Trump’s plan to make America ‘classic’ again, one gaudy building at a time

Donald Trump pledges to make America great again, and that includes the nation’s architecture.

As one of the country’s best-known developers, you might think Trump would support innovative design, but his vision is to the contrary. Rather than embrace modernity, he wants to reverse course and return to Olde World using neoclassical architecture.

Credit: Artwork: Stephen Kiprillis

In 2020, Trump ordered that any new US government buildings be designed in the neoclassical Georgian style. Though this order was overturned once Joe Biden took office, it has since been reintroduced, Trump this time declaring: “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.”

For decades, the US has been at the forefront of invention, innovation and ingenuity, particularly when it comes to design. What has characterised its post-colonial and contemporary history is a curious investigative intellect and a can-do creative attitude, as architects sought to progress the places we inhabit and celebrate their unique culture and place.

The work of immigrants such as Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Frank Gehry, Louis Kahn, I.M. Pei and Richard Neutra drew inspiration from and in turn inspired American-born contemporaries like Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, Ray and Charles Eames, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown.

Sullivan built the world’s first “true” skyscraper, and Pei placed a sharply modern National Gallery in Washington. Lloyd Wright showed how to engage with natural environments, which Gropius and Mies translated into cutting-edge steel, concrete and glass designs across US cities.

Following Trump’s first order in 2020, The Architecture Lobby noted the president was seizing on this particular style of design “to fictionalise national heritage ... while simultaneously claiming moral superiority”.

The lobby explained this neoclassic style, particularly in America, “is related directly to the construction of whiteness”. “Seizing on architectural styles is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes … The particular appeal to classical architecture often uses the nostalgic appropriation of style by fictionalising national heritage.”

There is also precedent for this approach. Adolf Hitler’s preferred architect, Albert Speer, produced perhaps the best example of this in the 1930s, designing the Nuremberg Rally Stadium and the New Reich Chancellery as a celebration of grandiose style inspired by classical Roman architecture and neoclassical pioneers Etienne-Louis Boullee and Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

To Hitler, architecture signified a kind of immortality for himself and the Third Reich – a vision shared by most despots.

Though Trump may have fleeting knowledge of architecture and what is possible, it is irrelevant in his transactional world. After all, his lifestyle is based more on golf clubhouses, hotels, mansions, and private jets than civic centres and functional office blocks. He is a developer and speculator, not a creative designer.

The clearest example of this is the US-Mexico border wall. When Trump first ran for president, he declared the wall would stem illegal immigrants, smugglers and drugs entering America, and promised Mexico would foot the bill for the project.

Despite promising voters “I know how to build”, it quickly became clear that he did not. Almost eight years on, the wall remains incomplete and has been plagued with faults. In fact, it is not a wall at all, but rather steel fencing that covers just 64 kilometres of the 699-kilometre land border. The estimated final cost remains anywhere between $US25 billion and $US70 billion and Mexico is yet to contribute a cent.

From a practical standpoint, it has also failed to achieve its main objective. The wall is breached 11 times a day on average and illegal land crossings increased after work on the project began.

Donald Trump now has his sights set on the FBI’s headquarters in Washington. Credit: THE WASHINGTON POST

Given the president recently tasked tech billionaire Elon Musk with culling federal government staff, many initially believed that there would be no demand for new buildings, so Trump’s architectural order would come to very little. But it turns out that one of the US government’s most iconic buildings is in his sights – the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s headquarters.

Opened in 1975, the J. Edgar Hoover Building’s brutalist concrete facade has been referred to as an accurate architectural portrait of its namesake, and has long been earmarked for renovation. After years of delays and politicised manoeuvring, Biden announced in 2024 that a new FBI headquarters would be constructed in Maryland, about 30 minutes away from the bureau’s existing Pennsylvania Avenue location, with a budget of $US3.5 billion and a construction time of 10 years.

Trump responded to the news by declaring that, if re-elected, he would return the headquarters to downtown Washington, where it would be “the centrepiece of my plan to totally renovate and rebuild our capital city into the most beautiful and safest anywhere in the world”.

Now, he has approved the demolition of the Hoover building and ordered it to be replaced with something neo-classically new. In one of the strangest decisions regarding urban design and architectural aesthetics in recent times, the new FBI headquarters will lead Trump’s push for his preferred style of glamorised Georgian: ornamentation, baubles and gold-plate.

Of course, it will be a sham – fake architecture. The FBI requires high-end security and leading technology, an enclosed environment, almost alien and off-limits to most people. But it will wear a neo-Georgian costume. That means a facade of classical columns, pediments, and ordered rectangular windows and doors. Effectively, it will be two buildings – one for operations enclosed inside and one with a picturesque veneer.

The order is the same old “drill, baby, drill” Trump attitude, just this time more “gild, baby, gild”.

Norman Day is a practising architect, commentator, and educator.

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