Justin Shubow joins host Rachel Lu to talk about the importance of beautiful government buildings and the possibility of a classical revival.

Brian Smith:

Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org and thank you for listening.

Rachel Lu:

Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Thanks for joining us today. I’m Rachel Lu, Associate Editor at Law & Liberty, and here with me today, I have Justin Shubow. He’s the President of the National Civic Art Society, a non-profit organization in Washington, DC that promotes the classical and humanistic tradition in public art and architecture. Welcome to the show, Justin.

Justin Shubow:

Thanks for having me.

Rachel Lu:

So we’re going to be talking today about the Beautifying Federal Civil Architecture Act, but before we get into the politics, I just thought I’d open with this question. I know you’ve dedicated tremendous energy to improving public buildings. If you were given the opportunity to wipe one public building or monument off the map and redesign it completely, what would you do with that opportunity?

Justin Shubow:

Well, I think one of the worst buildings that I would eliminate is the Department of Housing and Urban Development Headquarters in Washington, DC. It’s a massive, ugly, brutalist building designed by a famous architect, Marcel Breuer, and it’s just incredibly oppressive. Two different HUD Secretaries, one Democrat, one Republican, have said the building is like ten floors of basement. And a third HUD Secretary, also a Democrat, Julian Castro, seconded those Secretaries and also said that the building looked like something from the Soviet Union.

So here we have both Democrats and Republicans agreeing that this building is terrible, and it also does damage to an area of Washington, DC that’s very important. So, the building is located in the southwest quadrant near the National Mall. It could be a beautiful classical building that harmonizes with the best of our tradition in Washington, but it represents and embodies the federal government at its worst as a faceless bureaucracy.

Rachel Lu:

Yeah, and what would you do with that potential? What could be in that space?

Justin Shubow:

Well, I think an example of what a noble building could be is the buildings in the Federal Triangle, buildings like the FTC headquarters. These were classical buildings inspired by ancient Roman designs that were constructed in the 1920s and 30s. The Head of the Treasury Department specifically said that these buildings should be classical. The buildings helped to complete Washington, DC as a classical city as it was originally intended by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Rachel Lu:

Right. And that was the norm for a long time in Washington, DC, right? To build buildings in that style.

Justin Shubow:

Well, the founders consciously decided that the core buildings of government would be classical. They wished to harken back to Democratic Rome, Republican Rome, and Democratic Athens, and they saw the classical tradition as time-honored and timeless. They started a tradition that continued in America for about 150 years—and, in fact, in 1901, the federal government made Classicism official, talking about its greatness and how respected it is by people over the years.

Rachel Lu:

Right. So, I want us to talk more later about why this changed if we have a chance, but let’s get first to this issue of the Beautifying Federal Civil Architecture Act. Because this is a bill that’s presently in front of Congress or potentially being debated by Congress. Can you tell us about what that is, what the status of it is, and so forth?

Justin Shubow:

Sure. Just one correction. It’s the beautiful Civic Architecture Act, not Civil.

Rachel Lu:

Okay. Sorry.

Justin Shubow:

As a bit of background, the federal government, starting in the 1950s up until very recently, has been building almost entirely modernist federal buildings. And President Trump issued an executive order that revolutionized federal architecture by reorienting it from ugly modernism to beautiful, classical, and traditional design. The order said that, and it applied to federal buildings costing $50 million or more, it said that the building should uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit in noble the United States, command respect from the general public, be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional architectural heritage. And it specifically said for Washington, DC that classicism should be the default style for federal public buildings.

The executive order didn’t ban modernism, but it did make it much more difficult to build brutalist and deconstructivist designs. Unfortunately, President Biden in his second month of office, rescinded the order without giving any explanation. But more recently, as you said, there now is legislation pending in Congress. In the Senate, the lead sponsor is Marco Rubio. In the House, the lead sponsor is Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, who’s a rising star and is almost definitely going to be a Senator from Indiana in two years.

This legislation would essentially codify that executive order with some changes, but one important thing that it would do is it would require that there be substantial public input when decisions are being made for designs for federal buildings and U.S. courthouses.

Rachel Lu:

Right. So, Biden canceled that without explaining what was going on with that really, and this is an attempt to revivify that effort.

Justin Shubow:

Correct. This legislation proves that this issue is now on the national radar. This is not just about President Trump. This has much broader support from well-respected Members of Congress. This is an issue that’s not going away.

Rachel Lu:

Right. So, as I understand it, one of the arguments in favor of this, there are many, but one is just that people in general prefer classical architecture. It’s more beautiful. They’d rather walk by it and look at it in their cities. And there’s, I think, a lot of survey evidence that this is the case, right? That people prefer this. So partly for that reason, you want to give the public more opportunities to have input into the buildings that are being built in the Capitol and elsewhere, the public buildings that they’re paying for and that they’re living with, and they’re looking at. How is that going to work? How would that look? What kind of optimal structure would you want there to be for the public to give input into public buildings?

Justin Shubow:

Well, first, I would say that my organization in 2020 did do a survey run by the Harris Poll, a highly respected, non-partisan polling company. We polled 2,000 Americans to see their preferences for the design of federal buildings and US courthouses. And what we did was pair images, very carefully selected to show actually existing federal buildings similar in shape, size, color, and so on, making sure the sky was the same. And we just simply ask the participants, “Which of these two buildings would you prefer for a federal building or a U.S. courthouse?”

The results of the survey were overwhelming. 72% of the people surveyed preferred the traditional design, and there were widespread majorities across all demographic groups: race, gender, socioeconomic, political party affiliation, you name it. Regarding political party affiliation, tradition was preferred by 70% of Democrats and 73% of Republicans. So this survey proved what everyone really knows, which is that ordinary people prefer classical and traditional design for these kinds of buildings.

And you ask, “How could we ensure that the public has a say?” Well, I could imagine that when a building is going to be built in a particular locale, like, say, there’s going to be a new federal courthouse in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which in fact is the case, there is going to be one, that you could pick lay people from that region and give them samples of the kinds of buildings that they might want.

So in other words, you might provide an example of a classical building, a brutalist building, a deconstructivist building or a Romanesque building and so on, and say, “Which of these styles would you prefer for the new courthouse?” These lay people could be surveyed, and those survey results would influence the design that the architects actually create.

Rachel Lu:

I see. Yeah. So explain this—why is it, do you think, that people prefer traditional styles?

Justin Shubow:

Well, I think one major reason is that they are inherently beautiful. There are certain buildings and kinds of buildings that are greatly admired by not just Americans but people around the world. I think when people look at the U.S. Capitol, they see an inspiring, iconic building representing American democracy. And by contrast, when people see a brutalist building, they tend to see it as oppressive, foreboding, and so on. There is widespread agreement across cultures about what makes for a beautiful building. Symmetry can matter—having a certain degree of ornament and complexity matters.

So yeah, those are some of the reasons why people might like it. At the same time, Americans do associate this design with our federal government. Classical architecture is widely seen as the embodiment of our democracy. So there’s this association in the minds of Americans about what makes for building that speaks to who we are and who we