You have to hand it to President Trump — the man knows what he likes, and what he doesn’t. In the latter category, along with Bruce Springsteen and Harvard, belongs pretty much any architecture that smacks of modernity, in particular the midcentury movement known by the unfortunate name of Brutalism.
That name comes from “béton brut,” French for “pure concrete.” To detractors, though, the name is all too apt: Brutalist buildings, with their imposing, inscrutable facades, can appear, well, brutish. The style is often associated with authoritarian movements, but incorrectly; it is a fundamentally humanist enterprise, one informed by, and suspicious of, the atrocities committed in the name of higher ideals throughout the 20th century.
There is no accounting for taste, they say, but much of the dislike for Brutalism — which is hardly confined to Trump and his supporters — seems reflexive. You’re supposed to dislike it way you’re supposed to dislike anchovies. It doesn’t matter if you ever actually eat them.
Brutalism is “today associated with exactly the opposite values in which it was envisioned,” Mark Pasnik, who teaches architecture at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, told me. That may explain why, as Trump lashes out at Brutalism, few are speaking up in its defense.
Brutalist buildings line downtown Washington, DC, in particular the southwestern waterfront. Many of those buildings are functionally empty, as Trump has been cutting and relocating segments of the federal bureaucracy, and some could be torn down. Doing so would be an aesthetic mistake and an affront to history. Trump has the right to shape construction of new federal buildings while he remains in office, but any tinkering with the nation’s architectural treasures should elicit bipartisan outrage.
There’s not much time left. In an executive order issued last month, the White House stipulated that “Federal public buildings, such as courthouses and government office buildings,” need to “embrace classical architecture to honor tradition, foster civic pride, and inspire the citizenry.” Public buildings are to be “constructed in a style that uplifts and beautifies public spaces, ennobles our Nation, and commands respect from the general public.”
That likely translates to a return to neoclassical forms: white marble columns, sweeping staircases, Greco-Roman statuary. The move is supposed to compensate for the influence of modern architecture, which was particularly strong during the federal government’s expansion under the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and happened to coincide with Brutalism’s peak.
“The drive toward monumentality was seen as being appropriate to a civic building that would represent the people,” Pasnik told me. “It dialed into the era of big, growing government — government that was doing things in a positive light.”
Now that government is evil — according to the people who run it — so is every building that symbolizes its power, or at least, does so without reference to Ancient Rome. “In the 1960s, the Federal government largely replaced traditional designs with modernist and Brutalist ones — a move that was deeply unpopular,” the executive order says, arguing that “a majority of American taxpayers want classical, regionally inspired public buildings that beautify public spaces.”
“The style is often associated with authoritarian movements, but incorrectly.”
The order could imperil Brutalist classics around Washington: Marcel Breuer’s towering Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, the James V. Forrestal Building on Independence Avenue, the opaque donut that is the Hirschhorn Museum on the National Mall. This is the closest DC comes to the grandness of one of the world’s great capitals. But these and other Brutalist exemplars have unfairly been rebranded as “lumbering” representatives of a bloated government bureaucracy, Pasnik says.
If you need statues and colonnades, you can see those in London and Paris — and, for that matter, all over Washington. But the bold, angular structures of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau headquarters, across from the White House? That is pure midcentury cool, America at the height of its aesthetic and geopolitical influence. As the recent film The Brutalist pointed out, Brutalism was partly the style of European immigrants who had seen the horrors of World War II. The film stars Adrien Brody as a Jewish émigré from Hungary, who is seemingly based on Breuer. The members of this architectural cohort found comfort in concrete and simplicity, and they left Washington a grander and, yes, more beautiful than it had been in its staid, prewar days, when it was a small, Southern town.
It is true that these buildings have been allowed to deteriorate, but that is a problem across the entirety of the federal government. And while federal workers have complained about working in them, I doubt that Trump is especially concerned with the comfort of his bureaucrats. Rather, in a complexly perverse move, any architecture that isn’t strictly neoclassical now seems to be identified as “woke.” Yet wokeness, whatever that is, was the last thing the Brutalists had in mind.
“As classical architecture is the physical expression of the American regime, modern architecture is the physical expression of the woke regime,” one conservative intellectual wrote in 2023. He identified Madison Square Garden, built in 1980, as an example of woke-ism run amok. In fact, MSG is neither Brutalist nor woke. It’s just bad architecture, a sop to corporate interests.
At the same time as Trump is waging war on Brutalism, the newly minted Department of War (formerly the Department of Defense) is preparing to reinstall a Confederate statue in Arlington National Cemetery, under the guise of wanting to showcase all of history, the bad along with the good. I personally oppose displays of Confederate iconography, but many members of the Trump administration feel differently. Consistency demands that they protect our Brutalist history, as well.
Hope comes from an unlikely source: Mike Solana, editor of the influential and MAGA-adjacent website Pirate Wires, recently called Brutalism an abomination in a social-media post. But in a twist, that same post contained images of Brutalist buildings that have been rehabilitated with trees and plants — a new movement known as “eco-Brutalism.”
“This is acceptable,” Solana said of those images.
I may be grasping at straws here. Trump is no more a fan of environmentalism than he is of Brutalism. But maybe two (perceived) wrongs make a right? Trump wants to make Washington beautiful again. If he can resist his impulse towards the ersatz, he has a real chance of doing so by preserving and polishing the capital city’s Brutalist gems — and if that means a few trees sprouting from the concrete, so be it.
