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# Biden Revokes Trump’s Executive Order Mandating “Beautiful” Classical Architecture
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/biden-revokes-trumps-executive-order-mandating-beautiful-classical-architecture/
- Published: 2021-02-26T12:30:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:06:06.000Z
- Description: Trump’s executive order mandated that “classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings.”
- Author: Hakim Bishara
- Tags: News, Featured, Joe Biden, Washington DC, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 09:11 (2021, 2022, part 1)

During the last weeks of his presidency, Donald Trump signed an [executive order](https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-promoting-beautiful-federal-civic-architecture/?ref=hyperallergic.com) to make federal buildings "beautiful again” by [imposing a neoclassical style of architecture](https://hyperallergic.com/541386/trump-federal-architecture/). On Wednesday, February 24, President Joe Biden [nixed the mandate](https://www.politico.com/news/2021/02/24/biden-trump-federal-architecture-order-471459?ref=hyperallergic.com), among a series of other Trump-eraexecutive orders and memos.

Titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” Trump's executive order mandated that "classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings."

America’s landmark buildings should "inspire the human spirit, ennoble the United States, command respect from the general public," the order added. It went on to attack contemporary architectural designs that had been approved by the General Services Administration (GSA) as "unappealing," "lack\[ing\] dignity," and straight-up "ugly."

"The resulting Federal architecture sometimes impresses the architectural elite, but not the American people who the buildings are meant to serve," Trump's order argued. An [earlier draft ](https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/14466-will-the-white-house-order-new-federal-architecture-to-be-classical?ref=hyperallergic.com#AIA)of the order came close to banning 20th-century Brutalist and Deconstructivist architecture entirely, but a softer language was used in the final version, allowing different styles of architecture "where appropriate." 

Biden's decision to scrapthe order might put him in a conflict with Justin Shubow, the Trump-appointed chairman of the [US Commission of Fine Arts](https://www.cfa.gov/?ref=hyperallergic.com). Shubow, who is also president of the National Civic Art Society (NCAS), is believed to be[ the driving force behind Trump's executive order](https://www.npr.org/2021/02/25/971312635/president-biden-revokes-trumps-controversial-classical-architecture-order?ref=hyperallergic.com).