Here Is What’s So Scary About Fake Roman Temples!  

A Response to New York Times Editorial “What’s So Great About Fake Roman Temples - February 7, 2020

Submitted to The New York Times February 10, 2020

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Georges Santayana

This letter is in response to the New York Times February 7, 2020 editorial “What’s So Great About Fake Roman Temples?” which was written in response to the Trump Administration’s recent executive order necessitating that all new construction of Federal courthouses and Federal buildings in the National Capital Region be designed in the classical language (style).

I write it as an architect, as a former Associate Professor of architectural design at Harvard University, but most importantly, I write it as a deeply concerned citizen.  The editors posited a well-argued case against this executive order, and the inappropriateness and foolishness in demanding that buildings be designed in the classical style. The diversity and complexity of our nation’s cultural history and the diversity of our regional, climatic and geographic contexts in which our federal buildings are situated should logically inform and affect the choices about architectural language that designers make.  To do otherwise would be intellectually and culturally bankrupt.

So, while I wholeheartedly support the editorial, I also believe that the most important critique of the Trump administration’s executive order was not raised.  

By demanding that all government buildings be built in the language and style of Imperial Rome, the Trump administration is re-deploying a strategy used by the twentieth century’s most vile Fascist Dictators who – as part of their remaking of their nation’s cultures  - suppressed architectural diversity and the emerging languages of modernism while forcing a narrow re-appropriation and re-deployment of the classical language of antiquity. Hitler and Mussolini did not do this because they believed that the classical language was more beautiful or more appropriate than other architectural languages and styles. They did it in order to link and associate their new Fascist and Nazi regimes to Imperial Rome and to the power and authority of the emperors. In short, the governmental buildings of the Nazi and Fascist regimes were built in the classical style in order to help legitimize the power of Hitler and Mussolini who both issued their own version’s of Trump’s executive order as part of a broad use of architecture and the civic arts as a form of constructed political propaganda.

 In 1932, the fascist government erected a neo classical obelisk in Rome as part of the ten year anniversary of Mussolini’s taking control of the Italian state.  Interred in the obelisk was a small box with a text written in latin (the language of antiquity, not of the modern Italian state). It stated

“At this time by some divine command and will, a MAN appeared. He was gifted with a singular sharpness of mind and a most steadfast spirit and ready to undertake or to undergo anything bravely. In his divine mind, he formed the plan not only to restore the fallen and overthrown fortunes [of Italy] to their former state, but even to restore to the Italians that Italy which the ancient Romans had turned into a light for the entire world, and he set about making his deeds equal to his plans. This man was BENITO MUSSOLINI."

 These sound much like the words of a more modern very stable genius. 

To return to 2020 and to Trump’s executive order, we all should be a little sad that our loutish President is instituting a misguided limit on our nations most gifted architects, and will constrain the richness of technical and aesthetic experimentation that has defined our nation’s architectural production.  

However - and more importantly - I would suggest that we should all be deeply alarmed that this executive order is yet another action which follows the leadership roadmap of the last century’s most vile dictators and autocrats who devolved their nation’s democratic republics and democracies into authoritarian dictatorships.  The efforts by Mussolini and Hitler to regulate the language of architectural and artistic expression were easily forgotten because they were only minor cultural affronts when compared to those far more grievous affronts to civilization and to humanity.   

While we are quick to claim that we will “never forget” the horrors committed by Hitler and Mussolini, and likewise swift to proclaim “never again”, it may serve us well to remember that those grievous crimes against humanity were prefaced by just this kind of seemingly innocuous “executive order” focusing on the delimiting architectural language. In short, these reactionary but seemingly frivolous actions by the Trump administration are deeply troubling precisely because they are borrowed from the first steps of history’s most repressive and despotic leaders and they are thus the proverbial canary in the coal mine.