Alt / Urban: When the old trumps the new

Days after his second presidential inauguration, Donald Trump issued a fatwa that mandated all new federal public buildings be built in the neoclassical style.

This meant that new government buildings, whatever their function or location, should have classical Greek and Roman styling, symmetry, proportion and architectural elements.

In a memorandum issued on 20 January 2025 titled ‘Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture’, the POTUS specified ‘that Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government’.

This is not the first time Trump has expressed his disaffection with contemporary expressions of architecture. Late in his first term, he was even more trenchant.

In an ‘Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture’ (issued on 21 December 2020), the US president specified that ‘classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for federal public buildings, absent exceptional factors necessitating another kind of architecture’.

The order even foregrounded brutalist or deconstructivist architecture as one that ‘subverts the traditional values of architecture’.

Within three months of being issued, it was revoked by incoming president Joe Biden.

This time’s new order is likely to be implemented, however, considering that Trump is in full throttle as POTUS for the second time.

One can imagine a plethora of new civic buildings in Washington DC and other state capitals all displaying giant orders (columns extending beyond two storeys), grand stairways, pediments and neorealist sculptures or murals on their façades.

The White House with its signature orders holding up a neoclassical front porch

Current star architects such as Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Bjarke Ingels or even the late Zaha Hadid, lauded all over the world, shall presumably become persona non grata. Very likely, a bunch of compliant, state-approved architects shall fill the vacuum, with the American equivalent of our PWD (public works department) carrying out orders from above.

Retrograde positions are not new in architectural history. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were steeped in revivalism. Choosing a 600- or 2,000-year-old building style to cloak a contemporary building was the norm in Europe and the colonies.

From the Renaissance onwards, this normalised the idea of ‘formalism’ and ‘appropriateness’ in civic architecture. Architects continued to promote revivalism down to the early 20th century, ignoring structural changes (in a Marxian sense) that were happening all around, particularly as a result of the Industrial Revolution.

During this time, engineers became the new innovators while architects remained stragglers. It required several modernist forays, especially between the two world wars, to overcome this stranglehold.

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In India, Nehru, in his first years as prime minister, had to deal with a similar dilemma: what, in the new nation-state, should the architecture of India represent?

India had a vast menu card of architectures to choose from. Each foray into our rich past could have resulted in new revivalisms applied over buildings for modern usage.

Instead, Nehru encouraged several modernist architects to design the new buildings, allowing them free rein to express themselves through an architecture that represented India, but in keeping with the international modernism that was happening elsewhere.

Rajghat, designed and executed in the Jawaharlal Nehru era

From this impulse, we received Rajghat, the Gandhi Smarak Sangrahalaya, the Institute of Indology, ATIRA (Ahmedabad Textile Industry’s Research Association), the Secretariat in Calcutta and several IITs.

Later, Nehru invited Le Corbusier to design Chandigarh, and even presented his immensely creative Capitol buildings to the rest of the country as the essential ‘hit on the head’ Nehru believed India needed in many fields in order to think.

Chandigarh's Capitol complex, where its assembly sits, was designed by Le Corbusier in the Nehruvian period

This boosted the enthusiasm and careers of so many young architects all over India, even as it freed them from the shackles of the past.

The only ‘backward referencing’ building of some note from Nehruvian times is the Vidhana Soudha in Bangalore. It was built in 1956 in a neo-Dravidian style, fulfilling the wishes of then chief minister Kengal Hanumanthaiah. This anachronism is still there for all to see.

Bengaluru's Vidhana Soudha could be worth over Rs 3,900 crore — but definitely feels anachronistic

As recently as 2016, Andhra Pradesh’s chief minister Chandrababu Naidu had expressed his desire to rope in Rajamouli, director of the Baahubali franchise, to reimagine the architecture for the important public buildings of Amaravati, the proposed new capital of Andhra Pradesh. One can only imagine the hyper-inflated film-set architecture that these buildings would have used in order to evoke an imagined past.

Ambitions have been considerably scaled down since then.

One would have thought that, by the middle of the third decade of the new century, we would have put this speciousness behind us. But apparently not.

There are no apparent benefits in applying ‘historical wallpaper’ (to use Charles Correa’s phrase) to a new building of our times. The only thing pandered to is sentimentality and a pompous sense of self.

Mussolini’s buildings in Rome and Milan as well as Albert Speer’s visions of a new Berlin for Hitler also displayed such ‘stripped classicism’ on different scales.

then theres albert speer’s plan for berlin had the nazi’s won world war ii. would have bulldozed a charming city for big ugly car centric infrastructure

barf pic.twitter.com/jtVXjMBeKF

— push the needle (@pushtheneedle) February 20, 2023

There is a sense of regimentation associated with the kind of neoclassical buildings that Trump is propagating. Such monumental buildings would be uniform, orderly, symmetrical, with ceremonial features highlighted by architectural ornament, sculptures and murals.

But buildings do not have to be classical in order to be orderly, symmetrical or proportional. This is an associational fallacy. Modern buildings that use modern materials, structures and processes can have those qualities as well. And be relevant and responsive to the needs of today.

In this column, I have often talked about ‘good manners’ in architecture. Orderliness and harmonies of scale and proportion can be perfectly well achieved with contemporary architecture. Architects only need to be sensitive to location and context, to acknowledge local customs and traditions and appreciate the architecture that precedes one’s own.

Look at how well Antonio Gaudi’s most whimsical façades fit so well within the existing context of the Passieg de Gràcia in Barcelona. Or how Gehry’s ‘Fred and Ginger’ building straddles a street corner in Prague, blending in and standing out from surrounding neoclassical facades.

Vision is the art of seeing what is invisible to others

Casa Batlló, Barcelona

Redesigned by Gaudí in 1904

A masterpiece of architecture — and a masterpiece of art pic.twitter.com/AXzQs2vjFK

— Scott (@Havenlust) April 3, 2025

Dancing cheek to cheek next to the river in Prague you will find The Dancing House 💃

Completed in 1996 by Frank Gehry and Vlado Milunić, it’s also known as Ginger and Fred, reminding passersbys of the famous dancers Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.

📸 travelling_dean on Insta pic.twitter.com/2oT7qZEVkk

— the Design Museum (@DesignMuseum) October 22, 2023

Or our own Jehangir Art Gallery in Bombay, which occupies a prime position at Kala Ghoda with such quiet elegance.

Trump would be well advised, as would our own arbiters of greatness, that appreciating the present is both relevant and sustainable, more amenable to a future legacy than wallowing in a pastiche-soup from the past.

Mustansir Dalvi, recently retired, was the longest serving professor of architecture in the University of Mumbai. He is a trustee of Art Deco Mumbai.

Older articles in this series can be read