Thom Mayne’s misanthropic 2005 Nancy Pelosi Federal Building in San Francisco

Back in 2020, the first Trump Administration put out an executive order, “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” that made “classical” the default style for federal buildings. (Biden revoked it in February 2021.)

My suggestion at the time was that rather than demand all federal buildings look Greek or Roman, just ban styles from after 1945, the Year Zero of architecture. After all, there are lots of other great pre-1945 styles such as Art Deco and Collegiate Gothic that have long made Americans feel good. As Tom Wolfe pointed out in I Am Charlotte Simmons, conspicuous consumption in architecture to which you have rightful access makes you feel good.

But many ambitious architects hate the idea that the government won’t pay them to build giant new buildings in fashionable new styles, such as the recent fad for randomly placing windows to make the building look like a 1965 IBM punch card.

Six years later, the Trump Administration finally has some digital renderings of what they have been talking about: the GSA released mock-ups of a planned federal courthouse in Chattanooga, TN:

Granted, architects’ conception imagery usually imagine their design around sunset on June 1 with well-dressed pedestrians enjoying the 72 degree weather. Heck, there are probably a few dozen hours per year in which even the 1968 Boston City Hall isn’t a Giant Downer for everyone within eyesight of it.

HOK architects, however, also included a winter rendering,

which also looks nice. (Still, fresh snowfalls like this probably only happen a few times per year in Chattanooga. I would like to see a mandate that all renderings must include one of what the building would look like at noon on a gloomy January 31 with no snow having fallen for a week.)

Its supporters call the style Greco-Deco, for its hybrid combination of ancient structure with a flash of lavish pre-1929 stock market crash ornamentation.

It’s an evolution of the style of Chattanooga’s existing Joel Solomon federal courthouse, which was completed in 1933:

Wikipedia writes of the old building:

In 1938 the building was recognized by the American Institute of Architects as one of the 150 finest buildings constructed in the previous twenty years in the United States, and it was featured in an AIA photographic exhibit in America and Europe. …

The building is a notable example of the Art Moderne style as employed for government buildings in the 1930s. The form and details recall the classicism of earlier government architecture but take a stylized form here seen in sleek lines, a vertical emphasis, and plant, animal, and geometric decorative motifs. Several of the motifs, such as eagles and stars, evoke patriotic associations that are particularly appropriate for a federal building. The five-story building has a steel structure clad in white marble. …

The building has elegant interior features and finishes consistent with the Art Moderne style while incorporating motifs suitable for a federal building. The entrance foyers and the lobby have their original chandeliers and marble walls and inlaid marble floors in chevron and star patterns. The lobby ceiling is bordered with bands set with stars. The entry foyer ceilings take the form of shallow domes set with a stylized star pattern. The lobby contains the original postal sales windows with ornate aluminum grilles and fittings, as well as original postal counters. Dark-veined marble staircases with ornate metal railings lead to the upper stories from the entrance foyers. The Mail Carrier, a cast-aluminum sculpture by Leopold Scholz, was installed in the postal lobby in 1938….

The ceremonial courtroom is located on the third story. The courtroom lobby has marble walls and a terrazzo floor with an inlaid seal of justice. The courtroom is paneled in oak enhanced by decorative aluminum grilles. The judge’s bench is a masterpiece of cabinetry. A mural called “Allegory in Chattanooga” curves behind the judge’s bench. Installed in 1937, it was painted by Hilton Leech under the auspices of the Treasury Department’s Section of Painting and Sculpture. The mural illustrates the history of the city through the New Deal era and includes a transmission tower symbolizing the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), headquartered in Chattanooga from its inception in 1935. …

Anyway, it is by all accounts a nice building, representative of one of my favorite looks — the 1930s insistence that with a Depression on, were not going to waste the taxpayer’s hard-earned money, but we’ll still build something you won’t be ashamed to show your grandkids.

But now it’s too small. Also, it wasn’t designed with modern know-how about how to keep prisoners from causing trouble while being transported into and out of courtrooms.

But, it’s a historical landmark, so it can’t be torn down. So the GSA will likely move some non-judicial federal workers into it after the new courthouse opens.

The new courthouse, in contrast, curves and has more expensive Art Deco windows. The message I draw from the two designs is: We appreciate our pre-1945 architectural tradition, and now we can afford some flourishes that weren’t appropriate in 1933 at the bottom of the Depression.

So, the new Greco-Deco design appears to be a good start, which is outraging …

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