Looking onliune all I tend to see is modern Neo-Classical architecture associated with the Alt-Right. Do liberals like Neo-Classical architecture? I so why? If not, why not? I’m asking this question because architecture has become overly politicised.
It’s not about what Liberals think or like, it’s the alt-right picking modern architecture as another thing to hate. In part due to their fetishizing of “western cultural heritage”.
In this world view the past was near perfect and trying to improve on it, or discussing its bad elements, or how a lot of X-history (where X is practically anything, architecture, geography, geology, archaeology, literature) has, historically, been Euro/US-centric. At most there’s a seed in liberal views on plantations and plantation architecture. Some liberals reject that esthetic due to its connotations and the alt-right consider that an unfair attack on slave holding, sorry, on a completely innocent and perfect style of architecture.
I was also thinking along those lines but also that Neo-classicaj architecture has a whiff of elitism to it that liberals reject and the reactionary alt-right gravitate towards.
Fascists have always been obsessed with / influenced by classical architecture: Not Just Hitler and Mussolini: Neo-Nazis Love Neoclassical Architecture too – Pharos
A core component of fascism / the alt right is the politicization of aesthetics. However, being that they hate most contemporary art and artists, they have fewer sources of art to draw from. They glorify a mythic past, so they run back the Roman stuff.
(This is not saying that neoclassical art is inherently fascist, but if someone insists on the classics as the pinnacle of art and architecture and disdains art produced by minority groups… that’s a tell.)
I like it. I’m somewhere to the left of what seems to be considered liberal in the current USA.
But it’s not the only architectural style that I like, and I think people trying to insist that everything, or all public buildings, be built like that are being somewhere between silly and totalitarian. Or possibly being both at once.
The 1989 Nova episode Design Wars chronicled the design of the new Harold Washington Library in Chicago. There were five designs considered, most quite modern, but the one chosen by an eleven-member public panel was the typical neoclassical columns and pediments, in spite of much more interesting options. It was a thing even before alt-right became a thing. I highly recommend watching it if you can find it.
I don’t think any architecture since WWII has gained popular approval. Worse, several styles that came out of the interwar period were once supposed to be the in-thing among liberals have since become anathematized, like modernism and brutalism. Post-modernism was once much touted but outside of a few name architects and a few famed buildings never became a true style.
I couldn’t begin to name a modern architectural style. Googling, I find Parametricism, the type of fluid style associated with people like Zaha Hadid. Who does that other than a government with a billion dollars to spare?
Modern architecture is much like modern art. The public loved the few avant garde masters a generation after they were avant, then utterly rejected lesser artists who strove for something new or meta that only theorists could understand or like.
I’ve never heard of a movement of modern neo-classical architecture in America that the alt-right could like and never heard of anyone in the alt-right expressing a preference for any style, although I wouldn’t doubt they loudly dislike stuff they consider leftist. Could the OP give examples?
Trump, as President, signed an executive order to favor neo-classical design for federal buildings, though did not outright ban modern designs. Even at the time, several people expressing the belief there was a bit of dog-whistle involved in this decision as well, for the reasons listed above.
Biden has subsequently canceled the order.
And another article with further links about far-right figures favoring it:
As to the OP, the question of neo-classical architecture as political propaganda has been around a while. The far right’s obsession has roots in Albert Speer, who, as an architect in multiple sense of the word for Hitler, favored classicism and ‘traditional’ architectural design.
As above, it’s not about ‘liberals’ rejecting neo-classical design (the idea that ‘liberals’ would universally share any such opinion is kind of ridiculous by itself) so much as reactionary conservatives embracing it.
Thanks for the cites. I had forgotten Trump did that.
However, the articles don’t say there is a modern neo-classical style, mostly that the right hates modernism and wants to go back to the Good Old Days when architects were white men.
Hating modernism is fine in and of itself. Far too many modernist buildings are merely showy examples of sculpture; many fail to house the users properly inside the facade. It’s the underlying context that makes the hatred one of “wokeness.”