An excerpt from a piece written for Stirworld, asking whether the pre-eminent architect of America’s golden age would receive the same welcome from his adopted nation in the era of “making America great again”?
In February, the draft of an executive order from the White House entitled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again” was leaked. Its message was blunt: too many recent government buildings in the United States have “little aesthetic appeal”, inspiring “bewilderment and repugnance” in the public. And, because America’s Founding Fathers embraced the “classical architecture of democratic Athens and republican Rome” for their new republic, from now on “the classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style”.
This vote of no confidence in contemporary American architecture is perhaps to be expected – “Let’s Make America Great Again” pretty much necessitates a turn to the past. But when was this mythical era of greatness? According to President Donald Trump, the United States was at its zenith in the years after the Second World War: “We were not pushed around, we were respected by everybody, we had just won a war, we were pretty much doing what we had to do.”
At the time, however, America had a very different take on what the country, and its architecture, could learn from Athens. On leaving Massachusetts to take up the presidency in 1961, John F. Kennedy gave an address to its legislature, famous for the line “of those to whom much is given, much is required”. He also included a stirring quotation from Pericles’ oration on the dead of the Peloponnesian War, in which the Athenian statesman proclaims of his city: “We do not imitate – for we are a model to others”.
So, in the 1950s, Mies van der Rohe was, to all intents and purposes, the Western world’s leading architect.
This tribute to an idealised Athens, and to its democratic principles, was adopted as a model for post-war American architecture, and Kennedy’s invocation was cited at the start of the original “Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture”, issued in 1962. This text is short, direct and strangely moving, declaring that an architectural style and form must be adopted for federal buildings that will “provide visual testimony to the dignity, enterprise, vigour and stability of the American Government”.
To continue reading the original article at Stirworld, click here.