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we're in tuscaloosa alabama standing in
front of the united states federal
building and courthouse this is a
building that is not very old but it
references an architecture that comes
from two millennia ago this building
looks like an ancient greek temple
specifically gedoric temple and the
doric is easily recognized through the
mass of columns with simple capitals and
with no base those doric columns carry a
freeze and then above that this
triangular shape called a pediment and
then above those on the roof line
decorative forms called a criteria and
we're talking specifically about the
main entrance but there are wings on
either side this is a building that has
to house modern offices for the federal
government this building is remarkably
faithful to the ancient greek tradition
this style was revived in the 18th
century at the time of the founding of
the united states and we associate this
style with so many government buildings
like the white house and congress and
supreme court building in a way this
style has come to represent
ideals of democracy of civic virtue so
it's worth taking a moment to think
about what the ancient greek
architectural vocabulary meant in the
early years of the united states the
18th and 19th centuries were a time of
architectural revival it's almost as if
european and american culture looked
back to history as a place that they
could pilfer from that they could borrow
from and so you have neo-egyptian you
have an important revival of the gothic
but the neoclassical had special
significance the architect planner lon
funt who's credited with planning
washington dc the federal city was
looking back to ancient greece because
he understood athens to be the
birthplace of democracy the problem i
think comes in in the idea of mandating
from the federal government and imposing
one style on a country which is very
large and very heterogeneous and also
the associations of classical
architecture to white european values
and to the exclusion of all other types
of cultural heritage and an assertion
that this style is superior and so in
december of 2020 when president trump
issued an executive order mandating that
federal buildings must be in a
neoclassical style using a vocabulary
that struck many historians as
uncomfortably close to the kind of
rhetoric that was used by totalitarian
regimes for example we could look back
at the example of nazi germany and their
attack on modern art and their promotion
of classical art the ramifications were
very dangerous and often lethal artists
were persecuted some artists were sent
to death camps the artwork was destroyed
and only certain kinds of art could be
made and so many people noticed this
very uncomfortable parallel but i think
we have to be careful we don't want to
vilify the neoclassical the neoclassical
can be beautiful but it is not the only
kind of beauty there's an argument to be
made there is the idea that this is a
kind of civic architecture that has a
long history in the united states that's
associated with government functions
with high civic ideals and this is a
beautiful building and when one
approaches it one has a sense of
grandeur of monumentality and those
civic virtues that we associate with
neoclassical architecture we chose to
have this discussion in front of this
particular building because the
executive order singles it out as one of
the great examples that architecture
should now be and just recently
president biden rescinded trump's
executive order so while it might seem
like we're just talking about
architectural styles we're really
talking about something that is deeply
important in the social life of our
country
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