Shortly after President-elect Donald Trump announced his 2024 presidential bid, the former and now future president released some preliminary policy objectives. Among them, Trump promised that, if put back in office, his administration would undertake efforts to get rid of ugly public buildings and beautify American cities. This week on The Signal Sitdown, my guest was someone who can, and already has in the previous Trump administration, help the next president deliver on his promise to make America beautiful again.
Justin Shubow is the president of the National Civic Art Society, a nonprofit that promotes the revitalization of classical architecture and art in public works. Shubow previously served on Trump’s U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Intercollegiate Studies Institute President Johnny Burtka mentioned Subow in a recent op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, suggesting he could play a big role in Trump’s beautification agenda.
While some conservatives wish the federal government would mostly get out of the architecture business, Shubow told The Daily Signal that the construction of public buildings is not just inevitable but worthy of more conservative resources. “Great architecture can inspire people to be better people, to be patriots, to be better citizens,” Shubow said. When conservatives aren’t involved in this process, public architecture and art “can be subversive and be demoralizing.”
“Conservatives and indeed all Americans need to care about design,” Shubow said. “If our architecture and public art is done right, I think it’s absolutely a good use of taxpayer dollars.”
Shubow illustrated the point using courthouse architecture. “If people go to a courthouse and feel like it’s a place where they’re going to get justice, they’re going to be better behaved, they’re going to have greater trust in the legal system.”
“Winston Churchill gave a speech on the rebuilding of the House of Commons after it had been bombed in World War II, and he famously said, ‘we shape our buildings, thereafter they shape us.’” Shubow continued. “He was a statesman and he understood the role of architecture for the body politic.”
Churchill undersood, in Shubow’s opinion, that “it’s no small matter for a government to support art and architecture that redounds to the greatness of the country. This is something that Theodore Roosevelt talked about, who was actually quite interested in art and architecture. He said a national greatness that does not include art and artistic and architectural greatness is only a malformed greatness.”
The government’s involvement in building beautiful public works goes back to the founding era.
“The Founders always knew that the built environment of the United States of America was going to be crucial for the Republic’s flourishing,” Shubow explained. “Both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were talented architects, I mean amateurs, but in Jefferson’s case, he was an actual genius.”
“Both Washington and Jefferson, when designing Washington and the core buildings of government, wish to harken back to democratic Athens and Republican Rome. And that’s why they consciously chose classical architecture,” Shubow suggested. “It was a kind of cultural independence from British colonial architecture.”
“I mean, I think it’s fair to say that when Americans think of the architecture of democracy, they think of classical architecture. It is the architecture of civic virtue,” Shubow added.
Since the world wars, however, something has gone greatly wrong for Western architecture. Shubow credits this collapse in classical design to “radical ideolog[ies]” that swept Europe.
“If you go back to the birth of modernist architecture after World War I in Europe, those architects were trying to achieve a revolution in the social order. They did think that their society had self-destructed, and they were drawn to extreme ideologies on the Left, whether it’s communism or socialism, and on the Right, fascism and even Nazism. These were not defenders of liberal democracy. They had this radical ideology.”
But it’s not too late for America to return to the Founders’ vision of public architecture. “We used to build beautiful public buildings, and we should do so again.” Shubow believes, under Trump’s leadership, that idea is catching fire. “The 2024 GOP platform specifically said that Republicans will promote beauty in public buildings and build cherished symbols of the nation.”
“So this has gone very wide and President Trump should take all the credit for it,” Shubow concluded.
