Last year, we—Victoria Beach, Peggy Deamer, and Thomas Fisher—authored an online ethics column for AN with the goal of hosting a discussion of the values that architects embody or should embody. We are continuing our inquiry into the ethics of architects through a recent conversation with colleagues in response to the question: “What should architects do when confronted with President Trump’s executive orders? And: What tools are available to our profession?” An edited version of the exchange appears below.
Our respondents were Renee Cheng, dean of the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts, Arizona State University; Nancy Levinson, editor and executive director of Places Journal; Ana Miljački, professor of architecture at Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Justin Garrett Moore, program director of Humanities in Place at the Mellon Foundation; and Casius Pealer, senior professor of practice in real estate development, Tulane University.
Ana Miljački (AM): The U.S. has historically set terms for government buildings: They were more open and inviting after the Second World War but became more bunker-like as America saw itself under attack later in the century. Trump’s executive orders are a shortcut for white supremacy, which arrives embedded in classicist architecture.
Nancy Levinson (NL): I agree. It seems important to emphasize that the executive orders are not about architecture or aesthetics; they’re about the weaponization of culture on behalf of an authoritarian agenda to dismantle our flawed but real, pluralistic democracy. The Trump regime is operating in bad faith, and its architectural edicts are part of that.
AM: In response to this, I like the phrase “I would prefer not to” in Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” That is a very specific formulation of resistance, stating a preference not to rather than refusing directly. But this position needs to be multiplied; operating collectively is the only way to exert pressure of any significance.
Casius Pealer (CP): Trump’s orders are based on the idea that modernism is not popular, which aligns his interest with what he says the public wants. So in our response, and in our duty to the public, not just our professional desires, we must figure out how to better frame the things that we know are important through our experience and expertise in a way that connects to the public. Rather than debating about whether classicism is a good thing or not, we need to talk about design innovation and its benefits.
AM: The executive order is not a benign aesthetic proposition; it is not a matter of taste. It is retrograde, problematic politics that we have spent a century trying to overcome.
NL: Any regime that demonizes art is doing so with a political agenda. The Nazis denounced modernism as “degenerate” and shut down the Bauhaus. In this country, during the McCarthy era, artists and writers were persecuted for being “un-American.”
CP: But just taking the executive orders on their face, they claim that classicism is popular and what people want, so we should engage with that and challenge that claim.
Renee Cheng (RC): Some classical architectural details, for example, are expensive and don’t age well, so we can make an argument in terms of functionality. The AIA has a knowledge community on public architecture; maybe they could be helpful to shift the conversation away from style to talk about how design can lower the cost of operations and increase innovation.
Justin Garrett Moore (JGM): We need more spaces of dialogue to have more fruitful conversations around problem-solving. Innovation has traction with people in this administration.
CP: There are a lot of words in the executive order that we could embrace: words like beauty, civic virtue, responsibility, respect, dignity. These are not words that we have always used to describe design, but we could expand upon that.
AM: If Trump asks the architectural profession what he has asked of lawyers—to do pro bono work of his choosing in exchange for getting federal work—we would be faced with a classic prisoner’s dilemma. We must each make our own decisions about what is right, without knowing how others will choose. If everyone separately chooses for the benefit of the collective, this would be the best cumulative result, but some may choose what might give them an advantage over others. I am from former Yugoslavia, and this moment in the U.S. feels a lot like déjà vu.
NL: It’s historically been hard for Americans to accept that tyranny can happen here, but it’s happening here right now. How to deal with this as a profession? If you refuse to engage on your own, you might lose a job, but if the profession refuses to engage—say, on detention centers—then you have the beginnings of collective action.
RC: I was talking recently with the person who runs the AIA knowledge community for prisons about the movement to opt out of designing prisons that included solitary confinement. Their response was that prisons are going to get built, with or without architects, and that design interventions like biophilia can improve prisoners’ quality of life, so they felt that opting out was not the solution, that it would harm more prisoners than not.
CP: A colleague from the ACLU told me that the AIA’s taking a strong position on [prisons] in our code of ethics about solitary confinement has had a meaningful impact on litigation and on the law.
RC: Trump has, for many years, found ways to get free architectural services, so a quid pro quo would not be anything new, but I do think that this public architecture group at the AIA as well as a large firm roundtable would potentially be a place to start to ask the question so that they’re prepared and so that it doesn’t become a prisoner’s dilemma.
CP: One of the things that’s nice about having a code of ethics is you’ve presumably thought about some of these issues before they come up and you have a framework for them.
RC: It is actually not that hard to update the code of ethics. It would be worth doing if there was something that would be helpful for all the firms because it’s in the code of ethics.
NL: Something that’s fundamental to questions of architecture and ethics is the client-centric basis of most offices. Architects’ livelihoods—and payrolls—depend on meeting the needs of clients, which can mean taking on projects that conflict with one’s political or ethical convictions. At Places, we’ve launched a series called “Repair Manual” that explores “the paradigm shift from building the world to repairing the world.” It’s attracted a wide readership among architects concerned that wasteful construction is contributing to global warming. What to do when you find yourself working on projects that run against your beliefs?
CP: The same may come up with regards to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The first DEI executive orders came out calling it illegal, but DEI is not illegal, and nothing becomes illegal just because of an executive order.
RC: There have been clumsy and poor attempts at achieving diversity that feel like tokenism or quotas. So, if you say that we’re not setting quotas or numerical goals based on race, gender, or protected classes but instead that inclusion makes architecture better and more innovative, then maybe that is a way forward. If inclusion is something that advances innovation, it’s not a DEI policy; it helps an entity’s bottom line.
NL: But this administration is attempting to eliminate the Department of Education and with it much of the federal infrastructure that aims to democratize education.
RC: But what was the opening for doing that? Pell Grant recipients are not graduating at the rate of other grant recipients, so that’s a failure of the educational system. I’m not saying that eliminating the entire Department of Education is the correct solution, especially given the speed and the way that it’s being done. I’m just saying we ought to look at why the criticisms are landing, take responsibility for that, and propose positive solutions.
JGM: The same is true with buildings that have some clear faults. The ability to say that something is not working for people and, to be honest about it, has a lot of value relative to putting so much energy in attacking and disparaging something; it does not land well with the public when you do that. The broader public wants some degree of owning up to things, and that doesn’t happen enough. On the DEI question, we are in a highly divided society, and we have always been in a highly divided society. My parents went to segregated schools, so this is not new.
NL: Here it might be useful to note that most architects don’t interact much with the public—or, at least, most clients are private, not public. And yet buildings are inevitably part of our collective experience; architecture is the most public of the arts. How might the profession connect with the debates and divisions that are roiling our country and do so in meaningful ways? Can we imagine a profession with an expanded purview? With new ways of engaging with communities? What we’re experiencing in this country is scary and unprecedented. If the Trump administration succeeds in its authoritarian takeover, life will be different for all of us. But we can still choose how we respond.
JGM: I agree. This connects to how to get the broader public to care about just how much is at stake. That’s why it’s a problem when architectural concerns get boiled down to style, because what is happening is so much more than that. It’s a mass distraction to even talk about it that way, because 99 percent of the people on the street have lots of other things to worry about. So if the argument is about the style of buildings, you lose.
RC: I’m scared, but I’m also optimistic. This is a call to question the role of architecture in serving the public. Talking about architecture in terms of innovation or its ability to serve people is not something that we’ve done well as a profession. I think our current predicament is an opportunity to do something that we’ve needed for a long time, which is to show how design decisions have an impact on your daily life—not just civic life, but your personal life.
CP: I agree, but I also think that we can’t forget the fact that these executive orders are disingenuous. The Trump administration is not making a good faith effort to try to improve architects’ connections with the public. It’s the opposite.
Victoria Beach was a faculty fellow at Harvard’s Center for Ethics and wrote the textbook for the first ethics class at the Harvard GSD. She has had her own architectural practice for nearly 30 years and has recently held elective office in California.
Peggy Deamer is professor emerita at Yale School of Architecture and a founding member of the Architecture Lobby. She has practiced architecture for 45 years and is the author of Architecture and Labor.
Thomas Fisher is a professor in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota and the director of the Minnesota Design Center. A former dean of the College of Design, he was also an editor at Progressive Architecture magazine for 14 years.
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