I like a Trump executive order, AMA.
I ain't gonna ask you shit I'ma make you feel bad, dawg. The architects I know have been up in arms about this shit for the better part of a year. They're right. 1) Classicist architecture costs more than normal architecture and budgets aren't going to go anywhere. So what you'll end up with is Doric columns instead of air conditioning, but since air conditioning is part of the building code and Doric columns are part of the executive order, the building won't get built. 2) Neoclassicism is tied to the ideal of ruin value, a concept introduced by Albert Speer to make the Third Reich look imposing for the 1933 Olympics. It continued to be the principle aesthetic of genocide throughout Hitler's reign such that Nazi architecture was demolished rather than re-used. 3) But then, "imposing architecture" has been the standard of empire going back to Khufu or before. In general, the more despotic a regime the more their buildings lean into classicism. Turkmenistan before totalitarianism: Turkmenistan during totalitarianism: You will get no argument from me that current trends in architecture are pure shit. But telling current architects "build for the future of The Reich" is not a guideline that should be celebrated by you or anyone else.
About that. Athenian democracy, described at its most charitable, lasted from 509BC to 429BC. It was democratic to landed male citizens who, at best, were 30% of the citizenry of Attica. Slaves were not eligible, and best guess is every citizen's household had three or four slaves. Of the 250,000 people in Athens and greater Attica, 150,000 were slaves. At its peak, roughly 30,000 people were eligible to participate in Athenian democracy. It is left as an exercise for the reader to research slavery in Greece at the time of democracy. I will mention only in passing that the Greeks had more words for "slave" than the Inuit have for snow. Notably, the Socratic dialogues condemn slavery; just as notably, Athens put Socrates to death for corrupting the youth. The architecture of Ancient Greece was made of stone quarried by slaves who were fed with grain raised by slaves to aggrandize conquerors and warmongers who were "democratic" for less than a saeculum for the express purpose of glorifying themselves before their conquered chattel. Greek democracy was democratic the way the Magna Carta gave you citizen's rights - sure, if you're already landed, titled gentry with a retinue of serfs, the Magna Carta gave you certain rights until the Pope annulled it almost immediately thereby launching two years of civil war. But that doesn't really matter anyway since everything you think of as "classical greek" is actually "Egyptian Revival" which is a direct outcome of the god-king Napoleon storming across Africa and being clobbered by Nelson in 1798. It celebrates the conquer and subjugation of ancient civilizations and that by empires we fought and defeated (1776) or were about to fight and defeat (1812). And hey - both of those empires were hella closer to abolishing slavery than the Athenians were. Modern government buildings look like they're intended to perform the maximum utility for the minimum budget. Neither the Greeks nor the Egyptians had to worry about such trivialities because labor and capital shortages could be alleviated through piracy. Again, the more totalitarian the state, the more grandiose their architecture tends to be and the more grandiose their architecture tends to be the less likely it is to be torn down and rebuilt. Thus does "classical" architecture accumulate. It doesn't need to be built all at once. And it sure as shit doesn't need to celebrate slavery and imperialism.
And yet, the Greeks were the first to practice Democracy, and their buildings were beautiful, and so we chose to use that style. We always celebrate a facet of the past when we celebrate the past. When Harvard builds a new building to match their oldest it's not to celebrate the 200 years when women weren't admitted.
And why are you cool celebrating a cherry-picked aspect of the past, particularly when that cherry-picked aspect clearly and definitively does not represent the aspect you wish to celebrate? Why not celebrate the totality of the present? Here's the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre, designed by Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi woman: Find a bad angle of that building. I dare you. Here's the Odunpazeri Modern in Turkey by Kengo Kuma, a postwar Japanese architect. Here's the fucking Eiffel Tower. All three of these buildings are banned under the current executive order.
This is a popular idea on the far right. If you are a radical right personality it's almost obligatory that you make a video hating on modern architecture. The old ways are the best, we shouldn't progress in our arts, science, ethics or morals and if we can manage to regress that would probably be best. A certain strain of thinker has always yearned for the good old days of the forefathers, the Greeks were down with that and so are we. The puzzling part is how badly conservative want to suck off Howard Roark, it's the data point that I can fit.
Ya see yer girl yesterday? Fundamentally, the rank and file of the alt-right movement are the guys who would have been shot at by Pinkertons in the 20s. They're the Tom Joads, the itinerants blown out of their homesteads by the Dust Bowl. And if the plutocrats hadn't so successfully drawn parallels between labor, socialism and communism they'd be Union skull crackers through and through. It's taken three generations of propaganda but the guys who most need the support of collective bargaining and socialized society are the guys who hate it the most. So they've got their natural motivations (class and social solidarity, individualism) at cross-purposes with their external motivations (entrepreneur worship, subservience to the state). It's a whiplashy environment. Frankly dreading how it's going to play out.
Too busy to see anything...but I fixed the bad leak on the espresso machine and my alarm system is working and maybe Christmas will go off ok. And I was at the beach for three days while my espresso machine and alarm and door lock were all breaking. Luckily I've realized that every thing that happens in a week in this world is mostly forgettable two weeks later.
It's funny. Dude wakes up in the middle of the night, writes some insane shit down on a piece of paper, and then a flunky types it up and posts it to the internet. The sum total of the effect of an Executive Order. There are no controls in place. No enforcement. No authority... unless someone chooses to apple the Executive Order to their work, and then suddenly they have be-knighted themselves with the authority of the President. And because there is no enforcement or structure around which to ensure compliance with any Executive Order, it is up to the acolyte to decide how to interpret it. The Executive Order is the weirdest holdover from monarchy/dictatorial ruling structures... And in other news, the new White House is gonna be GORGEOUS... although a new name may be in order: