Amongst all the bizarre dystopian proclamations current US president Donald Trump has made in the first few weeks of his second term in office, most peculiar to me was his executive order ‘Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture’. Forsaking brevity, here’s a direct excerpt of what this order dictates:
I hereby direct the Administrator of the General Services Administration, in consultation with the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy and the heads of departments and agencies of the United States where necessary, to submit to me within 60 days recommendations to advance the policy that Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.
This entire proclamation baffled me at first- though regional and traditional seem the standard republican rhetorical fare ‘classical’ is untoward (so Ancient Rome/Greece?), as is ‘ennoble’. Most odd to me, however, was the notion of the architecture as a form of somewhat Foucauldian state control, whereby the constructions erected across the state somehow contribute to both the efficacy of its government and its ‘beauty’. One of my recent reads tread a similar ground- The Pyramid by Ismail Kadare is a satirical pseudo historical novella that makes clear to readers that the titular architectural phenomenon in question is principally a tool of state subjugation, an abstracted ideal built up not only to purposefully drain overly-rebellious peasant farmers of their money in time but to simultaneously ensure their total devotion to the Pharaoh as the to-be-entombed pyramid inhabitant.
Whether or not Kadare’s brief tale is historically accurate to the exact ambitions of the Ancient Egyptian architects is beside the case - rather, I am enthralled by the idea of architecture as politics, of building spaces as sites of governmental contest.
Take, for instance, the cityscape I grew up in of Kuala Lumpur Malaysia; vastly different from Scotland’s sprawling plains and moors, KL looks like a city straight out of Isaac Asimov with its needle-strewn horizon of towers upon towers and its chaotic mishmash of differing modern architectural patterns that not only alienates the buildings just from each other but turns its spectators alien themselves, forcing to struggle crossed-eyed at the city’s haphazard architectural flourishes like so many cracks in a diamond. Though, admittedly, this perspective on KL is a very subjective one, personal to me and probably not shared by all who come face to face with it, the unease its cityscape inspires in me is somewhat corroborated by academics like Yat Ming Loo whose book ‘Architecture and Urban Form in Kuala Lumpur’ conducts an in-depth study contrasting the architecture of KL when it was under the aegis of British colonisation and today. According to Loo, contemporary Malaysian architecture ‘reproduces colonial identification’, both in retaining and preserving the architectural remnants of colonisation, such as those startlingly out-of-place English buildings left in Penang and Malacca that I was made to visit on many a school field trip, but also in using its newer architectural creations as signifiers of an exclusive national religious pride that excludes certain races/peoples currently living within its diverse populus.
Yet, perhaps I am being too harsh- perhaps Malaysia only retains the buildings of its plunderers out of objective architectural appreciation? Perhaps the behemoth skyscrapers of today unsettle me not because they symbolise some vague Malaysian nationalism, but because they are just another reminder of how abstracted city spaces have become from the natural world - just more brutal evidence of the deteriorating impact architectural work across the globe has had in devolving our world’s climate and soiling its forests and seas?
Last semester I had the lovely opportunity to audit a class in Sustainable Development and found it to be a refreshingly new and exciting experience; most particularly interesting was the attitudes of my fellow students who, unlike me, a boring rotten English & Philosophy major with my head in my books and my eyes seeing JSTOR articles even whilst closed, had an untoward connection with the natural world around them that sparked envy in me. The day that the results of the 2024 American presidential election were revealed, many American SD classmates of mine shared how they ran to the sea, to green spaces on campus and, generally, to places ensconced in nature, to cope with the depressing and foreboding news.
It is thus that I feel, though interestingly politically-inflected at times and possibly a tool of colonial oppression and used as such even to this day, whatever contemporary architecture is and can be falters in the face of the nature world around us it has contributed to destroying, disallowing me from building a connection with nature that, due to my urban upbringing, was forbidden. Despite its encroaching devolution, still I yearn to be at one with the trees and the moors like a Victorian novel protagonist or Romantic poet, and no urban architectural space, in my opinion, will ever exist in such harmony with the human spirit as the natural world- a place so connected to our evolutionary history that it remains an instant recuperative and medication to so many struggling individuals, even today.
To end, here is a poem, inspired by Donald Trump’s inanity, the crumbling natural world around me, and the inefficacy of personal poetry at doing anything to combat these unstoppable forces decaying our environs:
Dead Fig Jam
I am standing at the bottom of Plath’s fig tree
Trying my hand at resurrection
Envisioning some hypothetical dead fig jam or chutney
To be entombed in a future jar vase urn
And loom over my predecessors in 22nd century art museums
But fig trees can’t grow in graveyards
And my lawn is too small and too ugly - the laughing stock of the neighbourhood
So the soil turns playdough dog shit in my hands
And the post novel post literary post art world garden of grass I scribble in
Climate change astroturfs
Into another Mar-a-Lago golf course