President Trump’s plans to build a 250-foot arch and to replace the demolished White House ballroom with a larger structure (including a military bunker beneath) have not gone over well with many Americans.
Those are just a couple of examples of how architecture and politics have intersected in the second Trump administration. Owen Hatherley has written about architecture and politics in Britain and beyond; his recent book covered social housing and public transport in New York and Washington, D.C. He reflected on this topic in a written conversation with John Guida, an editor in Times Opinion. It has been edited for length and clarity.
John Guida: Putting aside people’s political views of Trump (if you can), is there something about the somewhat anachronistic forms of architecture that he is planning that is hitting Americans in a visceral way?
Owen Hatherley: On some level, it’s a provocation, a deliberate assault on good taste and sensibilities. There’s also a certain level of exaggerated concern about the federal architecture that is actually being demolished — a half-remembered 1942 extension built partly to conceal a bomb shelter — which is usually vastly less venerable than it is presented as being. What Trump is proposing is a fake 21st-century neoclassical annex to a largely 20th-century building that is bolted onto an extremely heavily altered original that had to be substantially redesigned by Thomas Jefferson in the first place because it wasn’t very good.
In these cases there’s this particular model of what American official architecture is or should be, but that isn’t really much older than the Chicago Exhibition of 1893, which ushered in this particular sort of white, empty, spacious, almost audaciously unimaginative classical architecture as a national style. It seems very much an image of the civic standing in for its absence. I suppose people are attached to this stuff, as one can see from how often it gets blown up in disaster films, but I admit that it is quite lost on me.
That said, the triumphal arch is something else, something more deranged, and here it’s impossible to extricate it from the current war and the nonsense that the administration throws out about it on a daily basis.
Guida: You see the arch as something like the “Mission Accomplished” sign and speech by George W. Bush from 2003?
Hatherley: Something like that — the mission has not been and will not be accomplished.
Guida: Last year, in an executive order, the White House identified “traditional and classical architecture” as the favored style of federal civic architecture. I take it from your answer above that you don’t think civic architecture has much of a role to serve?
Hatherley: My personal tastes are modernist, though I’m not averse to a decent neoclassical building if it is done well. It very rarely is nowadays, but in Europe the most interesting architecture for some time has come from designers working in a way that can’t be easily classified as modernist or classicist. I think here of the Anglo-Canadian-Swiss designers Caruso St John, who are as happy to take from architectural styles like Palladianism or Victorian eclecticism as they are from Le Corbusier or Brutalism — in their work like the Nottingham Contemporary art gallery in England or their Bremer Landesbank building in Bremen, Germany.
I wouldn’t want to be prescriptive about styles of civic architecture — there are decent examples in pretty much every style globally and awful examples in every one as well. To judge something as “civic,” one has really to look at how it is used, which can obviously change radically over time. There are a lot of 1960s public buildings that were totally desolate at one time but end up with skateboarders and people playing music and hanging out.
Guida: What’s an example or two of a notable civic building?
Hatherley: Two I can think of have completely radically unlike aesthetics: the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, which is in a pretty horrible sort of Stalinist Gotham style but which is used by almost everyone in the Polish capital as a real multifunctional public space; and the Kulturhuset in Stockholm, a very strictly modernist public building that has always been used, again, by almost everyone in that city — young, old, regardless of race or class — and that for a time even housed the Swedish Parliament while the old one was under renovation. I’d consider these far more civic buildings than an icon like the White House, surrounded by its acres of useless greensward and protected with guns.
Guida: That same executive order from the Trump White House identifies the 1960s as the era when it all went wrong — when, as it says, “the federal government largely replaced traditional designs for new construction with modernist and Brutalist ones,” and it claims that it was “often unpopular with Americans.” Can you tease out the tension between traditionalist versus modernism architecture?
Hatherley: I find it a bit odd insofar as all the interesting designers I can think of working now, from, say, Amin Taha in London to Liu Jiakun in Chengdu, China, are doing something that doesn’t fit neatly into either definition.
My suspicion is it comes down to populism — it’s really useful for certain people in politics to point at the pointy-headed educated people and say they’re foisting something dreadful on ordinary folk, and for some reason a lot of liberals just love to take the bait and get outraged by it. I don’t know how much it maps exactly onto contemporary politics: To take an example, when I see people in the Democratic Socialists of America posting online about architectural and urbanist models, they always go to Vienna, and they point to this extraordinary mix of public and cooperative housing, some of which, like the Karl Marx Hof or the Reumann Hof, is quite Art Deco or even neoclassical, and some of which, like the Alt-Erlaa estate, is extremely, dramatically modernist, although with huge quantities of natural greenery all over it.
Guida: What do you think is the defining tension today?
Hatherley: What I think is happening is the rerun of an old tension that had real political currency once — the Nazis versus the Bauhaus, the nationalists versus the cosmopolitans — at a time in which loads of this have been emptied of all their original meaning.
Guida: Do you think that part of the traditional-versus-modernist tension can be located in the global work of “starchitects,” and a version of “placeless” neoliberalism that they have embodied in skyscrapers and other structures over the years?
Hatherley: Certainly — if I’m being generous, it is a counterreaction to that. The funny thing is that the starchitects — the Koolhaases and Hadids and Gehrys and so on — were consummate populists. What they were doing was showmanship, spectacles that were aimed at increasing tourism, retail footfall and recharging local economies through encouraging property development (and, more recently, holiday rentals) in the proximity of these things. It was predicated at going straight for the “man in the street” and exciting him in a pretty whiz-bang way.
Guida: This architecture of spectacle has included an array of development tools — tax breaks, subsidies and the like. Do these tools open other opportunities — perhaps less spectacle, more grounded — for the built environment in cities and towns?
Hatherley: I’m not an economist, but one thing that was conspicuous in the sort of golden age of that starchitecture, whether in Britain or Spain or China, was that there was a lot of public subsidy, often subtle through tax breaks, but sometimes just straightforward public money being spent publicly. Sometimes the results of this were just fine — where I live in London, I often take the bus or walk past the Peckham Library by Will Alsop, which was in its time one of the big architecture-as-spectacle icons, and it always makes me smile a little, especially seeing how consistently well used it is. The problem in that era was that the schools, the hospitals and the (almost entirely speculative) housing were usually terrible.
I do think that a lot of the public architecture of the 20th century, often in the New Deal or welfare-state era but really carrying on much longer than that in much of East Asia (something like the Housing and Development Board in Singapore, but ranging really from Japanese public toilets to Chinese subway systems), was a really major human achievement. There’s an increasing interest in that on the part of the younger left, who don’t remember it being desolate and bleak in 1972.
That poses the question of how you fund it today in a much more hostile political settlement, and nobody quite has the answer to this, though there have been some interesting scattered experiments in Paris, Barcelona or even London, and pretty consistently in Asia.
Guida: You have researched and written about public-supported architecture — housing and more. Are there particular historic instances that you see as models as a potentially usable past?
Hatherley: The three historic experiences that always seem to come up — rightly, in my view — are London, Vienna and Singapore. Politically they probably couldn’t be more different, but they all managed to do the same thing, which is build up this enormous range of very high-quality housing that was accessible to an overwhelming majority of the population and effectively abolished landlordism in each of these territories, and to a large degree homelessness with it.
The first, London, was the slightly-Tammany-Hall rule of the Labour Party and the labor movement in London local authorities from the 1890s until the 1980s (with a couple of interruptions). The second was Vienna, in around 15 years of fevered public housing activity when it was run by “Austro-Marxists” before they were literally bombed out of power in 1934. The third, Singapore, a statist and developmentalist Southeast Asian city-state, now has about 80 percent of its population living in very high-quality public housing (and unlike the other two, it is still going strong, without any period of decline or dismantlement).
Guida: What are the current experiments?
Hatherley: Though not at the level of ambition as the older models, experiments in Barcelona, Paris and London have had real effects. In Barcelona, it is “superblocks” — a system of blocks across the city that limit vehicles to reduce traffic and air pollution, use public space more efficiently and make neighborhoods more pleasant. In Paris, the very elegant (though often very small-scale) new public housing that has been built in the last 15 years. In London, over the last 12 or so years, public housing projects — again, in a style that is not easily identifiable as modernist or classicist — by the British architect Peter Barber.
All of these are interesting for not being bleak and monolithic in the way public housing is usually stereotyped as being, but they all also have a problem of scale — there are huge housing problems in each of these cities that aren’t easily solved by incremental and small-scale solutions.
Guida: Your recent book looked at New York, its architecture and its public housing developments (1 out of 16 New Yorkers lives in public housing). Can you explain what you identified as the “New York Ideology”?
Hatherley: The phrase was a bit of a windup, but it came from something specific, an idea that comes from Jane Jacobs and “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”: Cities at their best, when they work, when they’re fun and exciting and homely places to be, are about streets, grids usually, of densely built-up streets, where you have shops on the ground floor or on the corner and everything happens at ground level. And the best way to understand it is to walk.
Somehow this gets destroyed by two forces, both linked — on the one hand, by classicism and traditionalism, where densities are reduced and there are loads of green space and there isn’t as much street activity, and on the other, by modernism, which does the same thing but in a more extravagant way, with big plazas, overhead walkways and skyways and subways, but similarly messes with the good old street.
I don’t disagree with all of this — in fact I like lots of it, the emphasis on urban change over time, the emphasis on walking, the emphasis on diversity and unpredictability, and I share the suspicion of suburban or exurban anti-cities.
Guida: But you don’t like …
Hatherley: The disappearance of vested interests from all this — landlords and landlordism disappear from cities in this sort of analysis, which is owed ultimately to the fact that landlords really were less important in the city of the 1960s than they are now.
And I don’t like the suspicion of planning. I also, and this is the crux of it, don’t think a lot of these people practice what they preach. They don’t go and look at public housing, or modernist megastructural complexes, or multilevel cities. And so they don’t see the ways in which they actually often have come to work over time precisely through becoming more complex and diverse.
One of my favorite London places, recently demolished, was the Elephant and Castle shopping center, an enclosed 1960s mall that was probably very dull in the 1970s but had adapted over time into this Latin American-Polish-Irish enclave through its low rents and its close connection to the very affordable public housing all around it.
I guess what I was trying to do is use Jane Jacobs against Jane Jacobs — if you go out and walk you’ll see there are many more places that can encourage all the things she (and I) love about cities than blocks of tenements built by 19th-century speculators.
Guida: Does social media play a role in how architecture is perceived and how it relates to politics?
Hatherley: As someone who loves a lot of Brutalist architecture, I was always a bit sad at how all the Brutalism Tumblrs and then Brutalism Instagrams presented the buildings as untouched by time, as these haunting Kubrickian enigmatic objects, whereas what interested me was their being used and changed and worked with and lived in. But it also made a lot of people very interested in that architecture, so I wouldn’t want to dismiss it tout court.
A lot of the most important architecture is not so photogenic. It all goes back to that Brecht line: A photograph of a factory tells us nothing about the social relations in that factory. Same with public buildings.
Owen Hatherley is the author, most recently, of “The Alienation Effect: How Central European Émigrés Transformed the British Twentieth Century,” and “Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects: Adventures in Social Democracy in NYC and DC.” John Guida is a Times Opinion editor.
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