaning construction—became disjointed. In the turmoil following World War I, radicals advocating new political systems and cultural order were joined by a clutch of Central European architects infatuated by technology. They consigned the modern age that we call the Renaissance to the past and declared that a new, modern age had dawned and its spirit demanded a New Architecture. Finding no state willing to support their program, they turned to reforming the architectural profession and architectural education by establishing the Bauhaus that Walter Gropius founded and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe moved to Berlin. Hitler closed the Bauhaus and the Nazis promoted their fascist program with a bombastic style of classicism—a fact prominent in the canard that classicism is the architecture of fascism and totalitarianism.
Gropius, Mies, and other Bauhaus personnel accepted the invitations of Americans, and in 1937, they installed Bauhaus instruction at Harvard and in Chicago. Its instruction anathematized classical architecture and the theories supporting it, and enshrined histories of architecture based on styles and chronicling progress culminating in the new technological modern era. Technology replaced traditional building practices, and addressing social programs replaced the traditional public religious or civil purposes that architecture had served.
In that decade, Philip Johnson had introduced the New Architecture or modernist Bauhaus style to avant-garde connoisseurs as an aesthetic alternative to classicism. Now named the International Style, it planted modernist styles in the march of time with no allegiance to any particular nation. Its rise to global hegemony came through its being the face of the America that led the Cold War battle against godless communism and socialism. By that battle’s end in 1989, technology-based modernist styles had pushed humanist-based classical architecture into history’s dustbin. Modernist style buildings both public and private now predominate, and architects busy themselves inventing new styles to illustrate theories that interest architects, or use them as vehicles of self-expression or to provide corporate branding.
The U. S. government had continued building classical buildings, but in 1962 the Kennedy administration changed that practice. It mandated that new federal buildings were to present “the finest contemporary American architectural thought,” which was then thoroughly modernist. “Design must flow from the architecture profession to the Government, and not vice versa.” The early and subsequent results have been mixed. Some buildings are indistinguishable from new commercial buildings, and others present the latest modernist styles that architects award but the general populace increasingly spurns.
In 2020 at the end of his first term, President Donald Trump mandated classicism for federal buildings. President Joseph Biden quickly annulled it, but in 2025 Trump reinstated an improved mandate to make “traditional and classical architecture … the preferred architecture for applicable Federal public buildings” and the default in the District of Columbia.
The architecture establishment howled in protest. It stifles “innovation and harms local communities…we support freedom in design.” Preservationists, historians, and others agreed. Because a building’s design is commonly considered constitutionally protected speech, some opponents said this would “censor” modern architecture, although nothing in either the 2020 or the 2025 mandate would prevent architects and private clients from using whatever style they wished.
The resistance to Trump’s program comes from the modernist interpretation of architecture. This view is articulated in the first lines of a 1943 book by Nikolaus Pevsner that is now the canonic doctrine in histories and commentaries: “A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.” Indeed so! Anyone can see that a private structure sheltering a person’s bicycle is a vastly lesser thing than a public building serving and expressing the celebration and veneration of the anchoring truths that bind a people into a community. But for Pevsner and the current literati in architecture, the cathedral differed from the shed because it, unlike the shed, was “designed with a view of aesthetic appeal.”
That appeal is aimed at the eye of the beholder and offers pleasurable sensations. The pleasure is personal, and the individual’s assessment is enough to justify a design, even of a well-wrought Brutalist or Deconstructivist building that pleases architects but not the general public. This basis for justifying a building’s appearance is hardly appropriate for a national architecture. The Founders and their successors built classical buildings as the nation’s public architecture because, as Trump’s 2025 mandate puts it, such buildings visually “connect our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity, reminding citizens not only of their rights but also their responsibilities in maintaining and perpetuating its institutions.” Classical buildings appeal to the public because people understand that the beauty they see is connected to the common good that they value and enjoy.
The 2025 mandate is not one-size-fits-all style classicism. It notes that the classical “encompasses such [sub] styles as Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, and Art Deco.” These are variations within the classical that present the best understanding of beauty that was prevailing at the time and place of the building’s construction. They enrich the 150-year tradition of building “beautiful and beloved” federal buildings that have earned the nation its unique place within a multimillennial architectural tradition of beautiful buildings serving the common good.
The genius and essence of classical architecture is its ability to produce beauty through the guidance of the same principles that government uses to serve the common good. Modernist architecture’s service is limited to a transient aesthetic appeal. This rupture between classicism and modernism in architecture is the legacy of the long century that began in 1789. In our post Civil War building boom eclecticism interrupted the continuity from the Founding of our national classical architecture, but it was put on dramatic display at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition. Attracting a quarter of all Americans, fairgoers returning home launched the City Beautiful movement and the federal government set about building the Washington we have today.
Modernist styles satisfying an aesthetic appeal, being of their time and exhibiting the irresistible role of modern technology, began to seep into American buildings in the 1920s, and when building resumed after World War II they established global hegemony. Architects, educators, and builders of public buildings treated classical architecture as an impediment to progress. They preferred buildings that were disconnected from anchoring truths and built styles that illustrated esoteric theories or were artifacts of self-expression for themselves and their patrons who after 1962 included the federal government.
Enter the 2025 mandate. That mandate is intended to restore classical architecture and to have what the government builds include the involvement of the people the buildings will serve. It annuls the architectural profession’s franchise, and once again, “Design must flow from the needs of the Government and the aspirations and preferences of the American people to the architectural profession, and not vice versa.” Designs must be “visually identifiable as civic buildings” and command “respect from the general public.”
When people spend their own money to buy or build their houses, they rarely chose a modernist style. They endorse the preservation movement that grew from the destruction of beloved landmarks in the 1960s. The Secretary of State in 1965 and subsequent successors conducted a 30-year program to transform the diplomatic reception rooms inside the drab 1961 State Department into a beautiful display of American classical architecture. Jane Jacobs, Henry Hope Reed, and Norman Mailer took aim at avant-garde modernism. Architects were being trained to abjure classism, but in 1989 the University of Notre Dame restored instruction in classical architecture, and others have followed. Meanwhile, several organizations have promoted its revival, with the National Civic Arts Society founded in 2002 playing an instrumental role in drafting Trump’s mandates. In 2003 the Driehaus Prize was established to honor excellence in classical architecture; its premium is twice that of the Pritzker Prize for modernists but it receives virtually no press. An increasing number of universities and others are building classical, for example the Federal District Judge in Tuscaloosa Alabama who built a new Greek federal building in 2012.
Trump is an unlikely instrument for an instauration of classical architecture. As a builder, he likes glitter and gargantuan scale and displays of his name, and he razes without authority and manhandles federal building projects. As a commercial builder, he sought renown among the commercial elite. Now he wants the acclaim of the people who are less enthralled by the fashions that drive commercial success. They know that it comes and goes, and they also know that some things are more important than other things and that among buildings, Lincoln Cathedrals are more important than bicycle sheds elaborated into fanciful modernist buildings. The people value enduring classical civic buildings, and this program is intended to provide them.
And yet, just as he swept away the Executive Orders from Joe Biden on modernism, Trump’s own orders may be swept away by a next Administration that is far more worshipful of the avant-garde pretensions of Modernism—or are just inclined to throw in, unthinkingly, with any move to repudiate all things touched by Trump. There is a real need, then, to move from Executive Orders to the laws—laws that will put in place a national policy, with the promise to endure past the swings in our political seasons. That would involve making the case anew, in the schools and in the press, and across party lines, drawing again on the things that ordinary people widely understand. And it would mean simply drawing naturally on our accumulated experience, tradition, precedents, information, and knowledge—and yes, on the congruence of our individual human nature with the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.
