Episode 120: Federal Style

This week, Jessica and Michael discuss a draft executive order that would amend the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture written in 1962 and require many new federal buildings to resemble classical architecture.

The president, first and foremost a real-estate developer, is used to imposing his specifications on his “huge, beautiful buildings,” Michael says, however, that whether it’s the Trump administration’s mandate for the classical or Prince Charles’s “monstrous carbuncle” speech decrying contemporary architecture,

Any attempt to, at the end of the day, legislate and codify taste is always going to be suspect.… Subjugating everyone else to your personal taste is the ultimate expression of control.

Also mentioned this week:

Cathleen McGuigan, Architectural Record, Will the White House Order New Federal Architecture To Be Classical?
Katie Roberts and Robin Pogrebin, New York Times, Draft Executive Order Would Give Trump a New Target: Modern Design
Rain Noe, Core77, Explaining the Executive Order Proposing to Hand Design Authority Over to President Trump
Kate Wagner, The New Republic, Duncing About Architecture
National Civic Art Society
Prince Charles’s “monstrous carbuncle” speech (1984)
Architecture Daily, Foster, Hadid, Gehry, Nouvel, Piano and more against Prince Charles (2009)
Marketwatch, Do you use Times New Roman? People might think you’re a Trump supporter, according to this study
Jilax & Blax, Song 2 (Blur Tribute) via Souncloud
Blurred photograph from New York Times, Full Video: Trump’s State of the Union Speech
Dushko Petrovich, n + 1, Rise of the Blur
Election Night 1960 CBS News Coverage feat. Walter Cronkite
California International Antiquarian Book Fair
Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

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Posted in: Architecture, Arts + Culture, The Observatory

Michael Bierut studied graphic design at the University of Cincinnati, and has been a partner in the New York office of Pentagram since 1990. Michael is a Senior Critic in Graphic Design at the Yale School of Art.

Jessica Helfand, a founding editor of Design Observer, is an award-winning graphic designer and writer. A former contributing editor and columnist for Print, Eye and Communications Arts magazine, she is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale and a recent laureate of the Art Director’s Hall of Fame. Jessica received both her BA and MFA from Yale University where she has taught since 1994. In 2013, she won the AIGA medal.

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