Edmund Burke once said, “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”
No nation on earth should inspire more patriotism than the United States of America, which is why I introduced legislation last week to codify the core of President Donald Trump’s December 2020 Executive Order to make classical architecture the preferred style for all new federal buildings.
My bill defines classical architecture as a host of styles, including Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, and Art Deco.
We should follow the example of presidents like Thomas Jefferson, William Howard Taft, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who all prioritized classical architecture. They recognized the connection between its birthplace, democratic Athens and the American republic. Thanks to them, our nation’s capital features magnificent buildings like the U.S. Capitol, the National Mall, and the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials.
Critics charged President Trump’s original executive order as being racist. That is obscene.
At a time when Americans are divided about so much, one thing that unites us, regardless of race, sex or class, is the preference for classical architecture over modern architecture. The reality is that people of all stripes enjoy beauty, and they know it when they see it.
According to a 2020 survey conducted by the Harris Poll, 72 percent of respondents said they preferred traditional over modern architecture in federal buildings and courthouses. Tellingly, support for traditional design cuts across partisan, racial and class lines. Seventy-three percent of Republicans and 70 percent of Democrats said they preferred traditional over modernist design, as do strong majorities of black (62 percent), Hispanic (65 percent) and white (75 percent) Americans. Seventy-three percent % of households making less than $50,000 a year also preferred traditional over modern design, while 70 percent of American households making more than $100,000 a year were in the same boat. In short, the American people unanimously support making federal architecture beautiful again.
That’s why my bill requires that all new federal design plans make the sense of general public a chief consideration and aim to “command respect from the general public.” -- actual members of the community, who pass their day-to-day lives in and around these buildings.
Each year, roughly 21 million tourists from around the world travel to see the beautiful parts of our capital city firsthand. They do not gather outside of more recently built brutalist or modernist buildings like the FBI headquarters, the Hubert Humphrey Federal Building, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Headquarters, or the Department of Housing and Urban Development Building, which was once described aptly as “ten floors of basement.” That is because those buildings are ugly, oppressively so. Rather, they visit timeless visual expressions of the American virtues of liberty and self-governance like the National Mall and buildings like the Supreme Court and the Lincoln Memorial.
For example, the Lincoln Memorial was built just over 100 years ago, modeled after the Parthenon in Classical Athens. Replete with fluted, Doric-style columns, engravings of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural and Gettysburg Addresses and, of course, the 19-feet tall marble statue of Lincoln himself, the design of the memorial stands not just as a monument befitting of one of our nation’s greatest presidents, but as marble tissue connecting us to the birthplace of representative government.
Critics have accused President Trump’s original order of being backwards and excluding “local voices” from the architectural process.
Again, the opposite is true. Presently, the General Services Administration, which is the federal agency responsible for carrying out the construction of new federal buildings, receives little input from the general public. Instead, the modern architectural class – the vast majority of whom favor modernist architecture – guide the GSA’s building construction and management process.
This is most regrettable. Americans, most of whom genuinely prefer classical to modern architecture, ought to have more say in how their buildings look.
When a nation commits itself to building beautiful architecture, it willfully expresses the best of its people and history. One need not be from the United STates to love and appreciate the Capitol Dome, for example, yet as an American, one can and should take great pride in knowing the building represents us and what is uniquely ours. Our forefathers shaped it, and now it shapes us by inspiring us to be better citizens.
Despite how divided we are as a nation, building beautiful buildings is a goal that nearly all Americans find worth pursuing.
Rep. Jim Banks began represents Indiana’s Third Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Banks currently serves on the House Armed Services; Veterans Affairs; and Science, Space, and Technology Committees.