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Classical or Modern Architecture? For Americans, It’s No Contest

Classical or Modern Architecture? For Americans, It’s No Contest

Oct 14, 2020 2 mins, 9 secs

The neoclassical headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, D.C., is what a federal building should look like, according to a new poll. .

The survey, conducted by The Harris Poll, asked more than 2,000 Americans to consider seven pairs of images, most of them side-by-side photographs of various federal buildings — one classical in design, the other more modern-looking.

courthouse or federal office building?” asked the survey, which was organized by the National Civic Art Society, a nonprofit that promotes classical approaches to architecture and urbanism.

For example, the William Jefferson Clinton Federal Building — designed by Beaux-Arts architects William Adams Delano and Chester Holmes Aldrich and home to the Environmental Protection Agency — easily handled the Robert C.

Weaver Federal Building, designed by modernist architect Marcel Breuer as headquarters for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Poll respondents overwhelmingly preferred the 1935 building and its Classical Revival arcade to the 1968 curve of concrete with its Brutalist aesthetic — 81% to 19%.

The National Civic Art Society poll follows a failed effort earlier this year by classicists to move an executive order to the Resolute Desk to “Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.” A draft of this White House mandate, which leaked in February but stalled before it received the president’s signature, would have required all new federal buildings and courthouses to be built in a classical or traditional style.

“This is very strong reason for thinking that a bipartisan majority of Americans would support a reorientation of federal architecture in a classical and traditional direction,” says Justin Shubow, president for the National Civic Art Society.

Shubow was appointed by President Donald Trump to the Commission of Fine Arts, an independent federal agency that oversees design decisions in the nation’s capital, and he has long worked to push American architecture in a more traditional direction.

The new survey is the first to take America’s temperature on architecture since a 2007 poll by the American Institute of Architects, which asked some 2,200 people to rank their favorite 150 buildings in the U.S.

Despite the group’s pro-classical bent, Shubow says that the National Civic Art Society took pains to make this a fair fight, matching up related structures “to make them apples to apples.” That meant pairing buildings of similar scope designed by architects of the same stature.

Courthouse and Custom House, built in 1932 in Louisville, Kentucky, outmatched the Hammond Federal Courthouse, designed in 2002 by Pei Cobb Fried & Partners for Hammond, Indiana, 81% to 19%.

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