A City of Marble, A City of Concrete: Competing visions of what America should be
We are pleased to bring you our inaugural feature piece of the Pocket Strategist, a publication focused on visual culture, ideology, social narrative, and public memory. This piece is an abbreviated version of an original essay on urbisvisions.com.
New US presidents usually reserve their initial months in office for only the most urgent policy priorities, to take advantage of that fleeting moment of opportunity when their popularity is at its highest point and their agenda encounters the least political resistance. It might thus seem surprising that President Biden, just four weeks after his inauguration, should turn his attention to the architecture of public buildings. On February 24, 2021, Biden revoked an executive order issued by President Trump, “Promoting Beautiful Civic Architecture”, that had recognised classical architecture as the preferred style for federal buildings and discouraged the use of modernist architecture in federal construction projects. Why, when the highly anticipated COVID relief bill still had not been passed, would Biden be paying attention to matters of building design?
Washington DC is a planned capital city whose spatial design is meant to be a symbol both of the American government’s power, and of the national narratives that the government models for citizens. Public architecture in Washington DC is dominated by two styles. Federal buildings from the 19th century and early 20th century are built in the classical style, which draws inspiration from the civic architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. Federal buildings from the second half of the 20th century are built in the brutalist style, which is a descendant of continental European modernism and Bauhaus design.
The government buildings that line the wide avenues of DC’s National Mall are more than just the physical headquarters of public administration; they are symbols of the ideological tension between two visions for what America should be, expressed through the medium of architecture. The design of federal buildings represents the ongoing debate between libertarian and globalist value systems, between a society of farmers and a society of technocrats. The polished marble curves of classical architecture represent the republican utopia of the American founding; the raw concrete angles of brutalist architecture embody the internationalist aspirations of the postwar era.
The nationhood narratives constructed by political elites are only meant to grant legitimacy to themselves, the minority in power. Excluded from the farmer-statesman archetype of the American founding were enslaved people, indigenous communities, non-landowners, and women. Excluded from the global citizen archetype of the postwar age are the millions of working-class and middle-class Americans for whom transcontinental freedom of movement is a distant theoretical concept rather than an attainable reality. Although they don’t represent the lived experience of the majority, nationhood narratives are able to achieve broader societal resonance by being incorporated into public memory through the visual arts and through spatial design. That is why civic architecture is so politically important, because it shapes our understanding of who we are and of what our society should be.
The ideological struggle between libertarianism and globalism in American political life is as contentious as it is far from being resolved. Although President Trump certainly was no farmer-statesman, his “America First” foreign policy was a genuine counter-reaction to the societal consequences of unrestrained globalism, which has raised the prestige of a few elites while pushing the rest of the population into economic stagnation and precarity. The intent of Trump’s executive order on architecture was to repudiate brutalism, both for how it looks aesthetically and for what it represents ideologically.
It is precisely this symbolic association, between brutalist architecture and America’s assumption of a superpower role in the world, that explains why President Biden considered it important to revoke Trump’s order that would have marginalised brutalism in civic architecture. Biden, an internationalist who came of age during the Cold War and who previously headed the Senate’s foreign policy committee, truly believes in the postwar utopian narrative of American universalism. Biden’s executive action was as if to tell the world, “America’s back!” — because brutalism expresses American power in the way that the globalists want to conceive of it.
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