The executive order President Trump recently issued that calls for classical architecture to be the preferred style for all federal buildings and U.S. courthouses bears the imposing character and signature of the former real estate developer. But the order itself is the product of the single-minded persistence of one man: Justin Shubow.

Shubow, who runs a small Washington, D.C., nonprofit advocacy group known as the National Civic Art Society, has been waiting for this moment for years. Since joining the NCAS in 2011, Shubow has been telling anyone who will listen that the architecture of American democracy has been subverted for the past 75 years by an elite architectural aesthetic that flies in the face of public preference. 

Modernist architecture, Shubow argues, has become the de facto standard for new federal buildings, despite the fact that the Founding Fathers established a tradition of using classical architecture in federal buildings. 

“The core buildings of government in the United States are classical,” he says during a video call in early August, pointing to the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and the Supreme Court, among others. “I think it is inarguable that classical architecture is the architecture Americans most associate with our democracy.”

Shubow’s efforts started to pay off in 2020, when President Trump issued an executive order in December of that year, calling for classical and loosely-defined “traditional” architecture to be the default style of federal buildings in Washington, D.C. By that time, Trump had already lost the November election, and while the order rankled many in the architecture community, they didn’t have to worry for long. President Joe Biden revoked the order just two months later.

The new executive order, drafted by Shubow, calls for essentially the same things as the first one. And because it’s been issued on the early side of Trump’s second term, it could end up affecting the designs of at least some federal courthouses and office buildings in the government’s near-term development pipeline.

As it did during Trump’s first term, the American Institute of Architects has come out in opposition to the executive order. “This directive would replace thoughtful design processes with rigid requirements that will limit architectural choice,” the AIA said in a statement urging the administration to rescind the order. “Each era of America’s architectural legacy has honored the past while addressing contemporary needs through diverse design solutions. Restricting federal architecture options to styles from antiquity ignores this natural evolution and limits our freedom to create buildings that truly serve modern communities.”

Shubow has finally gotten what he wants. But some worry it may come at the cost of limiting architectural expression at the highest levels. Rather than cementing classical buildings as the architecture of democracy, it could end up forever aligning the style as yet another signifier of Trump’s divisive MAGA movement.

What the NCAS wants from the executive order

The National Civic Art Society was founded in 2002 as a nonpartisan organization made up of architects, urban planners, historians, philosophers, democracy advocates, and critics. It was meant to beat the drum for classical architecture, a historicist style of architecture with roots in ancient times, succinctly characterized by lots of columns and pediments. 

In addition to ancient Greek structures and the widespread architectural influence of the Roman Empire, many of the most well-known examples of classical architecture are prominent government and court buildings scattered across the U.S., with a heavy concentration in the nation’s capital. 

This old style of building is one that many people, especially in the U.S., recognize as a representation of the government and the system of democracy. Deepening that recognition has been the work of the NCAS for nearly a quarter-century.

In many ways, NCAS’s battle is already won. There is no real shortage of classical architecture in the world, whether ancient examples or modern forms in present-day democracies. But it is inarguably an older style of architecture in a field that often prides itself on pushing new ideas and forms, with practitioners who see their work as a mix of art and science. 

For many architects, innovative design does not involve buildings that look like they were designed thousands of years ago. Accordingly, the designers who have sought out commissions for federal buildings in recent decades have proposed buildings that largely lean away from the touchstones of classical architecture. 

In recent years, this trend has become the focal point of the NCAS. Shubow has said the predominant federal architecture trend of the mid-20th century onward has been “generic boxes and, to a lesser extent, the steel and glass cages that came to exemplify corporate America and international business.”

“There’s no doubt that modernism is hegemonic within architecture schools and within the profession,” Shubow says. This hegemony has infiltrated the federal government since the 1950s, he argues, exemplified most prominently by the Design Excellence Program, a 1960s-era policy from the federal government’s General Services Administration that set standards for federal buildings.

One section of that policy framework—the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture—says that the development of an official federal architecture style must be avoided and for architects to create their own concepts of what a government building looks like. “Design must flow from the architectural profession to the Government, and not vice versa,” the policy reads. The new executive order reverses that flow.

Shubow says this policy was targeted because it opened the floodgates for modernist designs to take hold in the federal architecture portfolio. Offending examples, according to Shubow, include the brutalist-style J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building (1975) and the Department of Housing and Urban Development headquarters (1968) in Washington, D.C., and the San Francisco Federal Building (2007), designed by Morphosis.

These buildings and many other modern federal buildings feature heavily in the lectures, speeches, and presentations that Shubow has been delivering during his time as president of the NCAS. He often refers to the FBI building as “the ministry of fear” and the San Francisco Federal Building as an “alien spacecraft that’s going to kill you with laser beams.”

He calls his presentation “a very persuasive slideshow” juxtaposing modernist designs with iconic classical buildings like the U.S. Capitol building, the U.S. Supreme Court building, and the White House, as well as historic examples of classicism dating back to Roman times. 

Shubow’s slideshows single out brutalist and deconstructivist modern federal buildings as being oppressive, alien, and dehumanizing. “One thing people have to remember about these brutalist buildings is not just that they have ugly architecture. Many of them are bad urbanism. These super blocks cut off parts of the city from each other,” Shubow says.

Beyond its recent turn as a flashpoint between conservatives and progressives, brutalism has been a divisive architectural style for decades. It emerged in the mid-20th century as structural engineering techniques enabled economical concrete-based buildings to grow bigger and taller.

Postwar architects latched onto the flexibility and expressiveness of designing with poured concrete, leading to what some have called “a golden age” of modernist design. Compared to steel or stone, the lower cost of building with concrete made it a popular material choice for fiscally responsible government buildings in the mid- and late 20th century.

Though some of the resulting brutalist buildings are well loved and even awarded, the style’s use of raw concrete exteriors and imposing forms is often criticized as being cold, sterile, and (at least in postwar America) “Soviet.”

Shubow’s presentations are not subtle in the way they demonize the modernist approach. “It’s fundamentally the photos of the buildings that make the argument,” he says. 

That’s how Shubow and the NCAS got Trump, during his first term, to make classical architecture a part of the presidential agenda, even if only as a parting shot.  

What Trump wants from the executive order

The real estate developer-turned-president would seem to be a natural ally for a building-centric group like NCAS. But Trump’s real estate ventures—from branded luxury towers and gold-themed casinos to a Manhattan hotel project that saw a classically inspired building renovated and covered in a glass facade—show more of a preference for the modern design the NCAS opposes.

Nevertheless, the NCAS managed to get a meeting in the West Wing of the White House with four or five members of the president’s Domestic Policy Council in 2019. Shubow presented his slideshow and made his case. “I explained what had gone wrong with federal architecture and why we needed to do something to reform it,” Shubow says. “It was from that meeting that the idea of an executive order was hatched.”

Shubow says his organization would have been happy to have the same meeting with any of the other presidential administrations over the past 24 years. “We’re like any advocacy organization that has policy ideas and brings them to the White House to be implemented,” Shubow says. “We have promoted our ideas, and they have been accepted.”

Shubow and the NCAS drafted what would become Trump’s December 2020 executive order titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.”

The timing of the first executive order during Trump’s lame duck period following his losing reelection bid in 2020 suggests that his interest in the subject was more concerned with stirring up controversy than pursuing policy. One source, speaking on background, says White House insiders saw the heated response to the executive order as proof of its worth.

The White House press office did not respond to multiple interview requests.

In his second term, Trump has embraced buildings as cultural flashpoints. The White House recently focused on the renovation of the classical-style Federal Reserve headquarters as a pretense to have Fed Chair Jerome Powell fired before his term ends. Trump also followed through on a campaign platform to move the FBI headquarters out of the brutalist Hoover building.

He’s also spearheaded several major changes to the White House, including the paving of the Rose Garden and the recently announced plan to build a 90,000-square-foot neoclassical ballroom. This second executive order on a preferred federal architectural style is a continuation of this trend, and appears primed to sow division.

Shubow calls it a straightforward display of populism. “I don’t think that a new executive order like the one President Trump previously issued should be controversial to normal people,” he says. “Sure, architectural elites are going to oppose it.”

A childhood hatred

The NCAS got an unexpectedly ideal leader when Shubow joined the group. He says he’s been very sensitive to the built environment for his entire life. “I remember hating a brutalist public library, even as a child,” he says. Located in his hometown of Towson, Maryland, the 1974 building is a concrete complex made up of bold geometric forms. For Shubow, it was an affront.

Yet, Shubow is neither a designer nor an architect. He earned a master’s degree in philosophy in 2004 from the University of Michigan, where he was exposed to the English philosopher Roger Scruton, who was known, among other things, for his focus on conservatism and a harsh stance against modernist architecture. 

Shubow later got a law degree from Yale and moved to Washington, D.C. Before relocating, he says he learned about NCAS after chatting about classical architecture with a fellow guest at a wedding. Since becoming the group’s president in 2014, he’s taken on the full-time role of arguing for classical architecture and against modernist architecture.

He says not being a designer is one of the strengths he brings to NCAS, comparing his outsider’s view to that of Jane Jacobs, whose work challenged the status quo of city planning in the 1950s. “She demonstrated that an entire profession can essentially be mistaken,” Shubow says. “I was never brainwashed into the ideology of modernism. Given my training in philosophy, I think I’m quite good at recognizing bogus arguments. And there is a lot of B.S. underlying architectural theory today.”

Shubow’s approach can be aggressive, especially for an organization whose focus is the seemingly urbane realm of aesthetics and culture. For the NCAS, the approach seems to be working. Since becoming president of the NCAS, the organization has seen its annual budget and contributions steadily increase, with a sharp jump in both contributions and in Shubow’s compensation in 2022 and 2023, the most recent year for which IRS filings are available.

Shubow declined to offer details on contributors to the organization. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the group is not required to disclose its contributors, but many similar organizations typically rely heavily on support from their own boards. One NCAS board member since 2019 is the billionaire Thomas Klingenstein, who gave more than $10 million to the Trump campaign during the 2024 election. Wherever the money is coming from, the group’s leadership sees it paying off.

“Justin has been successful because he knows the issues and he’s tenacious,” says Marion Smith, an NCAS board member who served as the group’s chairman from 2012 to 2022. He tells Fast Company via email that during his tenure, he defended Shubow from two separate “coup attempts” that sought to remove him from the organization’s leadership. “Some people criticized him, but my response always was: Yes, he’s a bulldog. But he’s our bulldog.” 

The dilemma of political convenience

Though Shubow has now succeeded twice in elevating the mission of the NCAS to the level of presidential intervention, there are some who worry that linking the cause of classical architecture so closely to Trump is a mistake. The style already carries what many would call an unfair association with conservatism. Having it be part of Trump’s platform was enough for at least one NCAS member to revoke his support for the organization.

Steven Semes practiced classical architecture for more than 30 years and is now a professor at the University of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture. He’s in agreement with Shubow that the federal government has, for too long, been closed off to classical architecture. He was an early and enthusiastic supporter of the NCAS. “Until Trump came along,” he says. “For someone who loves classical architecture and also happens to be a political liberal—as I am and as many of my colleagues are—it really does pose a dilemma.”

Semes says he urged the organization to be cautious about the risks of making classical architecture an extension of Trump’s divisive presidency and tarnishing its merits. “I’m angry that people will see the Trump embrace of classical architecture and they will say, ‘See, we told you that classical architecture is fascistic, and this proves it,’” he says. “As some of us pointed out in the first Trump administration, when the first executive order came out, you very well may set back the movement for classical architecture. This could have a very negative impact on what we’ve worked for for decades.”

Putting aside his own politics, Semes says that it should be clear that Trump’s focus on classical architecture is hardly genuine. He says the Trump administration is simply using its executive orders to stoke a culture war, pitting his own followers against establishment elites.

Shubow doesn’t dispute some of the impetus. “I think [Trump] saw this as a winning issue. That this is an issue about ordinary people versus a kind of elite, and that elite being the architectural profession,” he says.

Architectural styles, though, are almost totally beside the point. “If you want to know what the MAGA movement thinks of classical architecture, you can see how they treated the U.S. Capitol on January 6th,” Semes says about the violent storming of the historic landmark building in 2021. “Obviously, what it meant to them was, it’s the headquarters of everything they hated. But when I look at the U.S. Capitol, I have an opposite opinion.”

Policy and legacy

Shubow is not fazed by the dilemma of pursuing the mission of the NCAS through political convenience. “It has been a goal of my organization to bring this issue to national attention,” he says. Two executive orders, a presidential memorandum on classical architecture issued on the first day of Trump’s second term, plus Shubow’s appointment to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts from 2018 to 2021 equate to a certain degree of validation.

The NCAS was once close to achieving a more substantial version of its goals than the revocable proclamation of an executive order. In 2023, the group successfully convinced then-Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) to sponsor the Beautifying Federal Civic Architecture Act, followed by a version introduced in the Senate by then-Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. Both bills floundered, but Shubow is hopeful for binding legislation this time around. (Banks now represents Indiana in the Senate, and Rubio is the secretary of state. Banks’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

Policy change could be coming soon, affecting new federal buildings in the pipeline and those to be built in the future. The day after Trump’s second federal architecture executive order, Rep. Kevin Kiley (R-CA) announced he’d be introducing a bill in the House to “return our federal buildings to classical/traditional architecture that reflects the spirit of democracy and self-government.”

The new architecture executive order may not live past this current presidential administration, or it could get translated into legislation with a more viable path to approval. Either way, it could end up influencing at least some of the federal building portfolio in the years ahead, which includes a handful of federal courthouses and annex buildings in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Hartford, Connecticut. 

According to Shubow, just a few new buildings could be enough to show that the last 75 years of modernist design have been a mistake. “If we get beautiful, inspiring new federal courthouses and office buildings and contrast them to what had been built previously,” he says, “I think people will see that the president was right.”