President Donald Trump is setting his design preferences as the standard for how federal buildings should look.
An executive order Trump signed on Thursday sets classical architecture buildings, including the White House and the Capitol, as the “preferred and default” style for most federal buildings.
Trump’s executive order on “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again” singles out brutalist and modernist architecture as styles that have fallen out of favor, and should not be considered for most federal construction projects.
“A majority of American taxpayers want classical, regionally inspired public buildings that beautify public spaces, and their government should respect their preferences,” the White House wrote in a fact sheet.
Trump pursued a similar policy during his first term in office, but former President Joe Biden rescinded it soon after taking office.
On the campaign trail, Trump said in 2023 that he would “get rid of ugly buildings,” and “return to the magnificent classical style of Western civilization.”
The second Trump administration has already taken steps to get rid of brutalist federal buildings. The Department of Housing and Urban Development is moving out of its headquarters in downtown D.C. and plans to sell the building.
HUD Secretary Scott Turner told Fox News in March that the agency’s headquarters was the “ugliest building in D.C.”
HUD plans to relocate to the National Science Foundation’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. NSF has not yet found new office space for its displaced employees.
In May, the Public Buildings Reform Board recommended selling the Energy Department’s headquarters building, located south of the National Mall. The board advises the General Services Administration on which federal buildings it should offload from its portfolio.
In March, GSA briefly added the Energy Department’s headquarters to its list of more than 400 “non-core assets” designated for sale or disposal. A current version of that list now includes several dozen government buildings.
GSA, which oversees the federal real estate portfolio, will oversee implementation of the executive order. But it doesn’t have a permanent leader yet.
Michael Rigas, the deputy secretary of state for management and resources, took over as GSA’s acting administrator in July. The previous acting administrator, Stephen Ehikian, is now serving as GSA’s deputy administrator.
Michael Peters, former commissioner of GSA’s Public Buildings Service and a self-described “representative” for the Department of Government Efficiency, left the agency last month, just a week before the agency was scheduled to implement a reorganization plan.
Trump nominated Ed Forst, a banking and real estate executive, to permanently lead GSA.
When the Truman administration stood up GSA in 1949, Congress directed the agency to abandon the neoclassical style that was popular for government buildings at the time.
Instead, lawmakers directed GSA to develop new buildings in the brutalist style, using synthetic materials like poured concrete to cut costs.
A former Public Buildings Service official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak candidly, said GSA complied with that mandate in its early days and “built a bunch of really mediocre buildings.”
“There were some interesting detours into things like brutalism, but the overall picture was pretty poor,” the former official said.
The Clinton administration launched a Design Excellence Program, which had a panel of architects to judge contest entries for new federal buildings.
The former PBS official said the Design Excellence Program lost momentum under the Obama administration when it launched plans to shrink the federal real estate footprint and to rein in spending on government buildings.
The White House wrote that the Design Excellence Program produced buildings that impressed some of “architectural elite, but not the American people who the buildings are meant to serve.”
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