The politics of makeovers

Rajnish Wattas

In a seven-page draft executive order by American president Donald Trump titled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” he declares that the US federal government since the 1950s has “largely stopped building beautiful buildings that the American people want to look at or work in.” It further ordains that government buildings should look like those of ancient Rome, Greece and Europe. “Classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style.” The draft praises the designs of US Capitol Building, the White House, the Supreme Court and the Lincoln Memorial with their hybrid classical, awe-inspiring Greek columns, pediments and Roman domes.

In a country that historically is the land of freedoms and a beacon of democratic liberties, such a firman (diktat) on a “state-mandated architectural style that retreats so resolutely into the past is an implicit negation of the best of American culture. It is also the stuff of authoritarian regimes”, is the outcry by the media and professionals alike. A retrogressive step like this would turn the design of federal buildings into a ‘costume drama’, writes a critic in the Chicago Sun Times.

Leaving aside dictatorships or authoritarian regimes, this trend is now tacitly visible in democracies too. State meddling in the arts, and most significantly architecture, has always been a favourite tool of the ruling elite to use buildings and monuments for transmitting political messaging and manifest the awe-inspiring might of the rulers over the subjects.

Since time immemorial, grandiose architectural edifices, temples to the gods, palaces, monasteries, tombs or statues valorising conquerors and great kings have adorned cities. From the ancient Greek Parthenon to Roman Pantheon to the Hagia Sophia of the Ottoman empire, the magnificent temples of gods have always inspired the best of human endeavour in architecture. In our country, the historic temples, mosques, cathedrals and Mughal tombs, including the Taj Mahal, have always been works of extraordinary human ingenuity, craftsmanship and labour. The British rulers of India culminated their Raj regalia by building the Edwin Lutyens’ magnificent edifices at the Raisina hill stretching out to the three-km-long Central Vista culminating in the India Gate.

In Europe and the US, even in the 1920-1930s, neo-classical (or rather hybrid eclectic) architectural styles were employed for making the new-age public places like railway stations, banks, theatres, offices, housing or factories. The default style, even when technology and new material like glass and steel had become available, for making high-rise structures remained rooted in neo-classicism. The cities of Chicago and New York, with its Manhattan skyline, are veritable museums of architectural styles ranging from neo-classical to modernist skyscrapers. The Chicago Tribune Tower, internally a steel structure, is clad in fake Gothic elements in stone on the exteriors. It was in this context that pioneers of modernism — architects like Le Corbusier in Paris, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe in Germany (who both later fled Nazi Germany to America) — had begun to make buildings in a new idiom of architectural expression that discarded the clichéd and outdated forms dressed up in fake stone claddings over concrete and steel structures.

In America, the same revolt against the decadent styles was ushered in by Louis Sullivan, who coined the famous expression ‘Form follows function’ and his disciple Frank Lloyd Wright.

It is widely believed that legendry cult novel Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, with its fiery, iconoclastic protagonist Howard Roark taking on the might of the architectural ‘establishment’ was largely inspired by Wright.

Trump’s draft order reverses the current ‘Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture’, written in 1962 by Daniel Patrick Moynihan for President John F. Kennedy. Moynihan’s directive states that “The development of an official style must be avoided” and that “design must flow from the architectural profession to the government and not vice-versa”.

In this context, it needs to be reminded that like Mussolini and Franco, Albert Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect, planned entire cities that would speak of the greatness and glory of “republican Rome”. While developing a renewal of the German capital Berlin, the core features included the creation of a great neoclassical city based on an East-West axis with a victory column at its centre.

Modernism is increasingly under attack in many liberal political regimes also.

Modernist architecture has come under fire in Britain too. Thirty years ago, Prince Charles launched a scathing attack on the proposed modernist addition to the National Gallery in London. The extension is “like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved, elegant friend,” a strong critic of modern architecture, the Prince of Wales was ranting to save his country from vanishing “under a welter of ugliness.”

Perhaps the appeal of classical architecture for its lovers is its ability to endure time. While modernism made technological advances, it also made a clean break with the historical styles abruptly. Modernists were designing austere buildings for the common man, public purpose, and on affordable budgets with ‘no-frills’ designs.

In this context, Le Corbusier’s heritage tagged Capitol Complex at Chandigarh comprising the Secretariat, Assembly and High Court edifices, along with enigmatic ‘monuments’ like the Open Hand, Geometrical Hill and Tower of Shadows stands out for its architectural genius and unequivocal appreciation and pride that it gets from its citizens.

The proposed draft by Trump has sparked protests from architects and critics stating that the President should not have the ability to issue a top-down mandate on how government buildings should look.“We are a society that is linked to openness of thought, to looking forward with optimism and confidence at a world that is always in the process of becoming,” says Thom Mayne, the Pritzker Prize winner architect. These words echo the need for upholding artistic and architectural freedoms universally, and for all humankind.