From the article in Architectural Record:
Will the White House Order New Federal Architecture To Be Classical?
February 4, 2020
Cathleen McGuigan
Editor's Note: The American Institute of Architects issued a statement in response to this story on the afternoon of February 4, 2020. Read it at the bottom of this page.
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Meanwhile, last week, the GSA’s Chief Architect and Director of the Design Excellence Program, David Insinga, resigned his post.
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Yet Moynihan’s Guiding Principles also dictate that “an official style must be avoided,” and that new buildings should reflect their time. “Design must flow from the architectural profession to the government and not vice versa,” the guidelines state. “The Government should be willing to pay some additional cost to avoid excessive uniformity in design of Federal buildings.”
The mechanism for the radical upending of these principles, in order to promote classical and traditional regional architecture (Spanish colonial style, for example, would be permitted in places like Florida), would be a President’s Committee for the Re-Beautification of Federal Architecture. Its members would include the Commissioner of the GSA’s Public Building Service and at least one member of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, designated by the President. That commission, which approves architecture and design in much of the nation’s capital, is composed of seven experts, appointed by the President to four-year terms.
President Trump’s first appointment, in November 2018, was Justin Shubow, the president of the National Civic Art Society, which is devoted to furthering classical architecture. Its website contends that “contemporary architecture is by and large a failure,” and states the organization’s mission is “to help architecture return to its pre-Modernist roots.” Much of the language in the draft document echoes the website for Shubow’s organization.
Shubow became well known for his dogged opposition to the proposed
Eisenhower Memorial in Washington,
designed by Frank Gehry (which is finally opening this May). President Trump’s two most recent appointees to the Fine Arts Commission, made this past December, are James C. McCrery II, AIA, a founder and board member of the National Civic Art Society, and the Indiana-based architect Duncan G. Stroik, AIA, whose work is “informed by the timelessness of classical architecture and the humanism of traditional cities,” according to the Commission’s website. The terms of the four other members of the Commission expire next December.
As a real estate developer, Trump’s taste in architecture tended to the glass and steel of modernism, albeit in an often glitzy style—from the 1983 Trump Tower in New York, designed by the late Der Scutt of Poor, Swanke, Hayden & Connell, to the 2009 Trump International Hotel and Tower in Chicago, designed by Adrian Smith, then at SOM. When Trump bought the Gulf and Western building on Columbus Circle in New York in the 1990s, he hired Philip Johnson and Costas Kondylis to re-skin its facade in bronze-tinted glass, prompting the late critic
Herbert Muschamp to declare it was an International Style skyscraper decked out in a gold lamé party dress.
Will an executive order to bring classical design language to new federal architecture even be issued? The White House certainly has more pressing matters on its plate. But if it happens, quietly or otherwise, the impact would be enormous.
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SLOT FILLED
David Insinga Named Chief Architect for GSA
Insinga will succeed Leslie Shepherd who has held the position since 2007.
By KATHARINE KEANE
The General Services Administration (GSA) announced on Tuesday that David Insinga, AIA, has been selected to serve as chief architect for the Public Buildings Service effective Dec. 11, 2016. In the press release the GSA stated, "As chief architect, David will provide visionary leadership at a national level and high-level technical policy direction for the agency in matters of design quality and innovation, design excellence, and cost effectiveness in federal design."
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