America may be too divided and distracted to joyfully celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. After all, the democracy set in motion by the Declaration is at unprecedented risk. It’s a rocky year of war, inflation, billionaire hutzpah, and a wobbly economy.

This fraught moment made me think of the last time America celebrated the Declaration, in 1976—commemorations that are little remembered but for the sight of the billowing sails of tall ships gliding into New York harbor.

Philadelphia, as the cradle of American independence, was supposed to be the center of attention 50 years ago. From the beginning, deliberations involved arguably the most important architect of the late 20th century, Louis I. Kahn. His values and insights were idealistic for their time, as the Declaration signers’ were in theirs. Compared to the corruption, politicization and toxic grandiosity of this year’s Washington DC “celebrations,” Louis Kahn’s thinking is a tonic—and makes even more sense now.

The runup to the Bicentennial was also an uncertain and transitory time. The Vietnam War had ended ignominiously at the cost of some 58,000 American lives. People were dealing with high inflation while incomes stagnated, known then as stagflation. (Sound familiar?) President Richard Nixon would resign in 1974 once his impeachment seemed inevitable.

Philadelphia began planning for the bicentennial in the 1960s, but moved ahead slowly given the pessimistic national mood. The city’s civic leadership saw salvation in a Worlds Fair extravaganza, but Kahn counseled against an assortment of bombastic buildings that would fall into disuse after the fair closed. Instead he argued that architecture should play a minimalist role as an armature for what he conceived of as a global convening of citizens and great minds.

The idea was to co-create the institutions that would meet America’s needs as it entered its third century. Philadelphia in the 19th and 20th centuries had created great institutions—places of learning, justice, culture, and governance devoted to bettering the lot of people. Kahn believed in their transformative potential even as long-established elites faced growing opposition for prosecuting a war that could not be won and only fitfully acceding to Black demands for equal access to American freedom (followed by equality demands by women and other minorities).

Among the opportunities Kahn’s approach offered was to include people who did not benefit from the Declaration’s freedom promise, in a city in which Black was the color of more than one third of the population.

The city as a place of reinvention

Though Kahn’s vision may have sounded overly abstract and high minded, it appealed to business and civic leaders because promises of money, especially from the federal government, were not translating into hard cash in strained economic times. Kahn’s aspirational forum seemed far less costly to realize.

Kahn’s schemes for several sites are not well documented—available to us as scratchy, underdeveloped sketches—but they suggest a variety of physical and urbanistic tactics aimed at enhancing the city as fundamentally a place of convening and encountering people. Architecture’s job was to enhance those wisdom-sharing interactions. Of course the city as a forum is as old as ancient Greek agoras, but today’s fragmented and compartmentalized cities and suburbs too rarely learn the ancient wisdom. Kahn put it front and center.

His earliest idea was to close streets to cars in the oldest part of the city, between the Delaware riverfront and the Independence Mall greensward. He proposed to borrow churches, synagogues, and Quaker meeting places as venues for international assemblies—a small “u” United Nations.

That setting didn’t work and Kahn pursued other forms on various sites that he or the Bicentennial Committee of Philadelphia thought they could obtain. “Kahn’s insistence that the Bicentennial be a forum for discussion and meeting would prevail in all subsequent proposals,” wrote Marc Philippe Vincent in the catalog for the 1992 exhibition “Louis I. Kahn and the Realm of Architecture,” organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (my prime Bicentennial source, FYI).

A “Forum of Availabilities”

For a riverside project on the site of today’s Penn’s Landing, Kahn sketched an enormous tent that would shelter a flexibly organized beehive of activities. Another site at the confluence of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers—utterly isolated from the city by massive industrial tracts and crisscrossed by highways and a rail line—inspired an introverted scheme. He designed a long pedestrian street parallel to a canal lined on both sides by installations and modest pavilions that would spill into the street.

It would culminate with large structures at either end. A “Hall of Expressions” would host performance and exhibition venues. Thematic halls of water, land, and air would highlight global nature and scientific advancements.

In a more refined version, the street would be called the Forum of the Availabilities. (Kahn’s poetic rhetoric could be gnomic but it evoked possibilities, which were thin on the ground in those post-Vietnam War days.)

Kahn’s streets, courts, and forums celebrated interaction, debate, and conversation over grand national or commercial statements. All would have urged active participation by visitors in a “search for greater mutual understanding,” according to Vincent.

Philadelphia leadership did not coalesce around the plan sufficiently to convince the federal Bicentennial Commission of its viability. Congress widely dispersed $250 million that had originally been set aside for Philadelphia.

Mayor Frank Rizzo formed a committee to figure out a local celebration, focused on Independence Mall, a relatively intimate and central lawn that fronts Independence Hall, where the Declaration was signed by the second Continental Congress in 1776. Here Kahn would propose a line of “community houses” along the edges of the Mall, opening onto the greensward, which would become a place of gathering and sociability.

At one end a grouping of barrel-vaulted structures that suggest a hierarchy of small to large organizations would form a “Congress of Institutions” that he hoped would trace the evolution of institutions as the enduring backbone of American aspirations, and host conclaves that would define their role in the future.

This plan, too, would fizzle and Philadelphia’s most Kahnian Bicentennial legacy would be a diminutive crystalline enclosure for the Liberty Bell, fronting Independence Hall, designed by Kahn Protegé Romaldo Giurgola. It put people into intimate proximity to the Bell and glowed through glass at night.

Kahn’s idealism, optimism and personal magnetism kept this unique celebratory conception alive even as leadership struggled to put sufficient financial and logistical bones on the plan to persuade government and exposition committees to support it.

Philadelphia on the brink

Advocacy for a Philadelphia celebration faced plenty of distractions.

The Bicentennial coincided with a catastrophic time for cities. The industrial hubs of the Northeast and Midwest that had for decades created fabulous wealth, began hemorrhaging people to white flight as they lost their economic engines in a wave of deindustrialization. As Americans began forsaking unreliable Fords and Chryslers for spunky Volkswagen Beatles and Toyota Coronas, factories that made things began to seem antiquated. (Philadelphia was once the Detroit of locomotives and also built Packards.) Wall Street grew impatient with the massive capital investments industry required and their pesky unionized workforces.

Fully 45 percent of Philadelphia’s jobs were in manufacturing in the 1950s. (Nowadays the percentage is in the single digits.) By the late 1970s northeast corridor passenger trains entered Philadelphia through a moonscape of rubble-strewn, broken-windowed abandoned factories.

Most of the big industrial cities were then governed by political machines that were much more concerned about staying in power than undertaking the kind of deep soul searching necessary to adapt to a future made bleak by an exodus subsidized by freeway building. Mortgages were readily obtained in new subdivisions but next to impossible to get in the dense, sturdy redbrick neighborhoods that were “redlined” by federal policy. Cities were forced take over bankrupt private bus and rail companies.

Dramatic population losses ensued, hardening poverty in low-income Black communities where residents were soon deemed to be an irredeemable “underclass.”Gerald Ford famously told New York—staring down bankruptcy in 1975—to “drop dead,” as a New York Daily News headline put it.

In the 1970s and 1980s white-collar jobs were not replacing blue-collar ones. Philadelphia would gradually lose many of the Center City professionals who worked in its cluster of insurers; pharmaceuticals would largely decamp for suburbs. Once one of the wealthiest companies in America, the Pennsylvania Railroad skidded into bankruptcy in the early 1970s and was consolidated into Conrail, a freight-railroad camel assembled by the Federal government, with Amtrak picking up its passenger service.

Philadelphia, home to more than 2 million people in 1950 would lose 400,000 residents between 1960 and 1980.

Squandered Possibilities

In later decades, Philadelphia and other cities would turn themselves around, and the spirit of Kahn’s plan would suffuse enhancements on Independence Mall.

A Constitution Center would by added by Harry Cobb of I. M. Pei and Partners that would somewhat ambivalently close the axial vista up the mall in the same position Kahn had planned for his Congress of Institutions. Giurgola’s jewel box was ultimately deemed too small to accommodate visitors and too vulnerable to vandalism, and was replaced by a skinny red brick building by the Pennsylvania-based Bohlin Cywinski Jackson. It defers to Independence Hall by running along the side of the Mall as Kahn’s schemes suggested. The Bell is now more comfortable to visit but lacks the prominence and immediacy of Giurgola’s structure. A visitor center by Kallman, McKinnell and Wood links the Liberty Bell to the Constitution Center.

These institutions are each self contained, though, and leave the Mall itself as an afterthought. Its redesign by the landscape firm Olin is a lawn looking for a reason to be. The ensemble lacks the civic energy and the urge to participate that Kahn tried to realize in his designs.

Trashing the Declaration’s legacy

Fast forward 50 years to the vanity commercial spectacle that has made a mess of Washington’s Monumental Core—the most powerfully symbolic landscape in America. The squandered possibilities of Philadephia’s Bicentennial celebration pale in comparison.

The Lincoln Memorial and a vast territory around the White House were conscripted as TV backdrops to somehow legitimize the fake sport of ultimate fighting. UFC, which has cultivated a close relationship to Trump for years will cash in (as will Trump, who holds company stock and has other financial relationships with the company).

Opaque construction fences are everywhere but none of the frenzy of statue gilding, fountain repairs, and ballroom building bears any relationship to the significance of the Declaration of Independence. Official Washington in 2026 is not contemplating the legacy of America’s founding or considering how and why people have united around its principals. It is not debating how it has shaped American identity and inspired much of the world to adopt the contentious and difficult job of self-governance.

The garish commercial celebrations are, instead, an unmistakable physical manifestation of undisguised corruption, and the wielding of unrestrained power by unprecedented wealth.

As Philadelphia teetered in the 1970s, Kahn saw institutions as the glue that he hoped would assure the city’s rebirth though he did not live to see it. (He died in 1974).

He also did not live to witness an era of institutional destruction instigated by political operatives and masterminded by the Heritage Foundation, including the capture of universities, museums, and courts, to name a few. Vital institutions, he knew, needed to be rejuvenated and reinvented. It is unusual for an architect to also be a social visionary, but our appalling times have made his insight and aspiration more urgent than ever.

This post revises an earlier text that went out to paid subscribers, adding reporting on the Congressional proposal of $1 billion for the ballroom, additional detail on the public land grab.

I cannot figure out how Todd Blanche, the acting US Attorney General, can live with himself after signing the brief that demands an end to the injunction that required the White House to stop construction on the President’s ballroom project. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has led a lawsuit that asks the administration to follow the law, holding off on the project until it receives Congressional approval and meets other requirements. Echoing the President’s hysterical posturing on social media, the first sentence of the Department of Justices’s brief calls the Trust “FAKE,” and “very bad for our country.”

Because the Trust will not abandon its lawsuit, the legal brief says it suffers from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Such adolescent babbling in a legal brief? One that cites next to no law? From the highest legal office in the land? Imagine the cringing of responsible lawyers at DOJ.

Wait. Billion dollar ballroom?

It gets worse. At length the filing shamelessly exploits the April 25th assassination attempt at the Washington Hilton, positing it as a safety justification for continuing construction. Hiding behind this rationale, some Congressional enablers hope to appropriate $1-billion “for security adjustments and upgrades” to the ballroom project—which was endlessly promoted as costing the taxpayers nothing, just as Mexico was going to build the southern border wall for free.

The billion is attached to a $70-billion package for customs enforcement and the border patrol that have been operating on almost $200-billion of funds earlier allocated from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” The package, which require a special approval procedure to get around likely Democratic opposition, will advance the administration’s mass-deportation agenda by enhancing ICE disruptions of blue cities and expansion of a vast and intentionally cruel detention infrastructure that is being resisted by cities and towns across the country.

So what’s another billion dollars if it makes the President happy? The number appears to be plucked out of the air since even Trump did not have the nerve to say the wing would need that kind of money. (The private funds raised could reportedly be used for things like china.)

I wrote the office of Senator Charles Grassley to see if there was any plan or report that identified the need to spend this kind of money. (He has promoted the Congressional funding to deal with Trump’s possible loss in the National Trust case. I have not gotten a response.) There is a masterplan for White House upgrades that does not prominently address security, but it dates from 2000 and also makes no mention of a need for a ballroom.

Even though the ploy to equate the assassination attempt and ballroom security is working for at least some in Congress and the right-wing punditsphere, the security issues around the ballroom and the Washington Hilton have zero in common.

Let me take you through that. Be aware as you read on that I have not seen any non-public plans, and am not a security expert though I have done security research for publication.

Ballroom bomb shelter

The legal brief in the case to stop ballroom construction portrays the building as essentially a bomb shelter surmounted by a ballroom—an inversion of the pitch Trump has been making for months. Upgrading the secure bunker beneath the East Wing was only mentioned when it offered a convenient justification for Trump’s vanity project.

To make the case that bunker and ballroom are inextricably linked (meaning that halting the project would put the President in danger), the brief describes “missile-resistant steel columns, military grade venting, drone proof ceilings [sic, the roof is presumably meant], and an enforced [sic, means reinforced] concrete system.” (Did no one even copy edit this brief?)

That certainly sounds expensive, but it’s not billion-dollar expensive. Some hardening of the wing should be expected, like the projectile and blast-resistant glass, which would protect occupants in the event of, say, an exploding van parked on East Executive Avenue. But these have nothing to do with securing a subterranean bunker, one which is only intended operate briefly as a refuge. To build the entire ballroom resistant to missiles and drone-borne explosive devices would probably mean sacrificing the 20 or so 25-foot-high (my estimate) arched windows along with the fancy columned porticos, which might pull the building down if sufficiently damaged.

The brief speaks of systems shared by ballroom and bunker for heating, ventilating, air conditioning, electrical and security, but such sharing would be highly vulnerable. Harmful gas or smoke from a fire drawn into the ballroom air system, for example, could spread to the bunker. That’s why I hope the brief’s hyperbolic description is inaccurate.

The structure and systems for the ballroom and the bunker need to be separate, redundant, and capable of operating autonomously until people in the bunker can be removed to safety. If this was an embassy in a country rocked by turmoil there might be high walls, dedicated water, sewer and electrical generating capacity. Is that where a billion dollars takes us? Or is it just a Congressionally gifted slush fund?

Given the administration’s disingenuousness, U.S. District Court judge Richard Leon should continue to be highly skeptical of claims that the ballroom project needs to go forward on security grounds.

If the security facilities and procedures would be rendered inadequate by a halt in construction—as the White House has argued—then it is a failure of the Trump team, as Judge Leon has noted, since it is obligated to maintain those facilities to acceptable levels because the project has always been at risk of running aground because the required approvals were not secured before demolition began.

An elaborate interception infrastructure protects Washington’s airspace. That is why the White House and—as far as I can tell—the ballroom wing have not been designed to survive aerial weapons. Should the airspace protections fail to stop such an attack, a fortified White House wouldn’t be good for much.

Are we headed there? We should expect answers from the White House and Congress.

Land grab?

On the ground, the security perimeter of the White House (permitting no unscreened public access) already comprises the equivalent of 12 city blocks. (At the Washington Hilton, by contrast, a cordon of human officers standing just outside the venue comprised the event’s primary protection. They risked their lives, and succeeded in stopping the gunman.)

Large additional tracts are newly off limits to the public. In January, an obscure notice announced the closure of Lafayette Park, the seven-acre square to the north of the presidential residence that was not only a recreational resource for the city but was often the site of protests including one in 2020 that was forcibly cleared by federal law enforcement so that Trump could do a photo op with a bible.

Ostensibly the January closure was for the purpose of fixing two fountains but the entire park is under construction for a revamping of its landscape. There is no information as to whether public access will be restricted when the work is complete. (The National Park Service did not address queries submitted to it.)

The administration has not shown the project publicly, nor taken it through the usual approval process. There are no publicly available images nor specific description of the work. (Might a a floral bust of Trump be added? I wouldn’t be surprised. I am told by The Cultural Landscape Foundation, which advocates for America’s important landscape legacies, that a Section 106 review has been initiated, which is an assessment of the impact of projects on designated historic resources. It can be quite rigorous and entails public comment, but it may not be completed until after construction is done.) Flouting such rules seems to be business as usual with this imperial White House.

Visitors may also be restricted from viewing the White House along E Street through a high fence which is about 1,000 feet south of the residence. It encircles the southern edge of the 18-acre south lawn. Now the 52-acre Ellipse, the park landscape south of E Street that draws the White House greensward to the cross axis of the National Mall, has been gated-off as well, its fate unannounced.

There is a 2011 competition-winning masterplan by Rogers Partners, architects, to upgrade the Ellipse, but it never moved forward. The design thoughtfully reconciles security needs with a visitor experience that would have made necessary barriers invisible through strategic plantings and topographic manipulation. A welcoming checkpoint design would reduce the visually chaotic accretion of structures and barriers visitors and White House staff now encounter. The E Street vantage would be enhanced with a generous pedestrian viewing terrace that visually unites President’s Park with the Ellipse.

If the E Street sidewalk remains closed, the presidential residence could only be viewed from twice as far away, where it looks like little more than a hut in the distance.

The wisdom of this White House land grab of a vast public landscape should be debated, especially as the billion dollars that Republicans want to throw at the White House could be used to bring much of this public space into the fortified environs. The language says the money can be spent “within the perimeter fence of the White House compound,” but those imprecise words could be interpreted as the entirety of President’s Park, which encompasses Lafayette Park, the immediate White House grounds and the Ellipse.

Right now projects like the ballroom’s proposed visitor screening facility and the Lafayette Park work already are affecting the security perimeter piecemeal—all without a comprehensive plan. Hundreds of millions may be spent yet fatal vulnerabilities may slip through as a patient, thorough and consultative process is skipped.

Unlike the president and his acting attorney general, the rarely controversial National Trust has kept its collective head in spite of the enormous political pressure being applied to it. The Trust is apolitical, drawing people from across the political spectrum to resist heedlessly trashing places and structures important to America’s history and identity.

“We are not planning to voluntarily dismiss our lawsuit, which endangers no one and which respectfully asks the Administration to follow the law,” wrote Carol Quillen, the Trust’s president and CEO, noting that Trump could seek approval from Congress “at any time.”

Concerned about the scattershot vandalism of monumental Washington? You could become a member, as I have.

Thanks to Nord Wennerstrom, of The Cultural Landscape Foundation, for insight and assistance.

This is a revision of a post that went out to paid subscribers.

I cannot figure out how Todd Blanche, the acting US Attorney General, can live with himself after signing the brief that demands an end to the injunction that required the White House to stop construction on the President’s ballroom project. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has led a lawsuit that asks the administration to follow the law, holding off on the project until it receives Congressional approval and meets other requirements. Echoing the President’s hysterical posturing on social media, the first sentence of the Department of Justices’s brief calls the Trust “FAKE,” and “very bad for our country.”

Because the Trust will not abandon its lawsuit, the legal brief says it suffers from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Such adolescent babbling in a legal brief? One that cites next to no law? From the highest legal office in the land? Imagine the cringing of responsible lawyers at DOJ.

Wait. Billion dollar ballroom?

It gets worse. At length the filing shamelessly exploits the April 25th assassination attempt at the Washington Hilton, positing it as a safety justification for continuing construction. Hiding behind this rationale, some Congressional enablers hope to appropriate $1-billion “for security adjustments and upgrades” to the ballroom project—which was endlessly promoted as costing the taxpayers nothing, just as Mexico was going to build the southern border wall for free.

The billion is attached to a $70-billion package for customs enforcement and the border patrol that have been operating on almost $200-billion of funds earlier allocated from Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.” The package, which require a special approval procedure to get around likely Democratic opposition, will advance the administration’s mass-deportation agenda by enhancing ICE disruptions of blue cities and expansion of a vast and intentionally cruel detention infrastructure that is being resisted by cities and towns across the country.

So what’s another billion dollars if it makes the President happy? The number appears to be plucked out of the air since even Trump did not have the nerve to say the wing would need that kind of money. (The private funds raised could reportedly be used for things like china.)

I wrote the office of Senator Charles Grassley to see if there was any plan or report that identified the need to spend this kind of money. (He has promoted the Congressional funding to deal with Trump’s possible loss in the National Trust case. I have not gotten a response.) There is a masterplan for White House upgrades that does not prominently address security, but it dates from 2000 and also makes no mention of a need for a ballroom.

Even though the ploy to equate the assassination attempt and ballroom security is working for at least some in Congress and the right-wing punditsphere, the security issues around the ballroom and the Washington Hilton have zero in common.

Let me take you through that. Be aware as you read on that I have not seen any non-public plans, and am not a security expert though I have done security research for publication.

Ballroom bomb shelter

The legal brief in the case to stop ballroom construction portrays the building as essentially a bomb shelter surmounted by a ballroom—an inversion of the pitch Trump has been making for months. Upgrading the secure bunker beneath the East Wing was only mentioned when it offered a convenient justification for Trump’s vanity project.

To make the case that bunker and ballroom are inextricably linked (meaning that halting the project would put the President in danger), the brief describes “missile-resistant steel columns, military grade venting, drone proof ceilings [sic, the roof is presumably meant], and an enforced [sic, means reinforced] concrete system.” (Did no one even copy edit this brief?)

That certainly sounds expensive, but it’s not billion-dollar expensive. Some hardening of the wing should be expected, like the projectile and blast-resistant glass, which would protect occupants in the event of, say, an exploding van parked on East Executive Avenue. But these have nothing to do with securing a subterranean bunker, one which is only intended operate briefly as a refuge. To build the entire ballroom resistant to missiles and drone-borne explosive devices would probably mean sacrificing the 20 or so 25-foot-high (my estimate) arched windows along with the fancy columned porticos, which might pull the building down if sufficiently damaged.

The brief speaks of systems shared by ballroom and bunker for heating, ventilating, air conditioning, electrical and security, but such sharing would be highly vulnerable. Harmful gas or smoke from a fire drawn into the ballroom air system, for example, could spread to the bunker. That’s why I hope the brief’s hyperbolic description is inaccurate.

The structure and systems for the ballroom and the bunker need to be separate, redundant, and capable of operating autonomously until people in the bunker can be removed to safety. If this was an embassy in a country rocked by turmoil there might be high walls, dedicated water, sewer and electrical generating capacity. Is that where a billion dollars takes us? Or is it just a Congressionally gifted slush fund?

Given the administration’s disingenuousness, U.S. District Court judge Richard Leon should continue to be highly skeptical of claims that the ballroom project needs to go forward on security grounds.

If the security facilities and procedures would be rendered inadequate by a halt in construction—as the White House has argued—then it is a failure of the Trump team, as Judge Leon has noted, since it is obligated to maintain those facilities to acceptable levels because the project has always been at risk of running aground because the required approvals were not secured before demolition began.

An elaborate interception infrastructure protects Washington’s airspace. That is why the White House and—as far as I can tell—the ballroom wing have not been designed to survive aerial weapons. Should the airspace protections fail to stop such an attack, a fortified White House wouldn’t be good for much.

Are we headed there? We should expect answers from the White House and Congress.

Land grab?

On the ground, the security perimeter of the White House (permitting no unscreened public access) already comprises the equivalent of 12 city blocks. (At the Washington Hilton, by contrast, a cordon of human officers standing just outside the venue comprised the event’s primary protection. They risked their lives, and succeeded in stopping the gunman.)

Large additional tracts are newly off limits to the public. In January, an obscure notice announced the closure of Lafayette Park, the seven-acre square to the north of the presidential residence that was not only a recreational resource for the city but was often the site of protests including one in 2020 that was forcibly cleared by federal law enforcement so that Trump could do a photo op with a bible.

Ostensibly the January closure was for the purpose of fixing two fountains but the entire park is under construction for a revamping of its landscape. There is no information as to whether public access will be restricted when the work is complete. (The National Park Service did not address queries submitted to it.)

The administration has not shown the project publicly, nor taken it through the usual approval process. There are no publicly available images nor specific description of the work. (Might a a floral bust of Trump be added? I wouldn’t be surprised. I am told by The Cultural Landscape Foundation, which advocates for America’s important landscape legacies, that a Section 106 review has been initiated, which is an assessment of the impact of projects on designated historic resources. It can be quite rigorous and entails public comment, but it may not be completed until after construction is done.) Flouting such rules seems to be business as usual with this imperial White House.

Visitors may also be restricted from viewing the White House along E Street through a high fence which is about 1,000 feet south of the residence. It encircles the southern edge of the 18-acre south lawn. Now the 52-acre Ellipse, the park landscape south of E Street that draws the White House greensward to the cross axis of the National Mall, has been gated-off as well, its fate unannounced.

There is a 2011 competition-winning masterplan by Rogers Partners, architects, to upgrade the Ellipse, but it never moved forward. The design thoughtfully reconciles security needs with a visitor experience that would have made necessary barriers invisible through strategic plantings and topographic manipulation. A welcoming checkpoint design would reduce the visually chaotic accretion of structures and barriers visitors and White House staff now encounter. The E Street vantage would be enhanced with a generous pedestrian viewing terrace that visually unites President’s Park with the Ellipse.

If the E Street sidewalk remains closed, the presidential residence could only be viewed from twice as far away, where it looks like little more than a hut in the distance.

The wisdom of this White House land grab of a vast public landscape should be debated, especially as the billion dollars that Republicans want to throw at the White House could be used to bring much of this public space into the fortified environs. The language says the money can be spent “within the perimeter fence of the White House compound,” but those imprecise words could be interpreted as the entirety of President’s Park, which encompasses Lafayette Park, the immediate White House grounds and the Ellipse.

Right now projects like the ballroom’s proposed visitor screening facility and the Lafayette Park work already are affecting the security perimeter piecemeal—all without a comprehensive plan. Hundreds of millions may be spent yet fatal vulnerabilities may slip through as a patient, thorough and consultative process is skipped.

Unlike the president and his acting attorney general, the rarely controversial National Trust has kept its collective head in spite of the enormous political pressure being applied to it. The Trust is apolitical, drawing people from across the political spectrum to resist heedlessly trashing places and structures important to America’s history and identity.

“We are not planning to voluntarily dismiss our lawsuit, which endangers no one and which respectfully asks the Administration to follow the law,” wrote Carol Quillen, the Trust’s president and CEO, noting that Trump could seek approval from Congress “at any time.”

Concerned about the scattershot vandalism of monumental Washington? You could become a member, as I have.

Thanks to Nord Wennerstrom, of The Cultural Landscape Foundation, for insight and assistance.

Are you sick of being bludgeoned by TV, radio, and social-media feeds filled with election campaign claims from the dubious to the reckless? Are you tired of inescapable emails, phone calls, and texts from candidates pleading, cajoling, whining, and committing other acts of debasement to get you to send in “just $1?”

Get ready. It’s “only” a midterm election year but it may become the worst year for special-interest steamrolling yet.

Campaign finance is pretty far from my architecture and cities wheelhouse, but the corruption of elections seems to me a transcendent issue that America can’t ignore.

A Broken System

Probably just about every non-wealthy person (and quite a few wealthy ones) have these worries. Everyone can see that our campaign finance system is utterly broken, with seemingly no barriers for any corporation or wealthy person to purchase influence and candidates.

The brazen power of money in elections is an important reason people across the ideological spectrum think government and U.S. capitalism are rigged against them. Congress shows how powerless it is, and how empty are its promises on housing affordability, health care costs, and earnings growth—among many other issues.

People can see not only the flow of cash and influence but outright corruption that is quickly approaching levels unheard of since the Gilded Age—the last time wealth concentrated so much in so few hands in America. People and companies seeking favors from Trump have increased his wealth a conservatively estimated $1.4 billion. They have invested in his crypto company, his ETF funds, the company that owns Truth Social, contributed to the White House ballroom slush find, and participated in real-estate deals across the globe. Those favors, of course, do not necessarily redound to the benefit of the American people. Such influence buying is (or should be) criminally corrupt but few investigations ensue and no one seems to be charged.

The power of individual wealth and monopolistic “trusts”—in oil, steel, and railroads—was recognized at the turn of the 20th century as undermining governments that were supposed to derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed,” as the Declaration of Independence put it.

While we see the usual ideological donors and familiar corporate interests (pharmaceuticals, health care, finance, defense contractors) pouring money into elections, the scope of spending is growing exponentially given the breathtaking wealth that can be tapped nowadays. We see Republicans cowering before the likes of Elon Musk, who alone spent $270 million on behalf of Trump and his allies in the 2024 election.

Stir in crypto, AI, and toxic predictive gambling interests—new deep pockets who are already letting us know that they will spend tens of millions to promote candidates friendly to their anti-regulatory cause, and throw similar sums to defeat people who dare to care about the prevalence of criminal actors in crypto, the profound risks attendant to AI, and the corrosive effects of turning everything into a betting opportunity.

Are we surprised that Republicans are silent in the face of vast abuses of power wielded by Trump and his cronies through the sale of pardons and influence? Many Republicans in the House and Senate who have rushed to the exits are those who thought they were working for the American people rather than the current president or whatever entities are buying government contracts these days. Those remaining are following the money because why not? Trump is getting away with it; more than a few are grabbing the gobs of cash of offer—or want to. You think they are interested in constraining the influence peddlers?

With war, political gridlock, economic uncertainty, and daily new abuses of power commanding our attention, is it too ask that we focus laserlike on campaign-finance reform?

Election cash questions are too wonky, you may argue, and change is impossible. Stick with me, please. Leveling the campaign playing field may unlock solutions to many other seemingly intractable problems, by opening debates beyond the terms set by the rich and powerful. Maybe we’ll even see a functioning Congress.

Roots of the campaign cash orgy

The millions and billions that have grown exponentially since 2010 are directly traceable to the Supreme Court case of that year, Citizens United vs FEC. (In reading the following precís be aware that I am not a lawyer; don’t hesitate to correct any errors in the comments. Also, here is a good in-depth explainer.)

Historically, corporations, unions, and advocacy organizations were not allowed to give money directly to candidates or ballot issues because they were not individuals entitled to vote and because the nation has a history of deep-pocketed organizations corruptly buying candidates.

Campaign finance reform, taking the form of limits placed on individual gifts to candidates and public financing of campaigns, dates from the early 1970s, in response to abuses by Richard Nixon. Keeping corporate wealth out of elections was a given until the deregulatory agenda of an increasingly conservative Supreme Court began chipping away at the guardrails that kept out corporate cash.

A 1976 case called Buckley v. Valeo cracked opened the door. The decision launched the then-novel idea that spending money on behalf of candidates is speech. Restraining the speech of corporations “necessarily reduces the quantity of expression,” the decision states, “by restricting the number of issues discussed, the depth of their exploration, and the size of the audience reached.” On this basis, the ban on corporate speech was overturned.

Corporate campaign speech could be constrained to avoid the appearance or reality of buying influence or favors from candidates, the court argued, by requiring the spending to be independent, “money that does not go directly to a candidate or party.”

In 2010 Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote this in his majority Citizens United opinion:

It is inconceivable that companies and organizations would be willing to plunk down vast sums out of the goodness of their hearts.

As The Guardian writes:

Issues and candidates lacking deep pockets cannot reach audiences if they are overwhelmed by expensive ad campaigns and news outlets captured by people with both great wealth and political agendas. Citizens United hatched Super PACs, the “dark money” entities that don’t have to disclose their donors identities.

Kennedy also wrote this:

Oh, really?

Most of us wonder if a modest campaign contribution is actually meaningful. Does our vote make a difference? Is volunteering for a candidate, knocking on doors, or joining an activist group hopeless in the face of special interests relentlessly pounding their messages home on every platform—when they haven’t bought the politicians, platforms, or outlets outright?

Everyone can see the way politicians of both parties are afraid to work against corporate interests because they need the cash to combat politicians captured by other corporate sponsors. Elections too often are just battles of “our” billionaires against “their” billionaires.

In spite of the brazen abuse of campaign giving, the Supreme Court is in no mood to revisit Citizens United. Indeed it is looking at a case now that would permit corporations to cooperate directly with campaigns, enabling even greater abuse.

What can to be done?

Given the nature of the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future, a Constitutional Amendment would seem to be necessary to bring some discipline to election spending. Overturning Citizens United is deemed a fool’s errand, though, because so many interests would be willing to spend vast sums to stamp out the movement.

Also, prominent reformers reject the constitutional amendment route, most notably the American Civil Liberties Union, which sees any attempt to limit expenditures by unions, corporations and nonprofits (including ACLU and similar advocacy groups) as an unconstitutional constraint on free speech.

An amendment is not the only avenue to significant reform, however. The Guardian story referenced above offers a glimmer of hope that Citizens United can at least be tamed. A Maine ballot issue that will be voted on this fall attempts to overturn limits on Super PACs by showing that the “independent expenditure” requirement is a fig leaf, citing cases of politicians convicted of accepting quid pro quos for Super PAC contributions. It would create an opportunity for the court to backtrack on arguably its most destructive and unpopular recent decision.

There is another option, the “Corporate Power Reset” promoted by the Center for American Progress, and others. States, which wholly determine the ways in which corporations operate within their borders, can rewrite their charters to prohibit corporations from directly or indirectly engaging in election or ballot-issue activity.

I can’t speak to the viability of this idea in constitutional or practical terms, but it is being tested in a ballot issue that will be decided in Montana this fall. That deeply conservative Republican Montana is taking on this task testifies to the broad appeal of campaign-finance reform. The support for the ballot issue is understandable when you consider that Montana was treated for decades as a wholly owned subsidiary of mining interests, the dominant economic engine of the state. The ballot issue is intended to stave off a return of that indentured status.

Coalescing passion

While all this speaks to the urgency of the issue, the phrase “campaign finance reform” is insufficient to coalesce people into a passionate force for change. Reducing the power of great wealth in elections can stir people if advocates and candidates relentlessly remind us of all the ways big-money electioneering stunts our lives: Pharma doesn’t want price controls on drugs. Oil and gas have bought themselves out of pollution controls. Big tech will pay to get anti-monopolists off its back. Real estate wants to keep tax advantages that give predatory investors the ability to outbid families trying to buy a home for shelter. The list goes on, and it can be tailored to various aggrieved audiences.

Candidates can make compelling arguments by connecting key reforms to abuses voters can relate to.

• Organizations and corporations that want to spend to support candidates and ballot issues should have to comply with the same modest spending limits that apply to individuals, typically $5,000 per candidate or election.

• If large donations are allowed, donors must be clearly identified.

• The contributions of organizations, as opposed to individuals, must continue to be “independent” expenditures to minimize corrupt influence buying

• The supposed “social welfare” mission of nonprofit organizations that comprise Political Action Committees must be tightly defined to avoid shell organizations.

• Establish more robust, independent and effective means of policing electioneering abuses (replacing the feckless Federal Election Commission for example).

• Offer public financing of campaigns for candidates who decline to accept money from outside interests and large donors.

Another plus: Showing a groundswell of resistance to the abuses Citizens United has unleashed, may cause the Supreme Court to rethink this and other decisions that have been so brazenly friendly to the powerful. So bring on the constitutional amendment! Bring on the court cases and ballot issues! In this way America takes back its future.

This is a revise of an earlier post on this subject, which has taken on more urgency than ever.

With Trump Administration missteps allowing Iran to control the strait of Hormuz—the globe’s fossil-fuel superhighway—the world may be looking at medium or long-term interruption of oil supplies. Energy hysteria is rising along with prices at the pump. We went through this when Russia invaded Ukraine and sanctions scrambled the oil and gas supply chain. Trump illegally took over Venezuela’s oil infrastructure pursuant to his inexplicable and irrational embrace of empire. What does he have to show for it? Certainly nothing of help in this rapidly developing quagmire

Trump has taken Iran’s support of bad actors around the world and turned it into a bombing campaign justified to allow the U.S. to “take” Iran’s oil, while somehow inducing a popular uprising and destroying its nuclear capacity. Thus military adventurism has rapidly turned into a fiasco that has unnecessarily but perhaps inevitably (given who is in charge) turned into a global oil crisis, the likes of which we have not seen since the 1970s.

The emergency Trump created demands the pumping of more oil, he and the fossil-fuel apologists say, whatever the effect on the oceans and Alaska’s wildernesses. And switch on those costly, smoke-billowing coal plants!

Trump’s choices (and urging from Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu) have induced Asian countries starved of Middle Eastern oil to restart obsolete coal plants—but also induced them to take immediate efficiency steps like shortening showers, restricting driving, supporting greater work from home, shifting appliance use to off hours, and setting air conditioners at warmer settings. It is notable that China suffers little in the current crisis because it has doubled down on efficiency, solar, and electric cars.

Has Trump asked Americans to take such actions to drive prices down? He has not. Nor has he backed off his efforts to kill electric cars, solar projects and $25 billion in offshore wind-energy investment just as electrical demand from data centers is exploding and ratepayers are gobsmacked by spiking bills.

Will America never learn that embracing a high-cost, high-polluting fossil-fuel future is catastrophic?

Low hanging fruit

Rather than permitting our collective heads to explode, let’s focus on one urgent question: Why aren’t we talking more about reducing demand for energy?

Reducing energy is boring, maybe, hard to get one’s arms around because it involves so many things. Stick with me, please. Efficiency has been doing the hard work of bending the energy-demand curve downward for decades, whether it’s better insulated homes, Energy Star appliances, better lightbulbs, or hybrid cars that get 50 MPG.

Too few people are aware that improved efficiency in buildings has kept electrical demand flat for almost two decades even as the population and the economy grew considerably. Focusing on buildings has paid off because they are responsible for about one third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and 75 percent of electrical demand.

The political and pundit classes obsess over solar and wind, but generation from these renewables only began substantially displacing fossil fuels in the last few years. As someone who has analyzed and written about energy efficiency for years I recognize that for most people cutting energy use sounds like a penance, unlikely to spur sparkling conversation around the water cooler. Fossil-fuel interests depict efficiency as a lifestyle deprivation, a long-obsolete argument that has been internalized by pundits and politicians even as benefits multiply and technologies steadily improve.

Unlike gridlocked Congress, many states and cities remain committed to reducing power demand not only to save money but to address climate-induced catastrophes. Efficiency remains energy’s low-hanging fruit.

Mythical benefits of “energy independence”

Reducing demand does more than reduce pollution, power bills, and greenhouse-gas emissions. Unlike solar and wind, It is constant, not intermittent. Politicians have supported the expansion of oil and gas refining to secure alleged “energy independence.” That goal has been met; the U.S. is the world’s largest producer.

Yet the strategy has failed to free the U.S. from spiking gasoline prices when geopolitical turmoil creates oil supply crises. We’re now in the second such episode in just four years. If price gyration wrecks your family budget, it’s time to take efficiency seriously: buy the hybrid or electric vehicle, slow down, try to take the bus, scour the house for affordable energy upgrades.

Efficiency allows users to thumb their noses at fossil-fuel oligarchs, predators, and authoritarians—including those who have bought for-sale politicians.

Innovative building efficiency techniques are multiplying in spite of their lack of political sex appeal. LED lighting is now a no-brainer because its flexibility and cost advantages are irresistible. Insulation and high-performing windows are getting better while coming down in price. Improved heating and air-conditioning tech—like advanced heat pumps—lowers energy bills every month. Appliances cost less to run thanks to the Energy Star program the Trump Administration has attempted to kill. Innovation is allowing the building sector to rapidly “decarbonize” (i.e., reduce CO2 emissions) while adding such benefits as greater comfort and better access to daylight and fresh air.

Reduced energy demand by buildings makes room in the transmission grid for increased use of electricity by cars as well as the voracious appetite for power from metastasizing data centers serving the heedless growth of AI and that criminal bastion, crypto. There’s lots of room for rapid improvement.

Zero energy buildings are now

With a mix of efficiency and renewables, almost all new buildings could use essentially no electricity (called net zero) by 2030, Lindsay Baker, the CEO of the Seattle-based International Living Futures Institute, told me. The Institute runs the Living Building Challenge, a rigorous certification program that has pushed the construction industry to achieve energy-use reductions deemed all but impossible a few years ago. “Acting at scale is so eminently possible,” she says.

If efficiency is so effective why does it not get more respect? It has a marketing problem, for one. Reducing energy use is not easy to talk about because it is not a singular, sweeping solution that lazy pundits embrace, or that media—always searching for the next shiny object—obsesses about. The sprawling green economy lacks well-organized and funded interest groups. Instead it involves dozens of products and players putting structures together in a variety of ways: architects, engineers, lighting, mechanical systems, glass, insulation, and controls, among others.

Architects and engineers choose efficiency tactics to suit America’s widely varying climate, hydrology, and geography. This is a feature, not a bug. Thus, the architecture firm Miller Hull and the mechanical and electrical engineer PAE relied almost entirely on demand reduction in the design of the Bullitt Center. It’s a 2013 office building that has been influential in demonstrating how to achieve net-zero energy since its solar array could harvest few kilowatts from Seattle’s eternal cloud cover. Among many innovative tactics, oversized triple-glazed windows draw daylight in, while keeping warmth in and undesired heat out.

The same team brought its low-energy acumen to the Kendeda Building for Innovative and Sustainable Design at Georgia Tech. Working with local architect Lord Aeck Sargent the building bears little resemblance to Bullitt because it is attuned to Atlanta’s heat and humidity. It features a huge overhanging roof that deflects unwanted solar heat, as well as providing convivial shade in the Southern porch tradition. The design includes many tactics that reduce energy but the broad roof also hosts a massive solar array, producing 120 percent of the energy the building consumes.

Efficiency creates economic flywheels

Some regions adeptly harvest the economic advantages of green building innovation. Bullitt demonstrated the advantages of “mass timber” (wood strands glued together to form engineered columns, beams, and panels for walls and floors that replace environmentally damaging steel and concrete). This new kind of wood has become the biggest excitement in forest products since plywood. Mass timber elements were also used at Kendeda, and helped draw the attention of Southern yellow-pine producers, which have since built mass-timber manufacturing plants.

Kendeda also grew the market for Big Ass Fans, of Lexington, Kentucky, by using the industrial product instead of a tangle of ductwork to temper Atlanta’s high summer humidity. Shuco, the German manufacturer of the highly insulating windows used at Bullitt, brought its advanced manufacturing expertise to a Seattle-area window company.

Thus the variety of energy-reducing opportunities in buildings spurs economic flywheel effects as green entrepreneurs learn from each other and hatch alliances and new companies. That is one of the overlooked beauties of efficiency.

In the Midwest and Northeast, where cold-weather heating demand is high, an energy regime imported from Europe called Passive House relies on very high levels of insulation and air sealing, with 75 percent energy-use reductions readily achieved. These buildings provide draft-free comfort and quiet along with their rock-bottom operating costs. The immediate utility-bill savings have been embraced by affordable-housing developers because they stretch the tenant subsidies they receive.

Passive house was pioneered in the U.S. for single-family houses, but now is built at large scale, such as in the full-block Sendero Verde development, in East Harlem, that includes 709 apartments serving tenants earning a range of incomes in three structures, one of which rises to 34 stories

America reaps too few of the economic benefits of efficiency because the majority of green building products are manufactured in countries that have consistently supported robust low-energy technologies—Germany, Japan, Korea, and increasingly China, according to Floris Keverling Buisman, CEO of 475 Performance Building Supply, a green building-tech specialist. The U.S. has let its once-formidable leadership in lighting, glass, glazing, and insulation languish over decades.

America is reshoring some capacity—no thanks to Congress or the current administration. Miller Hull (of Seattle) and PAE (Portland, Oregon) are just two firms in a cluster of green-building architects and engineers (including the U.S. beachheads of some European experts) that is growing in West Coast cities. Passive House has nurtured low-energy design and construction expertise from Boston to Minneapolis.

Colorado offers incentives to modular builders, who can deliver high quality energy-efficient construction in quantity at competitive cost. “Weatherization,” a catch-all term for improving efficiency in drafty old houses, can be more effectively incentivized to improve the most wasteful older homes, in the process strengthening the poorest communities and the most needy regions.

We are supposed to be dazzled by hydrogen as a fuel, the resuscitation of nuclear fission, the development of nuclear fusion, the cramming of carbon into the ground, or the chemical seeding of clouds (in service to the arrogant goal of engineering the world’s climate)—all touted as energy cure-alls that people who find efficiency dull insist require an enormous Manhattan-project effort.

These visionary technologies could be transformative but each comes with its own costs and requires its own suite of incentives and regulations. Each comes with downsides that need to be thoroughly understood and accounted for. Only then can viable visionary energy tech go mainstream.

Efficiency is now, it’s proven, and its ready to do the job. Time to give it its due.

Update as of March 31, 2026. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon has ordered a halt to the East Wing ballroom project, writing that the plaintiffs, which are led by historic preservation groups, would likely succeed in the injunction they sought to require the project to obtain Congressional approval (which has not been sought) and additional signoffs that apply in Washington’s monumental core, which include The National Capital Planning Commission (which had set a final vote for this Thursday April 2nd) and the Commission on Fine Arts, which had waved the project through.

Adding more confusion to the rushed project, Trump yesterday showed off printed renderings showing changes to the project hastily made after the New York Times pointed out several ill-conceived aspects of the project including moving a grand stairway attached to the massive portico on the south side that served no purpose. (Most of the problems the Times pointed out are discussed in my earlier posts about the ballroom, here and here.) The Judge’s decision may well be appealed but since Trump has significantly altered the design it must be resubmitted to the two commissions no matter what.

The screening facility discussed in this post is not officially connected to the court case but its main reason for being was to serve the East Wing, so it can be considered to be in limbo.

The National Capital Planning Commission is set to vote on whether to approve Donald Trump’s garishly oversized White House ballroom project on April 2. The NCPC, with the Commission on Fine Arts, is supposed to act as a gate keeper so that Washington, D.C.’s National Mall is not littered with frivolous structures or passion-of-the-moment monuments.

Trump has stacked both commissions with sycophants lacking expertise who are supposed to green-light his obsessions unquestioningly. The expectation is that the Commission will approve the bloated ballroom though comments running close to 100 percent negative may give it pause. A Federal judge has said he will decide whether the ballroom is illegal and should be stopped by the end of March—two days from now. It won’t be a dull week.

Also on the agenda for the NCPC meeting is another blight Donald Trump is inflicting on the White House environs that has drawn far less attention—a visitor screening facility. The nation and the White House deserve a rationalized and welcoming yet secure entry for visitors. For too long people have passed through a sad tent shelter and gaggle of bedraggled trailers near the former East Wing entrance on East Executive Avenue, the street that divides the White House from the Treasury building.

Unfortunately, AECOM, the engineering and construction giant hired to design the facility in a secret process has produce a proposal that is bafflingly lazy, utilitarian, and unwelcoming. Nevertheless it will be expensive because it is to be built bunkerlike underground. At 33,000 square feet it is two thirds the size of the White House. (No cost has been offered, nor has the White House asked Congress for the money). This entrance would be embarrassing for a detention center, let alone among the most important and symbolic buildings in Washington.

Have a look at the documents the Commission is examining and offer you own opinion. The NCPC invites public input but the project has not as yet attracted many comments. NCPC makes it pretty easy (I’ve added mine), though the comment period closes on April 1.

A separate security-screening facility is considered good practice for structures that need high security, but the proposed facility is hardly better than the embarrassing temporary structures it is supposed to supplant.

The structure is supposed to be dug beneath the monument to the Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman, but its entrance pit design is heedless of the Beaux Arts symmetry of the monument. A ramp descending to the screening facility’s underground entrance collides at a street corner with a diagonal walkway that leads to the Tecumseh statue. The entry also entangles itself with the security barriers that block E Street. If the selected location is necessary (I’m not convinced) then the design must clearly separate pedestrian paths and architecturally draw the monument and entrance together.

Mature trees that ring the monument and frame view corridors will have to be sacrificed because the roof of the screening facility extends beneath more than half of the monument’s landscape. The proposal does not include enough soil above the roof to accommodate roots from large trees. The restored landscape would still be pockmarked with essential protrusions (stairs, vents, maybe an elevator shaft) that are likely to be more intrusive than they are shown to be on drawings.

The security perimeter perimeter around the White House has long been a disgrace. Everywhere there is a tangle of fences, bollards, truck-crash barriers, concrete Jersey Barriers, flimsy parade barriers, and vehicles parked and positioned willy nilly.

(Trump’s people have added to the chaos by shutting off public access to both Lafayette Park to the North and the massive ellipse to the South. It’s unclear how much or how long these closures will be continued.)

Law enforcement always defaults to greater fortification if the instinct is not tempered by conferring with the affected takeholders. Insightful designers can work with the Secret Service and other agencies to recognize the dignity and significance of the place and efficiently welcome people without compromising security.

The White House says it intends to improve the security perimeter at some future date, a welcome commitment, but the design should be prepared in concert with the screening facility—which is an essential component. Lacking that comprehensive focus, the security-perimeter design at the visitor screening facility site is incomplete, partly to do with drawings that don’t clearly demarcate areas accessible to the public from those that are secured. In the proposed design some barrier or fence will have to be placed on the western side of the Sherman monument, but none is shown likely because it will be intrusive and block views of the White House.

The design of the facility itself deserves greater scrutiny. The inexplicable curving walls that line the entry pit do not salvage it. It’s intended to serve tours and events including those at the massive ballroom, but its hard to imagine the White House would subject VIPs to a process that’s hardly better than the sagging tents and trailers now used.

The drawings are vague but suggest a ramp downward to the structure’s entrance with perhaps a stairway. (There’s got to be a safe emergency exit somewhere.) It does not look like there is enough space for queuing and the preliminary ID check. The entry is not weather protected. The (maybe?) ramp does not look long enough to meet the standard of the Americans for Disability Act. If that is the case, an elevator would be needed but none is shown.

There are no interior renderings but the process is described as subjecting visitors to two ID checks, a primary screening. A secondary screening would takes place in a space large enough to accommodate seven lanes—enough to serve a decent sized airport. This strikes me as overkill but I would not presume to second guess the Secret Service. Others with greater knowledge should carefully scrutinize the wisdom of such an extended and invasive process.

The design offers no architectural grace notes (such as access to daylight) to allay the bleakness of this block-and-a-half-long tunnel nor any interpretive gesture that might build some anticipation. Those who survive the screening are directed to scuttle through a winding hallway to an escalator (no proper emergency exit or disability accommodation shown) that culminates in a 4,000-square-foot pavilion on East Executive Boulevard that is hardly less utilitarian than the existing tents.

The design is a shockingly amateur effort by what may be the largest architecture/engineering/construction and consulting firm based in the U.S. Since it employs 51,000 people in dozens of countries why could the firm not do better than this? If the White House had undertaken an open qualifications-based process for selecting a design team this fiasco could have been avoided.

Both the Commission on Fine Arts and the NCPC rose briefly from their somnolence to ask for a less grim design. Unfortunately the commission lack expertise in architecture, landscape architecture or urban design and so members apparently think Classical details will be enough to “match” the bloated grandiosity of the ballroom wing. They will have little luck finding precedents for security checkpoints that use fluted columns and sculpture-filled entablatures.

In a horrific time for the arts—with declines in public participation, shifting philanthropic and government-funding priorities, and attacks from right-wing ideologues—it is paradoxically a big moment for museum and cultural buildings. Pandemic-induced delays have stacked up projects that had already taken years to realize. Culture buildings are costly enterprises and the new crop reflect deep institutional consideration of what their missions are and how to inclusively serve their communities.

I am periodically offering observations on these new structures, what they say about the state of architecture and the state of the larger culture. (I wrote about the Studio Museum in Harlem here and the Princeton University Art Museum here.) Spoiler: they mainly are cause for optimism if not rejoicing.

The New New Museum

I found the New Museum’s first freestanding building rather too antiseptic in a 2007 review for Bloomberg News. (The non-collecting contemporary art museum has moved and grown seven times since its founding in 1977.)

That building’s design, by the Japanese architect SANAA, stacks boxy, opaque forms that shift horizontally. The assemblage draws a jagged, snow-white silhouette against the sky. Its bristling metal-mesh cladding suggests a defensive stance toward the dingy mix of late 19th and early 20th-century commercial buildings that line the Bowery in Manhattan. A changing artwork hung from the exterior has done the work of inviting-in the public, as does a glassy full-width storefront lobby.

The New Museum has over-performed, however, becoming central to New York’s art ecosystem even with just three gallery suites on three levels that enclose a modest 10,000 square feet.

Now it’s gained an addition that doubles its size, with its design led by Shohei Shigematsu, a New York-based partner at Rotterdam-headquartered OMA, founded by Rem Koolhaas, who is also credited.

When I looked at renderings before construction, I saw busy architectural posturing—an off-kilter recessed wedge, and a scattering of diagonals that would detract from SANAA’s original and looked to irritate art mavens who want nothing to come between them and the experience of art.

Koolhaas, now 81, in his heyday was fond of inverting received building-design wisdom, pulling institution-challenging architectural rabbits out of a hat. That act got stale and the firm’s profile is now more diffuse, with partners like Shigematsu striking out on their own even as they remain tied to the Rotterdam mother ship.

I am pleased to report that Shigematsu and Koolhaas have paid close attention to what the New Museum actually needed and have produced a new structure possessing an appealing presence of its own while complementing the existing building, if depriving it of a bit of its stoic singularity. The apparently trivializing geometric gestures turn out to have everything to do with problem-solving that let’s curator think expansively while giving visitors pleasure.

The glass facade sandwiches an exceedingly fine metal scrim that lends a translucence that uncannily matches SANAA’s metal mesh. The glass wall folds diagonally inward to form a welcome outdoor niche for commissioned sculpture (a placement is to come) and allowed the architects to peel away much of the shared side wall at the lobby level in favor of floor-to-ceiling glass. It now glows with daylight spilling in from two sides. A bonus: viewed across the niche from the lobby the new facade reflects movement from the street, like a tilted film strip running constantly. The lobby, otherwise little changed, is incalculably enhanced.

Global Art Casbah

But let me not bury the lede: The New Museum opens the combined structures with its immensely ambitious and provocative (in the best sense) “New Humans: Memories of the Future,” a casbah of global art that reminds us that artists everywhere are trying to make sense of a world determined to be crazily nonsensical if not deadly, with distant, often predatory forces both transforming and exploiting cities and individuals, creating both misery and opportunity for millions.

the exhibition begins at the scale of the global city (assuming the visitor heads to the top gallery floor—of three—and moves downward), confronting the viewer with Arata Isozaki’s aptly titled “Reruined Hiroshima.” Adjacent are hung dozens of ink-line pages of Hariton Pushwagner’s “Soft City” a graphic novel from 1975 inspired by social critiques of interchangeable corporate workers, that includes skyscrapers crammed with anonomous figures hemmed in by antlike hordes of vehicles.

Contrasting these dystopian visions is “Ville Fantome [Ghost City],” by Bodys Isek Kingelez that presents new cities as a playscape—with an undertone of globalist skepticism. Above floats a cheerful balloon, “In Love with the World,” by Anicka Yi, with electromechanical appendages that evoke both the wonder of human-made things that fly and a forbidding emblem of universal surveillance.

These contrast with the subject of most of the exhibition, the human body (even as the media ranges from paintings to high-tech animations and industrial components assembled to look like mechanical people). With high ambition, and arguably trying to do too much, the displays address the myriad ways artists embrace, despise, and create their own visions of rapid scientific, medical, and technological change.

There’s a “Hall of Robots” that range from the horrifying to the goofy. A lot of bodies and body parts are depicted in extremis, some occasionally in grace.

Prosthetic Esthetics

Should the visitor enter on the lowest gallery floor first, they will see how the exhibit’s lens includes the miniature (going literally inside the womb with photos by Lennart Nilsson from 1965) in a theme called Reproductive Futures. It doesn’t get more primordial than that. The curatorial concerns open out as the visitor ascends, introducing provocative themes such as Mechanical Ballets, Prosthetic Gods, Automatic Women, and Post Apocalyptic Creatures.

The exhibition is both prospective and retrospective—enriching the sometimes opaque obsessions of contemporary works with items made (mainly) across the last 100 years, with glances at early modernist movements. It was overwhelming to someone like me, not an art expert, yet I kept being stimulated by the curatorial juxtapositions.

This virtuosic show also demonstrates the versatility of the new galleries. The new spaces, appealingly proportioned neutral boxes, blend seamlessly with the existing ones. The design encourages visitors to move up and down the building via a new elevator bank and and a spectacular stairway that are physically separated from the gallery suites—fixing the worst aspect of the older building, where elevators dumped people distractingly into the middle of exhibits.

The stairway coils around a narrow atrium, a kaleidoscope of angled planes and triangulated facets as it runs behind the building’s facade, capturing daylight (regrettably unavailable in the new galleries and little used in the original ones) and filtering it through translucent green glass panels set within the balustrades and accented by dancing rows of strip lighting. A wooly pelt by Czech artist Klára Hosnedlová, woven out of a variety of fabrics and ropes, dangles three stories within the atrium. Its slightly repellent texture reminded me of horsehair sticking out of a derelict chair.

The stairway zigzags upward to the top three floors, which tip backward to form a crystalline attic of angled glass planes that houses resident artists and a think-tankish incubator called NEW INC. These are the kinds of facilities museums are finding essential to to keep themselves fresh and tuned into the concerns of young and more diverse visitors. The ideologues may yell “woke!” But museums see these activities as essential to continued community relevance.

A diminutive terraced auditorium clambers from one level to the next, leading to a top-floor reception area linked to a similar room within the existing building, both of which also offer panoramas across the jumbled roofscape of the Lower East Side.

The architects’ careful balancing of bravura and deference along with the extraordinary inaugural exhibition salute the acumen and unwavering focus of Lisa Philips, who has headed the New for 27 years and helped it stay essential to New York’s cultural life. This is her swan song as she has announced her departure.

Multi-floor Museums Struggle

It is an accomplishment that is all the more remarkable for its contrast with the uphill battles fought by other modestly sized urban museums spanning multiple floors in New York. The American Folk Art Museum in Midtown folded, then was demolished as the Museum of Modern Art expanded. Huntington Hartford’s 1964 Gallery of Modern Art, a faux Venetian palace on Columbus Circle could not survive as a spiral of tiny display areas. Architect Brad Cloepful of Allied works resuscitated the building as the Museum of Art and Design by simplifying its layout and tearing off its kitsch exterior. Sadly, MAD seems to have lost focus and struggles. The Ruben Museum, with a luscious collection Himalayan Art, closed its multi-floor museum in a converted department store in 2024.

Two recent major museum buildings went to great and expensive pains to keep all the gallery spaces on a single level: The Princeton University Art Museum (which blew me away) and the Los Angeles County Museum of art that reopens next month in an amoeboid new home that floats across Wilshire Boulevard .

Small institutions must have a riveting vision relentlessly pursued in a suitable work of architecture to compete in a city with a vast number of attractions. Give the new New a visit and hope that it finds a leader with the acumen to perpetuate and evolve Phillips’ vision.

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While drones and rockets duel in the Middle East, the way is clearing for President Trump to proceed with his extravagant $400-million ballroom addition to the White House. To avoid the wrath of a federal judge, who has not yet stopped Donald Trump from proceeding with the project, the administration is taking the design through what should be a rigorous review process but which has become pro forma. If nothing else, the pubic meetings give the public a closer look and a clearer view of the degree to which this secretive project vandalizes the President’s house and the 225-year old landscape within which it sits.

The U. S. Commission on Fine Arts, was founded to defend the cultural integrity of Washinton’s Monumental Core, but its members (newly installed by Trump), lack expertise but have pledged their fealty to the President. They shirked their responsibility by waving it through rather than subjecting it to the scrutiny such an important alteration demands. After a meeting March 5, the National Capital Planning Commission, which had recommended proceeding with the project just days ago, delayed final approval to April 2, after receiving 35,000 overwhelmingly negative comments—and numerous in-person statements—an unprecedented rejection.

This column updates earlier posts here and here that looked at the symbolic and historic significance of the White House. With greater details of the design presented, it is revealed to be even more garishly inappropriate.

Constrained by Classicism

The commissions responsible for guarding the integrity of the White House and National Mall have seen presentations that belatedly include views akin to those experienced by passersby and White House visitors.

The closer the view get, the worse the wing looks. A rendering of the entire north side of the complex by architect Shalom Baranes Associates can’t hide how the hulking addition crowds the original building, depriving it of its primacy. (The images should have been paired with views made before the East wing demolition, but we are free to conclude that they are damning.) The wing does not esthetically fortify the original White House. It just sits there like a lump.

Seen from Pennsylvania Avenue, on the Southeast, the new wing’s bulk juts so far into President’s Park that it extends from behind the Treasury building to block the view of the main house—the focus of a vista along Pennsylvania Avenue all the way from the Capitol. It was conceived by the original planner of Washington, Pierre L’Enfant in 1791 to express both the separation and the connection of the executive and legislative branches.

The massing and architectural treatment of the new East Wing loom as large as the intimidating Treasury building across the street (although the peaked pediment shown on the East Wing (bottom image, below, has been removed). Additional renderings that include the Treasury building and the Old Executive Office Building to the West show how deferential the West Wing and former East Wing were to Hoban’s original building.

Baranes has stuck two grandiose porticos on the building. One faces East toward the Treasury, where it marks the entrance to the wing that is perhaps intentionally intimidating, even as its gratuitous nature is revealed by the dinky gates and an entry stairway that is not small but looks piddling compared to the eight mighty columns. (Somehow the North Portico, dating from the early 1800s, is perfectly gracious and welcoming with only four columns.)

Which raises thorny unaddressed issues of parking, security screening, and drop-offs when hundreds of vehicles for guests, staff, security—even motorcades—arrive and depart in short windows of time. Vehicular movement around the White House is already severely congested and additional parking capacity non-existent. Unlike the demolished wing, the proposal includes little space for people to queue and the hefty portico offers next to no weather protection. The security-screening process has not been figured out yet.

And what the hell are all those monumental exterior stairways doing on a 21st century building? They are an impediment to all, which is why they are almost never found as entrances to modern public buildings. (Don’t get me started on the pathetic wheelchair ramp.)

Mixing Classicist metaphors

The answer, of course, is the dogged historicism, which entraps Baranes in such Classicist devices that have wisely been discarded by almost all new public buildings.

An even more bloated portico—more massive than the Treasury’s intimidating version—has been adhered to the South end of the wing in spite of bearing no relationship to anything else on the building. One would think this grandiosity would be signaling the main entrance. But no, the entirety of its Corinthian pageantry is devoted to framing . . . an emergency-exit stair. Baranes was forced to admit under questioning from the only independent Fine Arts commissioner that it is gratuitous.

Instead of a coherent, elegant and welcoming composition, the new wing has been assembled from the Classicist parts bin—and looks it. An onlooker encountering the wing for the first time may wonder if this architectural camel is a courthouse or some other faceless institution that must strut its self-important stuff. It deprives the White House of its residential character.

No objective analysis has yet justified the capacity of the ballroom that is responsible for the overweening size of the wing—now almost three times the seat count of past state dinners. Nor, judging from renderings, is the ballroom divisible, which would mean typical gatherings of 200 or 300 would feel puny in such a gargantuan space. How is this not a white elephant?

Using and misusing the landscape

By pushing so far into President’s Park, the proposed wing distorts a looping park path integral to the conception of President’s Park, reflecting the thoughtless approach to the historic setting of the White House. In 1791, Pierre L’Enfant mapped out the park as the culmination of a swath of greenery that flowed to the White House from the National Mall, a design that has been refined by legendary landscape designers Andrew Jackson Downing in 1851 and the Olmsted brothers in 1935, framing the the long vista with groupings of large trees in a Romantic English garden style.

All that mature greenery is used by Baranes to assure the Commissioners that the new wing would not visually dominate the White House because it would be obscured from both the south and the north by the mature trees that have so far escaped the Administration’s chain saws. Will Trump put up with hiding his vulgar creation?

Historically, the east and west colonnades and wings of the White House wrapped intimate formal gardens as a graceful transition from the grand scale of the park to the domestic scale of the residence. The Rose Garden recently had its lawn paved over; the Jacqueline Kennedy Garden was obliterated to make room for the new Ballroom.

The new design offers no graceful integration of the landscape with the residence. There is some meager formal planting by the landscape architect MPFP that ignores the historic context yet is far too fussy to stand up to, or soften, the mass of the new wing.

Legal Red Flags

Is this juggernaut unstoppable? Historic preservation advocates sued to halt the project, but Federal Judge Richard J. Leon allowed the work to continue in a February 26 ruling. He invited plaintiffs to focus their arguments on the legality of undertaking such a significant project using private funds, calling the scheme “a Rube Goldberg machine.”

That might include violations of the Antideficiency Act, which restricts government agencies from accepting private funds without explicit authorization from Congress. The statute’s purpose is to prevent people from buying influence through such donations. The purchase of Presidential face time is precisely what is going on, of course, and the apparent quid pro quos have flowed freely. Companies have donated millions and are applying for (or already holding) billions in government contracts, include Palantir and Amazon. Others, including Meta and Google, are seeking regulatory or legal relief from the government.

After the project received substantial donations from the tech giants, for example, Trump has acceded to their desire to let AI development proceed without any government guardrails whatever, in spite of the enormous risks to the public of unfettered misuse, criminality, and cyber attacks. Whether such corruption could be tried in court or proven is yet unknown; the Justice Department, wholly operated for the benefit of the Trump Administration rather than the American people, isn’t interested in investigating.

There are questions about the role of the nonprofit Trust for the National Mall, a charitable group that partners with the National Park Service. It raises money and advocates for the preservation of the Mall’s irreplaceable heritage, but has been turned into a conveyance for donations to the ballroom project in a so-far untransparent process—meaning funds could be diverted undisclosed for the President’s personal use. Should the Trust be supporting this vanity extravaganza, especially as it has meant defiling the White House and President’s Park? Should it be a party to the pay-to-play influence-buying? Doesn’t this sordid scheme also implicate the National Park Service?

The National Trust for Historic Preservation has refiled its complaint. Unless the NCPC slows or halts the project given widespread popular revulsion, the project’s fate may well lie with Judge Leon.

A strange new choreography seen in countless videos has riveted eyeballs around the world as ostentatiously armed and masked federal immigration agents break down doors or haul people out of cars. In Minneapolis, flocks of activist observers holding mobile phones high over their heads swoop in, alerting neighbors with shrill whistles and filling the otherwise quiet streets with shouts of “ICE out!”

Cities, suburbs, and small towns across the country targeted by the Department of Homeland Security have virulently rejected the Trump administration’s mass deportation program. A remarkable aspect of Minnesota’s resistance is not only the willingness to endure violence and arrest, it is the effectiveness of an extraordinary mutual-aid network that support it, largely behind-the-scenes.

That activism and those networks vanquished the invasion. On February 12 the White House border tsar announced the end of the surge, which began in December,

The appalling size of the militarized immigration roundup, it’s ever-shifting and dubious intentions, and its deliberate aggressiveness and brutality spurred the rapid assembly and coordination of a volunteer infrastructure that supports targeted neighborhoods and people. “It was a mistake to pick the Twin Cities, “ said Thomas Fisher in an interview. He is the Director of the Minnesota Design Center at the University of Minnesota’s architecture school, “We have ways to fight back they didn’t get.” (His comments are his own, and not necessarily the views of the University of Minnesota.)

Volunteers began standing on street corners, watching for ICE activity and alerting neighbors to its presence with shrill whistles. Activist cadres arrive, organized via Signal chats.

With targeted people fearing drive-by detentions, a massive effort to keep those families fed has grown. Volunteers ferry children to school, and adults to jobs so that they are not snatched on the street. Teachers support frightened and confused children in the schools.

Fisher, shared a list of resources that the Design Center has compiled and regularly updates. “It shows the size and scope of the community networks here,” he explained. Across 17 categories it includes some 200 aid groups as well as on-line and in-person resources that train and support activists, and help arrestees know their rights. There are groups offering legal assistance in multiple languages, access to rent and small-business support, and portals to report illegal behavior by Border Patrol and ICE agents.

More than 60 food stores, food pantries, coffee shops and delis accept food donations and coordinate volunteers to contact needy families and deliver groceries to them. Restaurants run by immigrants and Somali refugees are listed so that people can support them through their patronage.

There are links to connect those who wish to donate to assist people who have been forcibly detained and deported, including GoFundMe accounts for the families of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, both gratuitously shot by ICE agents. Tow truck companies offer free return of vehicles abandoned when their drivers are detailed by ICE agents. (The MN50501 Mutual Aid link includes many of these organizations.)

A mutual aid ethos

Mutual aid organizations are found everywhere, but the depth and speed with which Minnesota’s networks organized in response to the surge was not happenstance. It springs from a unique mutual-aid ethos endemic to the Twin Cities.

The masterminds of mass deportation probably felt that cities were weak and would readily cave when overwhelming militarized force was applied. It hasn’t worked out that way. The Twin Cities built this infrastructure so rapidly because it is a place with a specific, widely shared identity and an ethos that is worth defending. The resistance won tactical victories against overwhelming force, and it exposed the moral bankruptcy of the entire enterprise, melting national support for mass deportation.

Learning to build a mutual-aid infrastructure is increasingly important. It’s not just empowered authoritarians wielding limitless funds who may keep attacking cities. Economic volatility is not going away.

Climate-change effects are also delivering body blows to communities in the form of storms, floods, fires, droughts, and rising sea levels, as well as general weather volatility. (I write as a rare deep freeze in New York City threatens the vulnerable.) A resurgent right wing in Congress and the current administration supports the withdrawal of disaster recovery and rebuilding resources. More and more, communities are on their own.

“Minneapolis shows up”

Activists in the Twin Cities, imported tactics that succeeded in Chicago and Los Angeles, but the surge also revived activist and mutual aid organizations founded to help people during the Covid pandemic and to protest the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.

“Trump and his people argued that the agitators must all have been paid,” said Fisher. “How little they understood this culture. The last thing people here expect is to be paid for doing work in the community.”

Anyone who chooses to live in the Twin Cities, knows that a winter climate of treacherous blizzards and sub-zero temperatures is no joke. “There’s a willingness to help forged by knowing we are all at risk,” wrote Anna Marie Cox in The New Republic. Thus neighbors shovel snow off an elderly person’s driveway and stop and help rescue a car stuck in snow, since the occupants “could freeze to death,” said Fisher. Since everyone will sometime need assistance, people take pride in helping, knowing it will be returned in kind.

“This is what Minneapolis does: It shows up,” a shop owner told the New York Times. “I mean, we’ve done it for decades.” Historically, Minneapolis saw considerable immigration from Scandinavia, where the severe climate—as well as the Lutheran church’s emphasis on selflessly helping the needy—encouraged a solidarity, where cooperation and collaboration becomes the natural means of addressing challenges.

Exposing the brutality of mass deportations

Though DHS swamped the city with some 3,000 agents of ICE, the U.S. Border Patrol, and other agencies, phalanxes of observers—cell-phones held high—showed senseless indiscriminate violence being applied against ordinary people and those least able to defend themselves. Some images embedded themselves in the national consciousness: Liam Conejo Ramos (below right), the five year old boy with the Spiderman backpack sent to a grim detention center in Texas. A 56-year-old U.S citizen (below left) being hauled out of his house in his underwear.

But of course a high price was paid: Unforgettable video captured an ICE agent firing point blank into the driver’s side window of Rene Good’s car (she was a U.S. citizen), and the shooting of VA nurse Alex Pretti (also a citizen) as he lay prone and unmoving.

America came to realize that these are not the hardened criminals the administration claimed were being targeted, especially as officials brazenly lied about the actions of Pretti and Good when video evidence to the contrary could be—and was—accessed by anybody. The lies and the excessive and unnecessary violence undermined national political support for mass deportation—a signature program that helped Trump win election.

It may yet lead to the resignation of the shameless Kristi Noem, head of the Department of Homeland Security, and other officials. It could be a tipping point: the moment when the nation at last tuned into the Trump administration’s massive abuses of power.

How the Twin Cities won

It’s an extraordinary accomplishment by thousands of volunteers against the enormous resources the federal government threw into the battle it started with Minneapolis and some of its suburbs.

Can any city do this? The Twin Cities’ mutual aid infrastructure resonated with me because of work I had done for a book on Seattle’s distinctive value system, which is similar to that of the Twin Cities and sprang from similar roots. Seattle created effective mutual-aid organizations in times of extreme stress, such as a general strike that closed the city down in 1919 to protest mass layoffs after World War I. Seattle was particularly hard hit by the Great Depression but its famous “Hooverville” shack town devised its own self governance and barter economy (infuriating business interests), called a “Republic of the Penniless.” When Boeing went into a tailspin in 1970 leading to mass unemployment, volunteer-run food banks proliferated and community gardens blossomed with some of their production given away.

Minnesotans and people of the Midwest and Pacific Northwest tend to be politically liberal but are by other definitions conservative: they follow the rules; a certain probity is innate. They are not by nature cynical and they don’t game the system. These are people who move to the political left when the powerful push them up against a wall (which seems to be how most non-wealthy Americans feel these days). They expect honesty, decency, respect, and responsiveness from government. The DHS surge, along with its horrors, infuriated Minnesotans because it violated the social contract.

Mutual aid programs are often castigated as socialist or communistic—and they are often led by people with leftist viewpoints. Mutual aid is only ideological in its rejection of the kind of mindless individualism that rarely countenances collective action, such as strains of Christianity that recognize no obligation to aid the larger community.

Other cities are beloved and command loyalty in ways not found in urban places where no larger identity transcends the subdivisions and strip malls. Yet many lack the Minneapolis acumen.

Minneapolis offers a recipe for other cities under siege by an administration that possesses a special animus toward cities that don’t bend the knee. The ingredients: Find out what people need. Organize and volunteer. And connect organizations with each other to present a comprehensive, unified resistance. People who have felt helpless to defend America against a lawless, corrupt and vindictive administration now know what they can do.

The request to architects and builders competing to design the White House in the late 18th century asked for “a grandeur of conception, Republican simplicity, and … true elegance of proportion.” That simple phrase embodies tensions that have been debated since the building was occupied in 1800. The relative modesty—even austerity—of the White House in its original form as an Irish country house by architect James Hoban bespeaks the lack of wealth the nation possessed when it was completed in 1800, but also was symbolic of the role played by an executive elected by the populous who served at the pleasure of the voters. Having thrown off the shackles of monarchy, Americans had no desire to emulate the self-important extravagance of those empires’ seats of power.

There has always been pressure to enlarge the White House or make it grander as America gained in power and wealth and as the structure of government became more complex. Even relatively small changes have been controversial and deemed inappropriately extravagant, though. Deference to the modesty of the house’s early iterations has largely prevailed.

A president who treats the people who elected him as subjects who must pay fealty and obey him in all things is trying to will into existence a kingly seat of power. It’s just a ballroom, the minions argue, though the wing is about 1.75 times larger than the White House itself.

A speed walk through the White House’s architectural history shows just how disruptive this project actually is but also how it is a building block in the authoritarian edifice Trump and the radical-right elite is creating to turn his increasingly chaotic utterances into a new era of colonialist empire.

The White House was altered almost as soon as it was first occupied by John and Abigail Adams. The North Portico, a deep porch, was a welcoming addition to Hoban’s dour pile. The half-round South Porch gave the house its most distinctive feature, enriching the composition and its visibility across the vastness of The Ellipse and the National Mall. (Both of these were by Benjamin Henry Latrobe, at the urging of Thomas Jefferson, famously an architect as well as U.S. President.)

A low-roofed passageway held up by columns, called a colonnade, was extended both to the East and West. As conceived by Jefferson and executed by Latrobe, these additions concealed stables and other service structures and were meant to be subsidiary to the main house. As plantings grew in, they became almost invisible.

Charles McKim, of the legendary architecture firm McKim Mead & White, respected the recessive nature of the colonnades when, in 1902 he bookended them with the West Wing as offices for Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, and the East Wing, a dignified entrance pavilion for visitors. Both structures were unassertive and barely visible from either Lafayette Square to the north or President’s Park to the South, vistas shaped by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., in the naturalistic style of Central Park. Thus Hoban’s house has remained unambiguously the focal point of the ensemble visible to the public.

Trump is having none of that. Though the White House ballroom is now under the direction of a new architect, the most recent models and renderings give some idea of the bloat that has resulted from Trump’s ever growing appetite for state-dinner spectacle (from 650 diners to just under 1,000—and at $400 million, double the original equally dubious price tag). Though Trump touts the urgency of his gold-encrusted bauble, state dinners historically have maxed out at about 350 diners, with most much smaller. Trump has only held four of them in his five years in the Presidency—the lowest number in recent decades.

The architect Shalom Baranes presented the current state of the design to the National Capital Planning Commission that revealed a massing much broader in the beam as well as extending deep into President’s Park, once thought a sacred precinct. It is now proportionally a ranch house rather than the soaring Roman temple it imitates. To fix that moment of ugliness, Trump insisted that Baranes tack on a massive columned and pedimented porch that presides over a grand stair to basically nowhere. With a concealing copse of mature trees axed, this attention-getting grandiosity would steal attention from the main house.

Along with the East Wing, Trump had the history-drenched East Colonnade demolished and expects to replace it with a two story structure that accommodates a high-ceilinged passageway between ballroom and the main house. Though it is called a colonnade the dim new renderings appear to depict no elements of a traditional colonnade, and will probably read as a heavy-handed solid wall that slams into the main residence, capturing none of the deferential delicacy of its predecessor.

In depicting the impact of the new wing, Baranes’s renderings are dishonest. With drawings so small that Commissioners could hardly see them, he showed only elevations of the entire complex—no models or three dimensional drawings—which obscures the impact of the new wing’s bulk. He used unrealistic shadowing to play down his new pedimented porch and the passageways, while emphasizing the South Porch and North Portico, both of which would be visually diminished by the addition. Like the departed architect John McGrery before him, he renders the whole ensemble greige when the new construction would presumably be painted white to match the original—a very different visual experience.

Iconic residence

The White House has been powerfully symbolic, the image of America’s idea of home, an emblem of individualism, free-thinking and wealth building that did not depend on begging for scraps from a monarch busy with his own whims.

The Hoban White House loses its iconic autonomy as a residence, and becomes just another wing in a palace-in-the-making. The bulk of the ballroom wing and passage completely unbalances the ensemble. You’ve got to go for symmetry if you are playing the Classical architecture game! So Baranes said he is already cloning the East Wing passage to replace the West Colonnade at the President’s request. It would be a passage to nowhere, but for Trump’s certain desire to demolish the dowdy and cramped West Wing to create a tripartite palace in the European aristo tradition. The West Wing likely only survives because there is nowhere to put its current functions while its replacement is built.

This pocket history is not to make a case for architectural originalism per se. Sticking a portico here, and attaching a grand stair there, and pretending a wall can be a colonnade is an insult to Classicism, which demands a cohesive whole. This amateur effort insults the American people. It represents an unbelievably cramped view of what architecture can do and be.

Where are the gatekeepers?

Baranes is a familiar figure in Washington. His firm has technical expertise having done extensive renovations of historic government buildings as well as doggedly mediocre commercial projects. His is a “service” firm: it knows how to take orders, but in his built work there’s little evidence of an expansive imagination that can see opportunities the rote architects miss and take a more comprehensive and longer view of what the White House should be.

The National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts, which are pledged to keep special interests from mutilating historic buildings or littering the Mall with ill-conceived monuments (Garden of Heroes anyone?) have had their memberships overhauled by Trump. A grating obsequiousness, rather than an open-minded professionalism was the default setting at Baranes’s presentation. Only the head of Washington’s City Council tentatively offered tepid criticisms of the overweening bulk of the project, but was happy to wait on later presentations to see what further refinements might be offered.

The Fine Arts Commission similarly shirked its responsibilities. Preliminary meetings are the time to put the administration on notice about the violence it has done to the White House, to ask for a justification for the wing that is based on objective analysis rather than evidence-free assertions. (The administration claims there were structural and infrastructure issues that precluded keeping the wing but have not produced any documentation. We are free to assume no documentation exists.) Both commissions could have held the administration’s feet to the fire for the demolition of historic structures without any apparent analysis of whether important elements could be included and whether alternatives to destruction were available.

Instead the NCPC said reviewing demolition plans was not their job. Had they analyzed Trump’s plans before the wing was bulldozed—standard practice—they may have concluded that irreplaceable historic elements were at risk, which would have been grounds for rejecting Trump’s design.

In the context of a dangerous leader who has invaded one country, seeks to annex two others against its peoples’ will and wreaks terror on cities, this bowdlerization of the White House can seem trivial. It’s all of a piece, however, with Trump’s brutish narcissism and the aspiration of people around Trump to a new imperium where might makes right.

As we witness a shift to an all-powerful executive, tentatively endorsed by the current Supreme Court via the anodyne-sounding Unitary Executive Theory, we see the ballroom being rushed to completion as Trump’s way of establishing “facts on the ground”—a physical manifestation of the power he thinks he wields that can’t be reversed. Of course this garish venue will be useful to him for shaking down donors and favor seekers en masse if he is around, and if the ballroom gets done. There are lawsuits, inevitably.

Authoritarians always seem to need to remake capitals in their own image—and classicism is the chief vessel of asserting power through architecture. St. Petersburg, the 18th-century stage-set city was willed into being with tens of thousands of forced laborers by Tsar Peter the Great. In Albert Spear’s makeover of Berlin for the Nazis, the buildings were supposed to last for a thousand years. (They are mostly gone.)

Though I have never visited the White House I have no doubt that the rooms that are not treated as museum displays are a riot of dysfunctional accretions because new administrations typically move in and make do. Their quest to get as much done as fast as possible precludes the comprehensive analysis of the building’s shortcomings that the complex deserves and the reconciling of competing claims for closeness to the President.

The president’s house deserves better than a gaggle of stuck-together historicist fragments. A holistic analytic approach might show the need for an enlarged dining and conference facility, but there are myriad architectural ways to skin this cat while maintaining the primacy of Hoban’s residence.

The White House could be more inviting, generous, and human. Now it seems ever more remote from Americans (not to mention reality) as the security cordon has expanded to encompass the equivalent of a dozen city blocks. The trappings of security have heedlessly accumulated: sentry huts, truck deflectors, mazes of metal and concrete barriers and vehicles parked willy nilly. This chaos does not suggest disciplined deterrence so much as unsightly incompetence. The visitor experience is repellent and the high fences depressing. (At the NCPC, there was reference to redoing the entrances but no scope or plans were offered.)

The White House could still elevate and inspire. A comprehensible upgrade could subtly enhance the house as a vessel of America’s values and enhance the ability of the executive to negotiate, conciliate, and collaborate—with Congress, with foreign leaders.

Such a long-held definition of the presidency does not apply to the current grubby, corrupt, vindictive and power-crazed inhabitant, so the misbegotten ballroom should be stopped until sanity can be restored.

The Trump Administration is inducing global conflicts over resources as it grabs Venezuela’s oil infrastructure pursuant to its inexplicable and irrational embrace of empire as well as a catastrophic high-cost, high-polluting fossil-fuel future. At the same time the administration is killing solar projects and $25 billion in offshore wind-energy investment just as electrical demand from data centers is exploding and ratepayers are gobsmacked by spiking bills. I guess this the political equivalent of AI slop.

Rather than permitting our collective heads to explode, let’s focus on one urgent question: Why aren’t we talking more about reducing demand for energy?

I think few people are aware that improved efficiency in buildings has kept electrical demand flat for almost two decades even as the population and the economy grew considerably. Focusing on buildings has paid off because they are responsible for about one third of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and 75 percent of electrical demand.

The political and pundit class obsess over solar and wind, but generation from these renewables only began substantially displacing fossil fuels in the last few years. As someone who has analyzed and written about energy efficiency for years I recognize that for most people cutting energy use sounds like a penance, unlikely to spur sparkling conversation around the water cooler. Fossil-fuel interests depict efficiency as a lifestyle deprivation, a long-obsolete argument that has been internalized by pundits and politicians even as benefits multiply and technologies steadily improve.

Many states and cities remain committed to reducing power supply constraints and addressing climate-induced catastrophes. Efficiency remains energy’s low-hanging fruit.

Mythical benefits of “Energy Independence”

Reducing demand does more than reduce pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions. Unlike solar and wind, It is constant, not intermittent. Politicians have supported pumping more oil and gas than any other country to secure alleged “energy independence,” but the strategy has not freed the U.S. from spiking gasoline prices when geopolitical turmoil creates oil supply crises—as happened when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. Efficiency allows users to thumb their noses at fossil-fuel oligarchs—including those who have bought influence on the Trump administration.

Innovative building efficiency techniques are multiplying in spite of their lack of political sex appeal. LED lighting is now a no-brainer because its flexibility and cost advantages are irresistible. Insulation and high-performing windows are getting better while coming down in price. Improved heating and air-conditioning tech—like advanced heat pumps—lowers energy bills every month. Appliances cost less to run thanks to the Energy Star program the Trump Administration has attempted to kill. Innovation is allowing the building sector to rapidly “decarbonize” (i.e., reduce CO2 emissions) while adding such benefits as greater comfort and better access to daylight and fresh air.

Reduced energy demand by buildings makes room in the transmission grid for increased use of electricity by cars as well as the voracious appetite for power from metastasizing data centers serving the heedless growth of AI and that criminal bastion, crypto. There’s lots of room for improvement.

Zero energy buildings are now

With a mix of efficiency and renewables, almost all new buildings could require essentially no electricity (called net zero) by 2030, Lindsay Baker, the CEO of the Seattle-based International Living Futures Institute, told me. The Institute runs the Living Building Challenge, a rigorous certification program that has pushed the construction industry to achieve energy-use reductions deemed all but impossible a few years ago.“Acting at scale is so eminently possible,” she says.

If efficiency is so effective why does it not get more respect? It has a marketing problem, for one. Reducing energy use is not easy to talk about because it is not a singular, sweeping solution that lazy pundits embrace, or that media—always searching for the next shiny object—obsesses about. The sprawling green economy lacks well-organized and funded interest groups. Instead it involves dozens of products and players putting structures together in a variety of ways: architects, engineers, lighting, mechanical systems, glass, insulation, and controls, among others.

Architects and engineers choose efficiency tactics to suit America’s widely varying climate, hydrology, and geography. This is a feature, not a bug. Thus, the architecture firm Miller Hull and the mechanical and electrical engineer PAE relied almost entirely on demand reduction in the design of the Bullitt Center. It’s a 2013 office building that has been influential in demonstrating how to achieve net-zero energy since its solar array could harvest few kilowatts from Seattle’s eternal cloud cover. Among many innovative tactics, oversized triple-glazed windows draw daylight in, while keeping warmth in and undesired heat out.

The same team brought its low-energy acumen to the Kendeda Building for Innovative and Sustainable Design at Georgia Tech. Working with local architect Lord Aeck Sargent the building bears little resemblance to Bullitt because it is attuned to Atlanta’s heat and humidity. It features a huge overhanging roof that deflects unwanted solar heat, as well as providing convivial shade in the Southern porch tradition. The design includes many tactics that reduce energy but the broad roof also hosts a massive solar array, producing 120 percent of the energy the building consumes.

Efficiency creates economic flywheels

Some regions adeptly harvest the economic advantages of green building innovation. Bullitt demonstrated the advantages of “mass timber” (wood strands glued together to form engineered columns, beams, and panels for walls and floors that replace environmentally damaging steel and concrete). This new kind of wood has become the biggest excitement in forest products since plywood. Mass timber elements were also used at Kendeda, and helped draw the attention of Southern yellow-pine producers, which have since built mass-timber manufacturing plants.

Kendeda also grew the market for Big Ass Fans, of Lexington, Kentucky, by using the industrial product instead of a tangle of ductwork to temper Atlanta’s high summer humidity. Shuco, the German manufacturer of the highly insulating windows used at Bullitt, brought its advanced manufacturing expertise to a Seattle-area window company.

Thus the variety of energy-reducing opportunities in buildings spurs economic flywheel effects as green entrepreneurs learn from each other and hatch alliances and new companies. That is one of the overlooked beauties of efficiency.

In the Midwest and Northeast, where cold-weather heating demand is high, an energy regime imported from Europe called Passive House relies on very high levels of insulation and air sealing, with 75 percent energy-use reductions readily achieved. These buildings provide draft-free comfort and quiet along with their very low operating costs. The immediate utility-bill savings have been embraced by affordable-housing developers because they stretch the tenant subsidies they receive.

Passive house was pioneered in the U.S. for single-family houses, but now is built at large scale, such as in the full-block Sendero Verde development, in East Harlem, that includes 709 apartments serving tenants earning a range of incomes in three structures, one of which rises to 34 stories

America reaps too few of the economic benefits of efficiency because the majority of green building products are manufactured in countries that have consistently supported robust low-energy technologies—Germany, Japan, Korea, and increasingly China, according to Floris Keverling Buisman, CEO of 475 Performance Building Supply, a green building-tech specialist. The U.S. has let its once-formidable leadership in lighting, glass, glazing, and insulation languish over decades.

America is reshoring some capacity—no thanks to Congress or the current administration. Miller Hull (of Seattle) and PAE (Portland, Oregon) are just two firms in a cluster of green-building architects and engineers (including the U.S. beachheads of some European experts) that is growing in West Coast cities. Passive House has nurtured low-energy design and construction expertise from Boston to Minneapolis.

Colorado offers incentives to modular builders, who can deliver high quality energy-efficient construction in quantity at competitive cost. “Weatherization,” a catch-all term for improving efficiency in drafty old houses, can be more effectively incentivized to strengthen the poorest communities and the most needy regions.

We are supposed to be dazzled by hydrogen as a fuel, the resuscitation of nuclear fission, the development of nuclear fusion, the cramming of carbon into the ground, or the chemical seeding of clouds (in service to the arrogant goal of engineering the world’s climate)—all touted as energy cure-alls that people who find efficiency dull insist require an enormous Manhattan-project effort.

These visionary technologies could be transformative but each comes with its own costs and requires its own suite of incentives and regulations. Each comes with downsides that need to be thoroughly understood and accounted for. Only then can viable visionary energy tech go mainstream.

Efficiency is now, it’s proven, and its ready to do the job. Time to give it its due.

I made a clarification in the last section about accusations against the architect. In a previous post on the Studio Museum in Harlem I predicted that it—along with the Princeton University Art Museum, would become among the most influential of our time. They are hardly a matched pair, but they do share the same architect, David Adjaye whose firm Adjaye Associates, has offices in London, New York, and Accra, Ghana. The new buildings are unusually tactile and powerfully experiential—while brilliantly serving these two very different collections with divergent curatorial goals.

A severe presence

The loose assemblage of nine opaque concrete pavilions that form the Princeton University Art Museum largely fills a green courtyard deep within Princeton’s historic campus. Bristling with vertically overlapping concrete panels, the pavilions’ severe exterior attracted a lot of criticism as they rose, seeming to be a Brutalist thumb in the eye of a campus of green quadrangles and neo Gothic delicacy. Princeton officials had to reassure the critics. “Everybody needs to kind of pause, give it a chance,” said Ron McCoy, the campus architect, in the Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Adjaye’s design makes sense at the center of campus rather than on the edge (more readily accessed by the public, said critics) because students and faculty can take an hour to look at art connected to a history or literature class—or just give themselves respite. The museum, which opened on Halloween, retains an elemental presence, even though it is less assertive as the construction fences have come down and new landscaping has come in. Most visitors will encounter only a fraction of the building seen between adjacent structures. Its great size is perceived only when the visitor walks around it.

The museum is indeed weighty, monumental, and self-consciously grand. Massive piers supporting hefty beams hoist the pavilions above the first floor, extending them beyond the footprint through deep cantilevers. The space beneath the cantilevers produces a primordial chiaroscuro of shadows lit by shafts of light that slant into gaps between the pavilions. (Think Piranesi.) An all-white sculpture of girls dancing happily in a circle (I could not identify the artist) looks menaced by the massive volume hanging over it.

A search for authentic form

The glib take on Princeton is that it is Brutalism redux, by which critics mean it’s just brutal. The best of American architecture that is tagged with the epithet Brutalist entailed a restless, idealistic search for an architecture that was notably modern—reflecting what America had become—but also aspired to assert the importance of institutions that gather us together and help us know who we are, collectively and individually.

The search began with the late work of the Swiss Modernist Le Corbusier, who explored the “authentic” possibilities of béton brut (raw concrete). The cause was taken up by British architects who coined the Brutalism moniker (and whose work Adjaye—who was trained and founded his firm in London—would be familiar with).

American architects sought similarly expressive form and concrete became the means to realize these ideas in an ostensibly less expensive and more proletarian form than the columned, pedimented, and carved stone surfaces of the Beaux Arts palaces of civic virtue built in American cities around the turn of the 20th century.

Thus came Boston’s City Hall, both beloved and hated, and Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum, a cliff-face in granite, shaped, it seemed, heedless of Madison Avenue’s upscale gentility. (The Whitney’s good bones are nowadays appreciated as it embarks on its fourth iteration as the global headquarters of Sotheby’s, the auction house.)

If anything Adjaye is exalting these sources, as well as drawing wisdom from the sainted Louis I. Kahn, the most influential architect of the last one third of the 20th century.

Kahn wanted to harness from ancient Rome and other Classical sources a means of asserting in a contemporary way the power of architecture to elevate institutions—which were under siege in the 1960s as they are now—and make places that embodied society’s highest aspirations. Kahn “strove to provide a framework for human interaction with which each individual could realize a greater degree of worth,” as David Brownlee and David De Long wrote in the exhibition catalog, Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture. A house was a “society of rooms,” according to Kahn, hosting diverse yet mutually supportive activities—a tiny city. He would speak of creating “availabilities,” by which he seemed to be saying (his pronouncements were poetic yet could be gnomic) that architecture should be open-ended, permitting people to invent uses or experience serendipitous encounters.

Adjaye has spoken of his admiration for Kahn (and won an award named after Kahn in 2018). He seems to be embarked on a quest for permanency and timelessness in the way Kahn was. This new direction was already evident in the high-rise luxury residential development in lower Manhattan, 130 William Street, which contrasted the prevailing glass-box style with the heft of grey masonry and inset arched windows. He wrapped a handsome courtyard in arched openings framed from rough-surfaced concrete that suggest the sublime calm of a ruined cloister.

Adjaye makes this massive 146,000-square-foot building permeable by providing a wide ground floor concourse through the building, crossed by a narrow hallway, thus encouraging students shortcutting through the building to stop and sample the riches within. On the primary north side, the interior unfolds theatrically: the visitor descends a stair to clear the overhanging pavilion, arriving at an entry court that balloons up the full height of the building, its elegantly proportioned nobility somewhat overwhelmed by a massively busy tilework by Nick Cave.

Entering the building opens a vast horizontal expanse, in which the sense of great weight from above is conveyed by thick partitions of dark nubby concrete, a rough plaster ceiling, and floors of terrazzo and stone patterned in swirls. Shafts of light refracted by the exterior overhangs interrupt the subterranean mood. Under glass at their feet, visitors find a restored ancient Roman mosaic.

A long diagonal vista culminates in the wood-clad Grand Hall. The space rises in tiers, reveals vitrines on the second floor through large corner windows. Concrete fins project into the space to buttress an opening above, crowned by skylights mounted above wood-clad coffers. Though the space is set up as a lounge most of the time, it has retractable seats and a stage that can turn the hall into a presentation space. What this dramatic spatial sculpture suggests, though, is a lofty medieval or Baroque chapel. It would probably look its most celestial with just sunlight burnishing its surfaces.

Also opening from the concourse is a baronial stair hall where daylight from clerestories and overhead laylights draws the visitor up to the 64,000-square-foot second floor containing almost all of the galleries. In contrast to the earthbound textures of the first floor the honey tones of deep, wood-clad beams that cross the high ceilings are the dominant and welcoming architectural feature. The contrast of wood and concrete is another evocation of Kahn, especially his Yale Center for British Art which feels like visitors as comfortable as they would be in a manor house even as the design is completely Modernist.

The curatorial conundrum: How to be true to a wide range of collections that vary by depth and are not readily divided into tidy categories nor captured by the oft-used term “encyclopedic.”

?The densely hung exhibits display the museum’s crown jewels. These are surrounded by works that are not always exemplary by conventional standards of exalted visual perfection, but tell stories of peoples and contextualize the times in which they were made. The intricate layout is true to cultures across the world that are deeply steeped in their own artmaking traditions. As a teaching museum, this approach is eminently sensible. (There are also embarrassments to be engaged, such as works that display colonialist condescension.)

Adjaye’s division of the gallery space into pavilions takes these realities and runs with them. Curators mounted collections in which Princeton has deep holdings (European, American, and Asian Art, for example) in five of the 5,000-square-foot pavilions, which are partitioned into intimate exhibition niches that avoid claustrophobia because the wood-beamed ceilings are an unusually high 18 feet. Smaller collections are shown in separate rooms or encountered in the generous transition spaces that unite the pavilions, inviting cultures to speak to each other. There are 32 galleries but no endless lineup of white-painted boxes.

As in many museums, curators have largely abandoned limiting esthetic taxonomies (the “who inspired whom” that has long dominated art history), instead encouraging visitors to look deeper by mixing the historic with the contemporary. A juxtaposition of fragile media (wood, paper) with sturdier paintings and sculptures is also made possible by the brilliant use of art lighting. Curators cited to me their in-house guru, Christopher Gorzelnik, as well as the project’s lighting designer Tillotson Design Associates. Adjaye also combats art-viewing fatigue by interrupting the flow with contemplative alcoves and rooms that feature just one or two works and offer carefully shaped views out to the campus that he calls lenses, but which take various shapes.

This extraordinarily rich design is certainly assertive throughout, but it is completely in synch with the nature of an institution that has been collecting for 255 years, one that inevitably reflects the sprawling curiosity and a worldliness—or lack thereof—among generations of Princetonians.

Can Adjaye be forgiven?

The 2023 accusations of sexual harassment and bullying against Adjaye (see this post on The Studio Museum in Harlem) have put both Princeton and the Studio Museum in a difficult place. They have acknowledged Adjaye as the chief creative force while keeping him away from opening events for fear that the accusations would become the story, rather than the extraordinary and clearly very collaborative results. Instead both museums have elevated the executive architect, Cooper Robertson, the New York based architect whose role was important but largely technical, one it has played for many prominent museum projects. In this common division of labor, Adjaye’s firm was the primary creative force and that work was largely completed on both buildings when the accusations became public.

There has been no public reckoning of the dispute, though Adjaye has apologized for his behavior while rejecting the accusations. No court case has ensued and no additional accusers have stepped forward. He reorganized his firm to advance the role of colleagues, especially Pascale Sablan, who heads the New York office.

While the Me Too movement has done much to bring abusive practices against women into the public square, restorative means to allow accusers and the accused an offramp to get on with their lives does not persuasively exist.

The justice system has proven inadequate to the task of resolving fault since little admissible evidence is often available, leaving cases in a he-said/she-said limbo. To be believed, women must often subject themselves to repeated judicial humiliations over years, with perpetrators punished in low numbers. We need a better means to arbitrate such disputes, especially at a time when the President and the elements of the Republican Party freely bully women and declare them inferior. Brazenly racist behavior is acceptable in these circles.

We need Adjaye’s voice back to join the resistance to the increasingly likely bowdlerization of the National Museum of African American History and Culture under the all-purpose political pretense of “anti wokeness.” We need him not only because he is operating at the height of his powers, but because he is a prominent Black architect—and there are too few of them.

Thanks to the pandemic and the wayward ways of design, fundraising, and construction, a lot of highly anticipated architectural projects have recently completed in New York City. If you are visiting over the holidays, you may want to check some of these out—also because several display superb art. If nothing else some of these will take you off the beaten track.

.After almost six decades the Studio Museum in Harlem, which is America’s premiere venue for nurturing and exhibiting Black artists, has gotten the extraordinary new home it deserves. It’s not just a repository of objects (though its bracing exhibitions pulse with energy) but an essential community institution that helps artists find their path and build their careers through education and residency programs. Architect David Adjaye’s masklike black facade opens invitingly into a wood-clad event space and expertly stirs the institution’s aspirations together, anchored by three exhibition floors. The views from the roof terrace are magical.

Architecture is a quieter presence at the Metropolitan Museum’s vast renewed galleries of African, Oceanic, and ancient Latin American art. Architect Kulapat Yantrasast, founder of WHY, reworked the huge south-facing wall of glass designed for the Michael Rockefeller wing by its 1970s architect Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo that blasted the space with far too much daylight. Discreetly filtered, Yantrasat shaped the space to allow limped daylight to seep deeply into the space, picking out new subtleties in this trove of jaw-dropping masterpieces.

The Met has attempted to overcome condescending traditional categorization of these collections as “primitive” or “ethnographic,” instead highlighting them as individual works of art by identified artists, while at least minimally contextualizing the time, place and intentions of their making.

New York welcomed back the Frick Collection, closed for five years for a top-to-bottom overhaul and an addition by Annabelle Selldorf. As a mansion originally designed by Thomas Hastings with conversion to a museum in mind, it’s beloved for its elegance (by robber baron standards) and sumptuous domesticity. The extraordinary works on view command attention, especially as beautifully conserved and relit; they have no trouble competing with the elaborate furnishings and decor. Selldorf’s restrained addition eases the cramped entry and encloses a handsome new auditorium and much improved space for temporary exhibitions.

For the Whitney Museum that opened in 1966 Marcel Breuer designed a six-story granite-clad boulder of a building that hangs menacingly above Madison Avenue. It has attracted sneers ever since. Yet the Brutalist design has proven to be stubbornly successful, reborn to its fourth life in November—this time as the global headquarters of Sotheby’s, the auction house. When the Whitney moved downtown to its current home (by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, highly recommended), The Met took over, and presented an idiosyncratic range of exhibition experiments in the “Met Breuer.” It ceded the building to the Frick while that museum’s home was under renovation. The Frick hung many of its masterpieces to acclaim beneath the trademark concrete-coffered ceilings in the loft-like spaces Breuer had designed.

After an all-but-invisible makeover by the powerhouse architecture firm Herzog and de Meuron, working with PBDW, the place works differently—a lot of display theatricality, smaller exhibition suites for big-bucks lots—but Sotheby’s failed to ruin the place. Indeed its Fall prices on major works broke records. Thank the marquee value Breuer brought to the proceedings, at least in part.

The colossal new 60-story 2.5-million square foot headquarters for JPMorganChase, that has risen on the corporate gold coast of Park Avenue has produced swoons for its acrobatic engineering (by Severud) and brickbats for its chest-thumping grandiosity. The company touts it as a 10,000-employee vote of confidence in New York City. To skeptics it’s a mega-scale architectural assertion of the financial industry’s dominance of the American economy—as if we needed reminding. Norman Foster, the 90-year-old founder of the sprawling, London-based firm Foster & Partners, takes credit for the architectural design. The interiors and workspaces were finished in pampering luxury by Gensler, among others. I may write further about this. Have a look and let me know what you think in the comments.

At the other end of the architectural spectrum, a minuscule storefront in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, leads to a modest but capacious gallery for a small organization, the Center for Art & Advocacy, that has transformative impact. It helps incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people who want to be professional artists develop their skills and overcome what is for some years of trauma. Pragmatically, they learn to navigate the mystifying labyrinth that is the art world. Founder Jesse Krimes, who as he told me, experienced the carceral gamut from juvenile jails to state and federal prions, bootstrapped his own necessity to make art into a practice that has reached the upper echelon of the art world, with gallery representation and an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Similarly the artists the center champions—shows rotate regularly—don’t dabble in the precious transgressions of the big-name art-world but pour an extraordinary intensity of feeling, experience, and expression into their work.

I’m sending all my readers warmest holiday wishes and hope shopping and celebrating take you to stimulating urban and architectural realms. By the way, a subscription to Architecture and the City may be just the gift someone on your list awaits. At any rate, I welcome comments, shares, and recommendations!

Spelling of artists’ names corrected and minor copy edits made. The dark concrete of the Studio Museum in Harlem is sculpted into nervous, overlapping frames, yet the facade it presents to West 125th Street is masklike, almost opaque. The Princeton University Art Museum is at first glance even more obdurate: long expanses of largely windowless serrated concrete walls squeezed into a courtyard formed by an eclectic assortment of older campus buildings. It revels in its weightiness.

And yet, I will make a rare prediction that these two designs which opened within two weeks of each other this fall, will become among the most influential of our time. What unites the architecture of these two very different institutions? They are unusually tactile and powerfully experiential—but they also brilliantly serve art while sensitively transforming the museum-viewing experience. And they are both designed by the same architect, David Adjaye.

In both Adjaye is unapologetically contemporary while reworking the idea of the museum as a protected treasury, akin to the nearly windowless Classical temple form of John Russell Pope’s austere National Gallery of Art in Washington or the imperious Beaux Arts hulks that arose in the industrial cities of the Northeast and Midwest. This is heady stuff.

Though he grew up in Africa, and was educated and founded his practice in London, Adjaye became the most important Black architect in America thanks to his leading role in the design of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, in Washington, where he worked with its then-director Lonnie Bunch, who now leads all of the Smithsonian institutions, and is under fire by the Trump Administration for the museums’ alleged “wokeness.”

Adjaye’s rise was abruptly halted by accusations published in July 2023 by the Financial Times that he had engaged in sexual assault, sexual harassment, and tolerating a toxic work culture in his office. He withdrew from—and was asked to leave—high-profile projects. There is more to be said about the limbo Adjaye finds himself in, but I am going to set that aside for the second post that I will soon add to this one.

That’s because the turn Adjaye’s work took before the accusations clearly has much important to say about the place of architecture in culture and I don’t want to get derailed from that. This post focuses the Studio Museum of Harlem, which opened November 15. In an upcoming column I will cover The Princeton museum.

Premier Museum of Black Artists

At 82,000 square foot squeezed into a commercial city lot, the Studio Museum is much smaller and less monumental than its Beaux Arts antecedents, yet shares an aloofness, even a nobility. Its restless boxlike volumes in polished and sandblasted concrete shift back and forth in relation to the street edge, evoking the energy of Harlem and the pulsing crowds that pass by.

The Studio Museum, like Princeton, has qualities associated with Brutalism, which was the brief trend of using modern materials—especially concrete—and modern conceptions of shaping space to access a kind of dignity, solidity and timelessness of ancient architecture. Nowadays the term has been diluted, used as a catchall epithet for just about any 1960s or 1970s architecture in which concrete is prominently used. The Studio Museum bears a resemblance to a 1971 Brutalist combination of city hall and courthouse Paul Rudolph designed for the Orange County government in Goshen, NY. Its jostling forms were meant to convey the multiplicities it contained, but it was deemed by many to be overwrought bombast—and it has been since bowdlerized.

The Studio Museum is more elegant and beautifully realized, but similarly implies what lies within—a remarkable one-off institution, the most important center of Black art in the country.

Though there are many museums of African-American history, the Studio Museum has stayed focused on the here and now. Through seven directors, it has remained true to the vision developed at its 1968 founding—a culturally roiled year when Civil Rights unrest was at its peak (and Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated). Young people were marching against the Vietnam War, and New York City was heading into a steep decline. The founders enriched the conception of the museum as not just a repository of objects but a living, breathing community hub and a place that engaged the community and created a safe place for Black artists to nurture their practice.

Thelma Golden, who has been the director for 20 years, has greatly expanded the museum’s reputation and impact. She developed the new home for the museum 10 years ago, hired Adjaye (along with the architecture firm Cooper Robertson), and raised $300 million to build the new building and endow the expanded exhibitions and programming it makes possible. In the process she has become among the most important cultural figures in New York (pitched by many as the worthy successor to Glenn Lowry, the departing head of the Museum of Modern Art. Another candidate got the job.)

In contrast with the sober exterior, the interior of the museum extends a warm welcome. Adjaye makes physically palpable the museum’s close relationship with the neighborhood by lining most of the width of the building with pivoting glass doors that can be opened to allow access to a terrace of seating and stairs swaddled in warm red wood that descends to the lower level. On good weather days this “reverse stoop” can be opened to the neighborhood for events, celebrations and presentations.

Behind the lower level stage and the first-floor lobby, bathed in daylight by high street-facing windows, an assertive and self-consciously weighty main stair rises to three gallery levels above, faced with deep-grey terrazzo trimmed in bronze. It is paired with a shaftlike atrium that draws daylight down from the roof.

The stair invites ambling from floor to floor, where views into galleries are visible across the atrium. Two gallery floors offer broad, flexible exhibition suites that are packed with works drawn from the museum’s 9,000-item collection. Every major name in Black art seems to be represented here. This is not a surprise since many were nurtured by the artists-in-residence program that dates from the museum’s founding (Kehinde Wiley, Wangechi Mutu, David Hammons, Simone Leigh, and Kerry James Marshall, to name just a few). Tucked in a half level between the gallery floors is a round-arched exhibition space that has been turned over to the light sculptures of Tom Lloyd, the first artist to be exhibited by the museum.

A handsome suite of daylighted, north-facing studios for resident artists interrupts the gallery itinerary as a means of demonstrating the importance of nurturing artists. (For now they host examples of the extraordinary range of works made in the museum over the years.) Similarly, visitors can peek into the suite devoted to education, enhancing the museum’s longtime mission to engage local school children who otherwise might find few opportunities to experience art hands-on.

Visitors also find peek-a-boo views of the city on every level, which resonates with the urban reality that is the subject of so much work on view. The wealth of experience enriches art viewing; there’s no parade of cubic rooms of white drywall. A roof terrace is the pièce de résistance with a magical vista to the towers of Midtown framed by wood-battened water towers.

Though Harlem is these days whiter and richer than it ever was, the raffish cacophonous streetscape outside Studio Museum testifies to the still visible struggles of lower income people and immigrants in New York, given the combination of impossible housing costs, Trump Administration budget cuts, and ICE chaos that leaves the undocumented jobless and desperate.

The throwback challenges cities face these days remind us that Harlem was energized by the civil rights movement, and its founding idealists opened the museum in one of the epicenter’s of the Black power movement. They nurtured it as the city (along with many others) entered a horrific era of decline that saw an exodus of the middle class, dozens of buildings set afire, and a hardening of poverty that would last decades. Through it all the Studio Museum was a beacon of hope and chronicler of Black artists’ concerns and aspirations.

The richness of the collection shows just how lucky we are that the Studio Museum made it through. It’s pugnacity on the street is earned.

For architects, the wanton destruction of the East Wing, including the colonnade designed by Thomas Jefferson and the wing itself designed by McKim Mead & White (though considerably bowdlerized) is a national tragedy, even though in the scheme of today’s political horrors it is far from the worst. Of course for everyone else the White House, along with the Capitol, is the symbol of America, its image on the back of every $20 bill. Trump intends to leave a permanent mark on Washington by throwing up a bloated East Wing. (This earlier post lays out the damage if you have not been following the story as the excavators complete their work.)

The house does not belong to him, but to the American people and such a substantial, irreversible alteration requires the approval of the National Capital Planning Commission, which exists, along with other official guardians of Washington’s Monumental Core precisely to avoid damaging changes at the whim of the President or anyone else. (The degree to which NCPC review is binding on the executive branch appears to be fuzzy, it should be noted.)

The Royal Hall of Favor Seeking

If Trump can drastically alter the White House on a whim, can’t his successors just tear it down for their own reasons? Maybe that would temper Trump’s urge to put his own paw print on everything. I’m not holding my breath.

A properly deliberate process would entail drawing up a thorough assessment of what the building needs, and rationally establishing a set of priorities, and seeking funding in a transparent, disinterested manner (“disinterested” not being a term in the Trump vocabulary). Any alterations should meet a demonstrated need.

None of this happened, of course, with Trump’s rush to get this monument to himself built before the next election. In a properly functioning democracy a Pay to Play Palace or Royal Hall of Favor Seeking would not be a reason to add an outsize addition.

So many questions; so little transparency. Have the East Wing’s historic elements, its antique furnishings, and its art been catalogued and safely stored somewhere? Or has it all been tossed into the dumpster? Did anybody separate from the White House review the plans for the demolition and new design, making sure the construction is appropriate and safe for use? Have security practices been altered to manage new vulnerabilities created by turning the White House complex into a construction site? Has access to the security bunker beneath the East Wing been retained? Or is it, too, to be demolished?

Pay to Play Palace

It can reasonably be inferred that contracting giant Clark Construction, which claims a $24-billion portfolio of government projects, and AECOM, one of the world’s largest architecture and engineering firms, were looking to ingratiate themselves with the administration that has billions in building contracts to award. What did it take to get this no-bid gig? Also, the no-competition award to the design architect, John McCrery, should be investigated, since he does not appear to be qualified to work for the Federal government. (At any rate these firms should be invoicing early and often. Trump has a reputation for stiffing designers and builders.) Since there has been no documentation of how these firms were hired or how they are to be paid, we are allowed to assume the worst in an administration awash in conflicts of interest and self dealing,

The Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) could drive them to do things they would not ordinarily do—as so many others have done. Licensing boards and professional associations should investigate the firms for ethical violations—at the very least—and look into ejecting the principals and canceling the professional certifications that allow them to practice if yet undisclosed machinations warrant it.

In a matter of days, the cost has risen from $200 million to $300 million. Does anyone on this project know what they are doing? Trump has said he’s raising the money privately and no taxpayer dollars will be required. Please. That never happens.

The White House released a list of tone-deaf funders of the ballroom debacle, including big crypto firms that are enriching Trump, big tech companies that seek lush government contracts as well as defense contractors. They are all in violation of conflict of interest rules but all the guardians of clean governance have been fired.

Many of these companies tout their good corporate citizenship so what were they thinking? They should all be ashamed of themselves. One donor, T-Mobile, tried to distance itself from this increasingly toxic project by indicating that it had made a gift not to Trump directly but to the charitable nonprofit, the Trust for the National Mall, which has supported the National Park Service in improving the Mall. It was being disingenuous. The Trust agreed to be a conduit for Trump’s vanity project, which could imperil the Trust’s non-profit status and piss off regular supporters who thought they were underwriting conservation of resources important to Americans, not assisting in their destruction.

Stay tuned. And thanks for reading and sharing. If you like what I do I hope you will upgrade to a paid subscription if you are reading for free.

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I had no intention of diving into the controversy over Trump’s anointing Classicism and other traditional styles as the official architectural expression of federal buildings. With so much else that is criminal, vengeful, authoritarian, and just plain cringy about Trump and his minions, the appearance of a few more columns and pediments on whatever buildings the federal government will get around to putting up has not struck me as essential to crusade against.

But now Trump has embarked on the most significant alteration to the White House since its original completion early in the 19th century. He proposes to add a 90,000 square foot addition to replace the East Wing which was conceived by Thomas Jefferson but largely completed in 1902 for Teddy Roosevelt.

It’s easy to get up in arms about this. Does the White House really need a ballroom seating 650? The rendering shows an array of tables and cheap convention-hotel gilded chairs so vast that diners may pine for the relative intimacy of rubber chicken in a hotel conference center.

In truth, the White House could probably use a strategic plan that looked dispassionately at what should and should not be jammed into the building while maintaining and restoring its historic grace and flow.

But Trump prefers the big self-aggrandizing gesture, and would like to leave his mark permanently on the most important residence in America. That alone should be a dealbreaker, but may not be.

If the ballroom juggernaut cannot be stopped, an argument can be made that compatible classicism is the right way to go. But the design of the addition highlights the peril of classicism (or any other ism) as the Federal government’s house style.

The big winner here is the National Civic Arts Society, which has relentlessly lobbied for classicism and other traditional forms as the only appropriate architectural expression for the Federal government. It had joined the campaign for a World War I memorial with an invited competition that attracted dozens of garish exercises in empty traditionalism, both amateurish and wildly expensive. A modest commemoration that few readers have likely heard about was installed four years ago within a small 1981 park near the White House that had been designed by the well-regarded landscape architect M. Paul Friedburg. He had provided a loose enclosure for a statue of General John Pershing, who led World War I’s American Expeditionary Force.

Friedburg’s inviting but neglected sunken garden of shade trees and picnic tables was replaced by a rigidly symmetrical plaza, designed by architect Joseph Weishaar, with a reflecting pool, and 58-foot-long cast bronze frieze by Sabin Howard (a self-described “classicist sculptor”) of 38 figures histrionically depicting “A Hero’s Journey.” I find people today don’t relate to such narrative monuments, which command respect but are emotionally distanced and don’t invite engagement—a conspicuous failure since World War I has much to teach us in this similarly hubristic and saber-rattling age.

The Society crusaded against the Eisenhower Memorial by Frank Gehry, who had been chosen in an open public process, again assembling an attention-grabbing “counter proposal” competition. The winner was Daniel Cook who drew a lurid triumphal arch—a singularly grating gesture that could only remind people of the Nazi preference for grandiose forms from Roman antiquity. Likenesses of poor Eisenhower were treated as decorative elements squeezed between pilasters.

Nothing about this or other entries speaks to Eisenhower’s achievements, leadership, or fundamental humility.(Gehry’s singular lyrical expressiveness got predictably ground up in the noisy jockeying by interest groups, politics, and planners’ orthodoxies. Yet it is respectful and some evocative life survived—rare enough in today’s deeply divided capital.)

Some political conservatives deem modernist architecture to be a socialist plot, which is crediting architecture with much more political power than it has ever wielded. It ignores America’s home-grown modern architecture, invented by Frank Lloyd Wright and others, that is expressed most influentially in skyscrapers, emblems of capitalism and advanced technology.

Nevertheless, citing America’s alleged preference for historical forms and the predominance of classical architecture in monumental Washington, Trump’s executive order “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” was born, largely drafted by the NCAS. It is not about beauty but a demand to make classical and traditional architecture America’s official architecture. Yet NCAS represents no swooning by the public for domes, arches, and rows of corinthian columns. The “Society” comprises its President, Justin Shubow (a former journalist), one staff member, and an all male, all white board of directors who are mainly corporate executives. There are no artists and just one architect, John McCrery.

Give the relentless Shubow credit. He, largely alone, seems to have gotten the administration to buy into his vision, perhaps as a way to “own the libs.” (Trump’s own taste in casinos and hotels runs to bland glass boxes.) Yet no cabal of liberals tells architects what to do; they pugnaciously adhere to their own individual esthetics and are overwhelmingly apolitical to avoid offending potential clients. The American Institute of Architects (AIA), which represents about 100,000 professionals, for that reason objects to the designation of any single style for government architecture; there’s also no precedent for it.

Wither the White House?

When speaking of the iconic home of the American president, an addition done in a compatible manner is completely reasonable. But there are pressing questions, mainly whether this sea of flimsy gilt chairs merits this beefy addition.

The design presented by the administration in a few renderings is self-consciously grand, with the exterior in a Neoclassical revival style that takes its stylistic cues from the massive columned and pedimented Treasury Department (1836-1869) adjacent, instead of the rather humbler sobriety of the “Irish Georgian” White House itself, completed at the turn of the 19th century by James Hoban. (His dour pile was later gussied up by the addition of the familiar half-round South Porch and the deep columned and pedimented North Porch.)

The ballroom design is said to be a reproduction of Mar a Lago's dining venue, which was reported to be inspired by the marble, gilded and mirrored Versailles—not exactly the right look for a nation governed by the people, for the people. Architectural historian Barry Bergdoll likened it to another over-the-top reception space—the Tsarist St. George Hall in the Kremlin Palace.

Constructing the ballroom entails the obliteration of the squat East Wing (and a bunker beneath it), which was added by Teddy Roosevelt in 1902 (as was its counterpoint, the West Wing) by the eminent architect McKim Mead and White. The firm also renovated connecting arcades designed by Thomas Jefferson to house servants and clerks that were built low so as not to compete with the house itself. The wings continue to be almost invisible from the all-important north and south sides, screened by dense planting. This is a good thing since both have been embarrassingly bowdlerized, and resemble roadside motels long past their sell-by date. (If an addition can be justified the East Wing would not be missed.)

The new addition violates the visual primacy of the house, however, because it rises as high as Hoban’s building and commands a chunk of the parklike gardens to the south that have long been deemed inviolable. It adds a tall additional floor to the arcade, which would prevent the original house from visually standing alone. The wing would no longer be visually subsidiary to the original house, but compete with it.

The extension into the park suggests that a corresponding replacement for the West Wing could be added to maintain the symmetry of the entire composition. That would turn the “house” into a tripartite composition redolent of the grand, formal-gardened palaces of European aristocracy, and perhaps reflect in architecture the power in the executive that Trump has claimed for himself with acquiescence by Congress and the Supreme Court.

As shown in renderings the design assembles elements from the Beaux Arts parts bin—the mighty pediment at the east entry, monumental arched windows punched out of otherwise blank expanses. Such classical architectural wallpaper is not lacking in Washington.

We should not be surprised that the design is by John McCrery, the house architect of the Civic Art Society. A designer of Catholic Churches, he is conspicuously unqualified to take on a project of such intricacy and entailing extraordinary technical demands. Evidence of his capacity to do this project is largely unavailable, though. His website is little more than a single page.

There is no evidence that the administration considered any other architects just as we don’t know who paid for the design which no doubt cost millions and is said to be ready for construction. AECOM, an engineering and architectural megafirm that is neither a leader nor innovator but is adept at working the levers of the federal bureaucracy, is backing McCrery up.

The AIA is unhappy and asking for a do-over, this time considering firm qualifications in terms of experience, technical capacity, experience with preserving landmark historic buildings, and imagination to inventively reconcile the many complexities unrevealed by McGrery’s computer-generated images of what appears to be the Greige House.

As usual Trump attempts to run roughshod over the gauntlet of rules that apply, including submittal to the National Capital Planning Commission, which is charged with protecting the historical integrity of Washington’s “monumental core” (as it’s preciously called) from inappropriate or frivolous change, since dozens of interest groups clamor for any slice of prestigious Mall real estate they can get.

What style should DC be?

The use of historical architectural styles may evoke a comforting past, but it does not speak to who Americans are and what they aspire to.

The Vietnam War Memorial speaks powerfully to people today even though few contemporary visitors served in the conflict. Maya Lin had the insight and imagination to invite Americans divided by the war to unite around the sacrifice of those who believed they were doing good (they were deceived) and gave their lives to it. It is why the 58,000 names inscribed in polished granite are so prominent and so tragic.

By contrast, the 2004 World War II Memorial, an elegant double helix of 56 classical pillars designed by Friedrich St. Florian, lacks emotive power because it is meaninglessly organized by U.S. state and territory. The war’s significance fails to come alive—the vast effort it took, the enormous losses it entailed, the existential necessity of ending Nazism, and the tense Cold War that ensued.

James Ingo Freed (of the firm Pei Cobb Freed) tempered his modernist instincts at the Holocaust Memorial Museum by devising a limestone exterior that suggests its difficult purpose without competing with the traditional buildings on either side. Freed deployed riveted-steel elements within that were derived from the industrial engineering of death camps. They foreshadow the tragic events the museum explains, and they resonate with viewers, whether consciously or subconsciously.

One could continue this argument tit for tat as there is plenty of both failed classicism and failed modernism on the mall. The problems aren’t just stylistic (though the advocates for classicism talk about nothing but style), too many are heedless of expression well suited to the building’s purpose, that enhances experience, and deepens meaning.

After some over-the-top-flops, The General Services Administration inaugurated its Design Excellence program in 1994 to actively seek out architects who were curious, insightful, and talented at form-making—whatever esthetic they worked in. The designs were peer reviewed by people dedicated to achieving the best quality for money, so that a single official or judge did not rule on esthetics nor blow the budget on goodies he or she wanted. It was inevitably imperfect but the track record is pretty good even as the program has eroded through political indifference over the years.

There may be better ways to build for the government but the alternatives should not include executive whim and special-interest capture as the way to create architecture for all Americans.

I’ve updated this post from last October, when I feared damage from candidate Trump’s rhetoric of demonizing cities. Now that he has deployed the National Guard and armed forces in cities against the will of local residents and leaders, cities must join together to defend the many effective innovations they have pioneered.

Donald Trump has relentlessly depicted cities as cauldrons of violence and lawlessness abetted by spineless liberals. His endlessly repeated mantra depicts urban crime in the most lurid overblown language: “Violent mobs, arsonists, looters, criminals, rioters.” Immigrants are murderers and child traffickers. These apocalyptic portrayals are true nowhere.

Now there are boots on the ground in Los Angeles, Washington and perhaps other cities by the time you read this. Unfortunately for the Trump Administration, the politicized deployments of armed forces against Americans on American soil is presumably a crime—not a good look—though courts will have to sort that out.

Some in the pundit class are willing to credit the Trump administration if crime actually goes down, but flooding public places with uniformed officers is extremely costly, and of limited value at best, especially when imposed on municipalities rather than in a cooperative partnership with local law enforcement and reflecting the desire of locals.

Creating the perception of rampant crime is a potent political weapon, however destructive it is to targeted communities. Masked and armed troops are a TV-friendly spectacle meant to show that Trump and his minions are “tough on crime.” This is the latest sequel in the “law and order” franchise—not the TV show but the expression deployed as a political tool to bludgeon cities—especially cities run by Democrats.

The rhetoric of urban and immigrant violence dates from the 1960s and presumes that bashing communities, rather than offering solutions, will work at the ballot box.

Cities can’t allow this. It damages their economies and dehumanizes their people.

A Sordid History

The violence that wracked southern cities and northern urban centers in the 1960s Civil Rights era was a turning point for cities. Richard Nixon and Republican politicians would invoke images of burning buildings and roving Blacks stealing televisions out of shattered storefronts, stoking fear of a feral Black underclass. They promised restoration of “law and order” in cities they depicted as consumed by chaos and crime.

Their solution was enhanced policing, use of the National Guard to quell unrest, and demands for ever longer prison sentences, even for minor offenses—tactics that were widely questioned even in the 1960s. Nixon would get elected President in part on his tough-on-crime promises, and declare a “war on drugs,” which swept up Black marijuana offenders and only rarely white ones—and failed to quell addiction or crime in cities that were spiraling downward thanks to massive disinvestment.

Cities—and their Black and brown residents—would pay the price for “law and order.” The fear-mongering imagery became a self-fulfilling prophecy as government subsidies for housing, transportation, and other infrastructure were shifted to suburbs. Whites and businesses fled cities in droves, leaving behind empty, vandalized buildings and shuttered industrial plants. In the 1970s and 1980s, some cities would lose a third to half of their population, and many—experts and ordinary people—would come to think of dense cities as irredeemable.

The same rhetoric would reappear over subsequent decades when politically convenient, leading to a further militarization of police, and draconian sentences that put millions of Black men behind bars.

Yet many cities struggled back from the brink in spite of such headwinds. High crime tracks pretty closely with poverty, and cities able to broadly increase wealth gave people hope, made necessary investments possible, and put people to work. Recovering cities saw a virtuous cycle of investment leading to dramatic, persistent reductions in crime, which encouraged greater growth. Washington, D.C., was once a deeply crime-ridden place. Now it is desirable, with prices to match, where serious crime persists mainly in low-income hot spots.

When protests in the wake of the death of George Floyd and other senselessly killed Back men turned violent a few years ago, opportunistic right-wingers returned to the Nixonian playbook. Trump actually increased the scale of violent clashes in Portland by deploying Federal law-enforcement officers against mainly peaceful protestors. He threatened to send Federal forces to other cities, but was deterred by virulent pushback from state and local officials.

Protest violence was in fact limited, but cities did not recognize how powerful this imagery was in inciting visceral fear. Hanging in the tear gas-filled air was the accusation that mayors who did not deploy massive, highly visible police forces to swarm aggressive but legal protests were against . . . “law and order.”

Cities, already coping with pandemic emergencies, did not push back hard enough. Fomenting fear of crime that exaggerated reality crippled cities in their pandemic recovery and induced their companies to look elsewhere.

Much is made of “Democrat-run cities” failing to eliminate crime. In truth, most cities, and urbanizing suburbs (even in deep red Texas) are run by Democrats because Republicans don’t listen, aren’t responsive to these voters, and promulgate anti-urban, anti-professional, and anti-education policies that undercut their success. While the people who live in cities point out substantial drops in crime, the blowtorch rhetoric of Trump and his minions keeps ratcheting up.

A Gallup poll taken at the height of the Trump’s pre-election demonizing of cities found that an unusually low percentage of Democrats found crime to be worsening (29%) while 90% of Republicans perceived more crime. It’s a huge and unique disparity, and it means A) Republicans believed the apocalyptic rhetoric while Democrats rejected it, or B) that crime is rapidly worsening in the exurbs and rural areas where Republicans govern, and safety is rapidly improving in predominantly urban democratic areas. What it does not mean is that blue cities are swarming with criminals. Voters may turn on Republicans that don’t do more to reduce crime.

Undoing Reform

Right wing zealots tore up a fragile consensus that has developed in recent years across the political spectrum to reduce scandalously expensive, at times brazenly racist and life-destroying incarceration of millions of men serving excessively long sentences thanks to “three strikes” laws that all but eliminated judicial discretion.

Behind today’s right-wing sloganeering—to the extent that any specifics are offered— are the same old pledges to return to massive police forces and a resort to long prison sentences that play well on TV but historically decimated communities and lives while largely failing to reduce offending. (Crime continued to decline in New York City after a court ordered an end to its aggressive and heavily resented “stop and frisk” program in minority communities, for example.)

Progressives are cowering in the face of the bullying onslaught, rightfully slammed for “defund the police”—an intentionally provocative slogan that backfired destructively as people watched the justice system seize up and crime rise during the pandemic. Officers quit en masse in cities run by progressives, but they also abandoned well-resourced suburban and rural departments that pretend to respect police.

Police as pawns

Cops are realizing that they are being used as political pawns rather than constructive participants in a well-functioning and politically independent justice system. (The abuse of police in the 2020 invasion of the Capitol luridly displayed the low regard held by the right when enforcement was inconvenient to their cause.)

Now police, national guard troops, and members of the armed forces are being used as props in political vendettas against city leaders who stand up to the administration. It also looks like a consolidation of the armed forces and law enforcement in service to a totalitarian takeover that’s no longer a paranoid fantasy.

But a massive growth in police forces, jails, and prisons will be hard to pull off. ICE recruitment is so anemic that the government is promoting $50,000 signing bonuses. That has produced thousands of new candidates—from local police departments and the military which can’t match that pay. Immigrants who join the National Guard are promised fast-tracked citizenship, as they are tasked with rounding up other immigrants. When will those hires become inconvenient to the would-be king and be purged in turn?

Prisons are overcrowded and underfunded and people are dying in them. Many are already dangerous and ill-prepared to cope with an influx of destabilizing high-needs offenders, such as those with mental-health maladies or who are addicted to drugs. Jails and prisons are likely to see more violence, homicides, and suicides. Severely damaged people released after serving their sentences are likely—at best—to add their numbers to the homeless.

This New York Times story noted that Republican governors have not sought the presence of federal troops even though crime rates in their cities are similar or higher than in Washington. These include Kansas City, St. Louis, Birmingham, three cities in Ohio, and sunbelt cities thought to be thriving, including Nashville, Houston, and Salt Lake City.

Media has paid little attention to the prevalence of crime in Republican exurbs and rural areas, where desperation and easy access to opioids and fentanyl have devastated communities.

Cities are the anti-crime innovators

Cities that innovate in crime prevention have nothing to apologize to the zealots for. They resist the brute-force performance art because they have been there and done that. Its why the innovations that actually reduce offending have been developed in cities—even the ones that host isolated poverty neighborhoods where lack of access to resources breeds desperation, which seeds gangs and violence.

Cities have devised programs to reduce youth offending, thereby undercutting the growth of gangs and their way of turning minor criminals into hardened ones. Some nonprofits focus on helping aimless children lacking mentors to stay in school. “Violence interruptors” are credible messengers to otherwise unpersudable young people because they can speak from their own experiences in gangs and prison. They teach young men how to de-escalate conflicts rather than resort to violence. Other programs reduce the allure of guns.

All of these programs are shown to work in concert with conventional policing. They work even better when stable housing is available, when schools are well resourced and effective, and when health care (especially mental healthcare) is available. Congress, embarrassed by the prevalence of homeless veterans, poured money into housing them, and the numbers of veterans who live in distress on the street has dramatically decreased.

The federal government has aided some of these efforts but to no one’s surprise the programs have been cut under Trump. Washington could play a constructive role by helping fund these basics and helping to spread best practices. Many of these innovations were supported across the political spectrum before the opportunistic ideologues saw that the old-fashioned “law and order” rhetoric (which is increasingly neither) tested well in focus groups.

Growing wealth and opportunity has proven to be the best crime-reduction strategy. States and the federal government have too often gotten in the way. (Tennessee’s legislature is the most lurid example, undercutting newly thriving, fast-growing Nashville at every turn. It tried to halve its governing council, and tried to throw out city legislators who pushed gun-safety legislation after mass shootings. Nashville is responsible for 40 percent of Tennessee’s GDP but try telling that to power-grabbing legislators.)

“Courts do harm”

By focusing entirely on enforcement, The Trump Administration misses the fact that the justice system isn’t set up to deal with the kind of street crime that people most fear, concluded a public defender in Seattle, Lisa Daugaard, who is the co-director of policy at the nonprofit Purpose Dignity Action (PDA). “The most commonly charged felony crime is drugs, usually low-level possession and dealing,” Daugaard explained to me in an interview. She founded Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD), a program of intensive case management that addresses not just addiction or offending but the drivers of such behavior.

Diversion into intensely managed programs that address substance abuse and trauma related to domestic abuse, avoids the cycle of arrest, charges, and detention or prison for people with mental-health maladies that often intertwine with substance abuse, and who may be homeless. It is a widely admired program that has gone national.

Police can do empathetic outreach, she says, but “I don’t think you can convert courts to being helpful to peoples’ recovery,” adding, “It raises the deepest questions about the enormous superstructure of lawyers who exist far from the reality of the street.” LEAD tries to keep people out of the justice system because, she says, “It does harm,” an assessment shared by many crime-reduction groups. Recovery and change are not possible in jails or in a probation and court system that is “traumatizing and disruptive and not clinically competent in how people recover.” She adds, “It’s also very expensive.”

Understanding that fear mongering is effective with voters, urban leaders need to focus on meeting peoples’ concerns and helping them understand the effectiveness of these alternatives to militarized law enforcement.

They should emphasize:

• Keeping kids in schools that understand their needs undercuts the pipeline to crime

• Violence interruptors teaching de-escalation (to youth and police) reduces violent encounters

• Programs that successfully reduce drug use and address substance abuse reduce crime

• Successfully addressing street homelessness reduces the sense of disorder that drives fear of crime and enables crime

• Diverting drug, homeless, and trauma offenders from a court system that can only mete out punishment is more effective at lower cost

None of this is enough for the bellicose ideologues lobbing rhetorical bombs from their comfortable country clubs. One called urban crime-prevention programs “milquetoast promises” and “toothless social programs,” while offering no specifics about why they don’t work. The far right swoons over the macho posturing and performative militarized policing. But the country needs to do better than return to a past that wasted too many billions and ruined too many lives to too little effect.

It was only a little more than two years ago that the historic and much-loved town of Lahaina on the western coast of Maui was torched by a wildfire propelled by high winds. It is a uniquely difficult place in which to rebuild but modular construction—an innovation perpetually seeking scale and never quite getting there—has begun to come to the rescue. How it was done, how it helped Lahaina, and why its lessons may well go unlearned is explained in this story I wrote for the New York Times.

Disaster is such an everyday occurrence that the 33 large uncontained fires currently raging across the US merit hardly a mention in most media. But the ones that hit communities hard leave behind the excruciatingly difficult task of rebuilding—made worse by high building costs, a lack of builders in many places, and too few financial tools to bridge inadequate insurance payouts.

I was not able to go to Hawaii to write this story so I had a lot of help in attempting to capture what it is like in Lahaina. (My brother, Joe, and his wife, Cheryl, drove to Kilohana when they were visiting to verify that the photos reflect reality, for example.) But I also really appreciated this Times story that shows the touching, painstaking commitment to rescuing the very few culturally important artifacts that survived the fire. It captures a unique local spirit I could not hope to reflect from thousands of miles away. I’ll get there someday.

Stay tuned if you benefit from stories like this. There’s much more interest these days as supposed “safe havens” from climate-change effects have proven to be chimerical. I have covered disaster rebuilding in many cities—it usually begins long after the immediate flood of volunteers has ebbed, and reporters have moved on to new horrors. I have also looked at projects that strive to adapt communities to future disasters, protecting Staten Island, New York, for example, and the polluted Gowanus neighborhood in Brooklyn.

It is impossible to overstate the foolhardiness of going backward on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions—as now seems to be national policy bulldozed into place by clueless ideologues. Plenty of heartbreak is already baked in, but do we really have to invite more wildfires and other disasters?

Catering to the whims of the unhinged President and the craven opportunism of his minions is simply not an option in much of the country and so I am working to bring a couple of timely stories to the media outlets I write for or this column.

If these topics are important to you please subscribe and share with friends and colleagues. Paid subscribers help support this work—thank you!

Is it really coincidental that turning the city of Venice into a catering hall in service to the marriage of Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez happened just as the passage of the huge US tax and spending bill by Congress became inevitable?

Only in a world where a mob of the monied was supremely confident in the future of their wealth and power would the billionaires of tech and finance along with wealthy celebrities dare rub the noses of the world in such a spectacle of superyachts, helicopters, bulbous jewels, ultra-luxe fashion, and parties of royal splendor. This is not a couple who are defined by the good deeds they have done nor their philanthropic generosity but simply by the pots of money that Bezos has made.

Big and beautiful its proponents called the inflation-bloating tax cuts and dubious billions in new spending passed by Republicans, but if it was so lovely to behold, why was it hustled through with next to no debate in a week that many people hoped for a holiday respite from the drumbeat of political outrages? Stuffed with gifts to monied people and companies while snatching wealth and opportunity from ordinary earners and people with the least means, the threats to any senator or representative who questioned such repellent priorities shows that the centimillionaires and billionaires seeking even greater riches are in charge.

Like so many others, I have asked why Republicans who have been skeptical if not outright appalled by the bill’s provisions did not belatedly develop a spine but have instead taken the knee and let this bill pass.

That’s easy for me to say. I am not threatened by the same billionaires and their minions who have made it clear that naysaying members of Congress will pay a heavy price to their election prospects, not to mention their personal reputations and perhaps the security of their families, if they did not sign on.

This bill was rushed through before most Americans could take in its implications. (Though, apparently, it polls badly, even among those who will not be made destitute by the lack of ability to pay for food and healthcare.)

For those who want to understand the bill’s effects, the New York Times has published a list of how the dozens of provisions will affect different people, and also this story which usefully categorizes the giveaways and take backs. This grab-bag of tax benefits is beautiful to the lobbyists adept enough to get their wish-list items into the bill since many, if not most of its provisions would not pass if offered and debated by the whole Congress separately. (Many of the most egregious giveaways are found under the category of “other tax provisions.”) Thus, for most of us, much is ugly. I highlight a few areas that deserve more attention.

Homes will be even less affordable

The big costs of the bill are in the much-touted tax cuts but note that they include lucrative rewards for real-estate investors. The favoritism to real estate drives investment dollars into the housing market that would not naturally go there. Lushly rewarded corporate investors and private equity don’t build for any but the luxury market while buying up housing that would otherwise be available to families hoping to buy for shelter. (More on this here.) That will keep housing out of reach for anyone who is not affluent. The massive debt incurred by the bill may also push interest rates up should the foreign investors that buy much of America’s debt get skittish over just how irresponsible the level of US debt has become. Higher interest rates are a bane for shelter buyers.

Instead of worsening the supply of housing, the bill’s great size could have significantly addressed America’s housing shortfall—a major issue to voters last November, and one that Trump and the rightists in Congress pledged to fix.

Killing Green Industry

As many have pointed out, eliminating clean energy subsidies and tax credits will kneecap clean technologies, a key future-focused economic sector, in the process dirtying air and water and delaying action on climate change that will inflict extra pain in coming decades. That cannot be forgotten or forgiven. (I find myself turning to “Heated,” a Substack by Emily Atkin that monitors climate-change developments and helps people understand the implications of policy.)

Failing to consistently enable clean technologies has ceded innovation to other countries. It’s not just about solar and wind, though that’s all that pundits talk about. America already imports a wide range of products that could have been mainstreamed here: high-efficiency insulation, windows, lighting, heat pumps, batteries, among many others. China’s BYD would wipe out the American electric-car industry but for high tariff barriers.

Why do we keep failing in this way? (Chinese gained solar-panel leadership as Reagan-era cuts in support for solar cleared the way. China’s electric-car leadership sprung from intense focus and strategic support. America could have done that.) These are the industries America needs and could be competitive in, creating high paying jobs in both design and manufacturing. In a searingly competitive world, it won’t happen by accident.

The Trump nostalgists are obsessed with obsolete tech, like coal, shipbuilding, and steelmaking that don’t make economic sense—not to mention environmental sense—in America anymore. Instead we will see the economic and cost-saving benefits of the clean-energy economy drain rapidly out of America to other countries not blinded by ideology.

Killing Aspiration

Student loan limitations will cause more students to defer college even as employers complain that young people are not experienced or well educated enough to be employed in many jobs. This is a mess partly made by states that underfund education, but Congress could have forged a deal that encourages states to do their part.

Somehow the education debate has devolved into how to finance training programs that deliver human automatons to industries too lazy or inept to mentor and teach. Why can’t government reduce barriers to education at every level? Specialized training programs that are applicable to multiple industries should be available to everyone. So should community college, so should college. In recent years, fraudulent “schools” charging high fees for worthless certificates have been snuffed out. Trump (whose own bogus university had to be closed) and Congress have welcomed them back.

Murdering innovation

Through this bill and other means Trump and Congress have produced dramatic reductions in research and development spending on biotech, medical research, epidemic prevention, and vaccines, as well as global economic and health aid related to the “woodchipping” of USAID. This is already shattering the world-leading, globally connected, US hubs of academic, nonprofit, and for-profit innovation that, taken together, has grown an economic sector essential to the future—a sector America led. This cluster is among the US’s largest employers, behind only tech and finance.

This disaster deserves greater attention. The cuts affect high-end elite centers disdained by the Trump/MAGA/Project 25 ideologues in places like Harvard, but also Houston’s gigantic medical-research and treatment complex (entirely a creation of the federal government), and federally enriched state-university academic and medical complexes across the country.

These cuts won’t just hit scientists, but the vast support systems these centers require, the pharma they pioneer, the hospitals and clinics they serve. The cuts will deprive America and the world of needed health diagnostic and treatment tools. People suffering from various neurological diseases despair now that promising research piggybacking on human-genome research and other breakthroughs are being rolled up, with labs closed, and the firing of irreplaceable technicians and post-docs. The enormous economic impact in jobs lost and companies forced to close or layoff staff may quickly become evident.

Wretched Excess

And all this for . . . what? To preserve and enhance the multi-generational wealth of people earning millions per year. The rarified class worth tens of billions realize that they could not possibly spend or give away such vast fortunes in their lifetimes. How would even greater riches matter? Yes, some of the super wealthy underwrite the invention of transformative products and services, or make meaningful philanthropic gifts. Others exploit human labor to expand their fortunes, or deploy unearned wealth for selfish ideological ends or, like the Bezos’s, lavishly spend on orgiastic displays of self aggrandizement. Most pay little in tax already.

It was spectacles akin to the Bezos-Sanchez wedding that turned Americans against the Gilded Age “economic royalists” of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (In those days, millionaires could be more amusing, too: Isabella Stewart Gardner is said to have walked tigers in a zoo on leashes. She danced with gigantic jewels bobbing in her hair.)

Disgust with wealth deployed in excesses of display and in the cruel exploitation of labor led to trust-busting that broke up monopolies in railroads, oil, and steel in the early 20th century. It led to income tax rates on the wealthiest almost double what they pay now. (I read Matt Stoller’s fascinating Substack to see just how pervasive resurgent monopoly is today.)

In 1901, Theodore Roosevelt, no enemy of wealth, saw the power of the Gilded Age monopolists as a threat to democratic rule. Do we understand the same threats today?

Thanks for reading! If you find these posts stimulating, please comment and help others find this Substack by sharing.

Though now headless, the DOGE dragon continues to lay waste as it writhes through the federal government on the trail of alleged waste and fraud. People are catching on to the widespread damage wrought by the carpet bombing, but the work is still applauded by those who believe that the wanton destruction of government capacity will lead to reform.

After all, the last election saw centrist voters shifting to Trump’s radicalism because they were fed up with a “system” that was not working for them. Trump promised to disrupt business as usual—which he has certainly done.

In New York we are days away from local elections in which fabulously expensive and dysfunctional governance is barely on the radar screen. There is no sense of urgency about draconian cuts in federal programs that may be on the way.

Outrageous failures

Democrats and those who reject Trumpist corruption, power-grabbing and vindictiveness, look in vain for candidates who focus on fixing broken systems for housing production and healthcare access—to name two top-of-mind issues. Instead both progressive and moderates make empty promises about the housing they will build or the healthcare they will enhance but they have no roadmap to achieve their goals.

There is much handwringing today that America in general and government in particular “can’t build things.” This is part of the argument New York Times columnist Ezra Klein and Atlantic senior editor Derek Thompson make in their much-discussed book Abundance.They are outraged to find the California high-speed rail project to which billions were committed years ago has gotten just about nowhere. But such boondoggles are not new, they are just being discovered by the liberal pundit class.

New York is one of the serial abusers of capital projects. It presciently bought land and dammed waterways to create one of the most admired water-supply systems in the world—in the 19th century. To backstop its two aging water-delivery tunnels it undertook the construction of a third in 1970, and largely completed it four decades later.

The MTA keeps subways and commuter lines running but spends colossal amounts of money on capital projects, famously $2.5 billion per mile to complete (in 2017) a 1.8-mile section of the Second Avenue subway, a project that began in the 1970s envisioned to serve much of the east side of Manhattan that likely will never be completed.

MTA operates trains with manually operated signals almost a century old. The operators’ bathroom breaks delay thousands. Yet the machinery doesn’t get replaced at speed because dealing with all the old signals is a $3 billion proposition. Making a single station accessible via elevators can cost $20 million. When you accumulate all the items it takes to keep a sprawling rail infrastructure spread over hundreds of square miles operating day in and day out, the costs are simply overwhelming even for a system that serves millions per day.

I could go on.

It’s an outrage. But New York voters have tended to give the endless empty promises by politicians and MTA leadership a pass. How many times have political candidates promised to root out “waste and fraud”—and proceeded to do neither? Hence, pledging to fix government dysfunction typically fails to move voters.

That could be changing.

With widespread unhappiness with government institutions, voters are listening to candidate promises to blow up business as usual. After all, New York’s non-progressive, non-ideological center shifted consistently right in the 2024, giving fresh right-wing faces a shot at fixing things.

The closest to a competence candidate for New York City mayor is Andrew Cuomo, currently fighting it out at the top of the polls with Zorhan Mamdani, a charismatic progressive. As governor, Cuomo bullied the obdurate MTA and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to wrap up long-delayed projects but he did not attack the systemic problems in these agencies and so they continue to underperform. (Mamdani overpromises with little evidence that he can deliver.)

Why so slow? Why so expensive?

I joined the New York City Department of Design and Construction in 2015 in part because I wanted to learn both how government works and how it fails. DDC’s responsibilities stretch across a vast landscape of buildings and infrastructure. It engineers major water and sewer projects, renovates roads as well as building and remodeling structures serving some 20 agencies, homeless shelters and juvenile justice to libraries and senior centers. I joined an organization capable of excellence but its processes continue to be excruciatingly slow and expensive.

I asked why, as so many had before me. The dance a renovation of a community library goes through, for example, is revealing.

First, New York has not one but three library systems and they must pitch their capital construction needs to the city council. That’s assuming there is a rational assessment of their state of repair. (There are 219 branch libraries in NYC.) The council allocates money, never enough.

Negotiations ensue, with DDC often bouncing the project back to the library system until it can get more money. Then a lengthy design process begins, entailing numerous reviews which are supposed to assure compliance with a growing number of mandates from the city council, such as rules about community consultation and minority hiring, energy and climate sensitive design, reviews of esthetic excellence, and so on.

But I saw that the process from inception to move-in lacked clarity. I was looking for a diagram of how projects moved through the numerous steps and approvals. To my astonishment, there was no widely agreed-to roadmap, so projects would sometimes languish in some bureaucratic corner. Units within the organization had overlapping responsibilities and outside budget and legal watchdogs demanded periodic reviews but were not sensitive to how long their reviews would take. Nor did not own up to their lack of expertise, nor the unreasonableness of some requirements. This byzantine maze blurred accountability throughout the process so that issues that should have been resolved months earlier arose during construction—to much costly fingerpointing.

I wondered how anything got built. Actually some quite superb projects were realized but the endless wait for projects sent agencies hunting for faster and cheaper ways to get their projects done. Some were able to develop design and construction expertise in-house, which is duplicative. Others wanted to work through the Economic Development Corporation, which is a quasi-government agency intended to help businesses thrive in New York but has developed a considerable design and construction expertise that does not have to jump through so many hoops. Thus, if a project can make the case that it is advancing economic growth in the city, it can be built by EDC. With its slimmer, more nimble process, it has the capacity to deliver high-quality projects in a reasonable time frame.

The obvious question is: why can’t DDC operate like EDC? The city’s political leadership has never asked that question and so the costly and ineffective delivery of projects goes on.

Businesslike governance?

Simplistically, the answer is to run government agencies like private businesses. The primary difference between government and private businesses, though, is who they serve and how they serve them. Businesses have two straightforward agendas: to make money and to please customers sufficiently that they will come back for more. Effectiveness and success can be relatively easy to measure.

Government agencies are supposed to serve their constituents and stakeholders. These can be many with diverse agendas of their own. A garbage transfer station in Seattle, located where an industrial district transitions to a residential one became subject to a variety of demands by locals: It had to be tucked into a hillside to reduce its visual impact. A small dog-walking park and kids playground and an attractive rain garden to manage stormwater runoff were added to the project. All of these objectives are worthy, and the architect, Mahlum, handsomely fit all these disparate pieces together, but it came at a $108-million cost. A planned police station in the city was cancelled after the cost ballooned, largely attributable to amenities neighbors insisted on.

Effectiveness in government is not always easy to measure—judging the effectiveness of teachers, for example, is perpetually a topic of debate. Projects and initiatives can fall victim to agenda creep (as happened in Seattle), to legislative whim, and official neglect. If elected official are not clarifying the mission of agencies, demanding that they work effectively by defined criteria, and then holding them accountable, the agencies can lose their way or become subject to special-interest capture.

This said, DOGE is not at all concerned about effectiveness or capacity to do the jobs we ask of government. It is purely disruptive, often driven by ideology, intended to make government subservient to the president (when not being looted by those who have bought favor from the Trump administration). DOGE does not know how to fix anything, as we are all painfully learning.

Is there another way? Well you could do what conservative politicians often do: Deep six entire departments and entire tasks—the most appealing targets being agencies and initiatives that serve low-income voters or have diffuse functions where stakeholders have trouble coalescing to lobby for their cause.

Conservative competence?

Give the small-government conservatives credit for their focus on low taxes and low costs, though voters may also be letting them off too easy. Conservatives spend big on law enforcement, jails, and prisons, but too often lack the low crime statistics to show for it. (Permissive gun regulations contribute to mayhem and enrich private prison operators. Prisons and jails are pretty terrible everywhere because they can’t recruit high quality officers. New York’s Rikers Island has been a death sentence for detainees who have not even by convicted of a crime.

Conservative states tend to underspend on education and so can’t recruit the well-educated entrepreneurs that have powered the economies of knowledge hub cities. Instead they lavish taxpayer dollars on an assortment of giveaways intended to lure businesses from costlier locations. There can be little analysis of whether those businesses deliver promised jobs or spur economic flywheels.

Conservatives can also be adept at bureaucratic tactics that suppress use of expensive government services. It is now widely understood that work requirements proposed for recipients of Medicaid are really a method to drive people off the rolls by burying them in time-wasting documentation. (Though it must be said that such tactics are used by so-called progressive governments to reduce use of expensive services as well.)

Moving the needle

If progressives and moderates are going to advocate for government programs and institutions, work has to be done. The last mayor to truly move the needle on government sclerosis in New York was Michael Bloomberg, who left office in 2013. He chose carefully from best practices that had worked for his eponymous media and data company (which I worked for as an architecture critic for several years) and applied them to increase the impact of government. He looked for the most talented people he could find and told them to do what it takes to deliver services better and more efficiently.

Those leaders attracted talent to the city that would previously have gone elsewhere. He required agencies in love with their silos to work together on issues in common and brought into the 21st century the city’s antiquated data management and IT infrastructure. At last, effectiveness could be measured!

Thus Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik Kahn could open up thinking on city streets by piloting programs, like protected bike lanes and other street improvements, with little more than paint. Planning Commissioner Amanda Burden could lead large-scale rezoning to accommodate more housing faster.

I found many people at DDC dedicated to the mission and to public service, but frequently frustrated by the sclerosis that prevailed in spite of Bloomberg efforts. These are people who know how to do the job better, and need to be asked how to do it. Other stakeholders are ready to help too. Making an effort to drill deeper into government dysfunction is utterly unsexy politically, but voters must insist on it. Once underway lots of low-hanging fruit will promptly appear in a well-managed restructuring. These victories that can then be used to leverage clout to address the most hidebound, most politically powerful resisters of change.