‘Architecture order demolished’

     

J. Edgar Hoover Building, Washington, DC. Is there a reason why the headquarters of the FBI has to resemble some Eastern Bloc state security ministry?

Executive Order 13967 has been demolished, razed, bulldozed, etc.

That was the document signed in December by then President Donald Trump for the purpose of resetting standards of aesthetics in the designs of certain future federal government buildings. It would have given preference to Classical styles over the shit we have that, for example, looks like it was transplanted from 1972 East Berlin.

Oh well. It was a good idea. (Based on what I’ve seen on social media, I realize that some of you don’t understand how it’s about national identity. The public buildings created for us are expressions of who we are. So, when the architecture looks like it has been copied from a science fiction movie about dystopia, it negates the esteem in which we ought to regard ourselves, and that contributes to the many forms of social collapse we are witnessing every day.)

Background here and here.

    

‘Trump issues architecture order’

     

Hey, who said the Five Orders of Architecture are dead?

President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order yesterday to determine the architectural styles that may be employed in constructing certain federal government buildings in the future.

The “Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” specifies how all U.S. government courthouses and agency headquarters, all federal public buildings in Washington, DC, and all other federal buildings that will cost $50 million or more shall be built in “such styles as Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, and Art Deco.”

This will be undone by the next president. The short-lived Executive Order will be a conscientious objection to the Comecon-style concrete and the schizophrenic steel and glass impositions that have prevailed for generations.

In promoting Classical architecture, Trump lauds historical figures, including some who are significant to Freemasonry, including Palladio, Christopher Wren, John Soane, and John Russell Pope.

Read all about it here.

For some background from February, click here.

     

‘NBC News: Trump requests return of Pike statue’

     

Courtesy Washington Post

NBC News reported the other day that President Donald Trump asked the U.S. Department of the Interior to restore the historic statue of Albert Pike to Judiciary Square in the nation’s capital.

The self-described news network did not provide any attribution to its claim, and it did say the White House did not “provide a comment” on the subject, so who really knows if this is rooted in even a whiff of reality? But, reviewing the first half of 2020, I can see anything is possible.

As you may know, this statue, donated by Scottish Rite Freemasons and erected in 1901, was pulled down, defaced, and burned last week.

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Days ago, I was accused in social media by Rev. Lovejoy, a Brother Mason and Methodist Minister in Iowa, of opposing the removal of “Confederate statues.” I am not. I find nothing wrong with removing memorials to historical persons’ seditious and otherwise anti-American misdeeds. (This Pike statue is no such thing.) There just has to be a legal process first.
     

‘White House said to be drafting architecture executive order’

     

Courtesy Khan Academy

By Operative Masonry, we allude to a proper application of the useful rules of architecture, whence a structure will derive figure, strength, and beauty, and whence will result a due proportion and a just correspondence in all its parts. It furnishes us with dwellings and convenient shelter from the vicissitudes and inclemencies of seasons; and while it displays the effects of human wisdom, as well in the choice as in the arrangement of the sundry materials of which an edifice is composed, it demonstrates that a fund of science and industry is implanted in man, for the best, most salutary, and beneficent purposes.

Middle Chamber Lecture
Grand Lodge of New York


A flurry of media reports last week claim a presidential executive order is being drafted that would make neo-classical the sole style of architecture for most future federal government buildings.

The president of the United States is empowered by law to issue executive orders to govern operations of the Executive Branch of the federal government. Donald Trump has made three such orders in 2020, but that being discussed in the media is not among them.

Predictably, most media coverage is not only negative, but also near hysterical. The story broke February 4 in Architectural Record. The next day, ArtNet News reports:


In a new executive order that’s quickly drawing comparisons to fascist ideology, President Trump plans to re-integrate “our national values into Federal buildings.”

Titled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” the order seeks to rewrite the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture to ensure that the “classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style” for new buildings, according to Architectural Record, which obtained a draft of the document.

The order denounces the quality of architecture since the Guiding Principles were first issued in 1962 by former New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and cites Brutalism and Deconstructivism as examples. It specifically calls out the U.S. Federal Building in San Francisco, the U.S. Courthouse in Austin, and the Wilkie D. Ferguson, Jr. U.S. Courthouse in Miami in particular for having “little aesthetic appeal.”

Courtesy fbi.gov

J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, DC.

Courtesy sf.curbed.com

U.S. Federal Building in San Francisco.

Courtesy miaminewtimes.com

Wilkie D. Ferguson, Jr. U.S. Courthouse in Miami.

The New York Times, which would advocate for cancer if the Trump-appointed Surgeon General of the United States discovered its cure, offers this headline on its Art & Design Section last Friday:

MAGA War

on Architectural Diversity

Weaponizes Greek Columns

For God’s sake.

The Art Newspaper, quoting Pulitzer-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger, says:


Many policies that we’re seeing now seem to be about exclusion, and now it’s in the realm of architecture. It’s a terrible mistake and it’s inconsistent with an enlightened, liberal democracy. Perhaps it was a mistake to think that architecture would not come under this spotlight.


Conversely, writing in the Wall Street Journal, Myron Magnet, author and winner of the National Humanities Medal, explains:


Architectural classicism is a living language, not an antiquarian straitjacket. Its grammar of columns and capitals, pediments and proportions allows a wide range of expression. Just look at the original genius with which Michelangelo marshaled that language in his era or Christopher Wren in his. It’s a language that constantly updated itself in America’s federal city, from the handsome 1790s White House to John Russell Pope’s sublime 1940s Jefferson Memorial and National Gallery of Art. In the language of classicism, buildings relate civilly to each other, forming harmonious cities—Venice or pre-World War II London—in which the whole adds up to more than the sum of its parts, however beautiful some may be. A bad classical building may be awkward or uninspired; it is never hideous. And all is based on human proportions and human scale.

Not so for the modernism that the proposed executive order discourages. Though modernism is an odd word for a style that’s now almost a century old, it began with an explicit European rejection of American architecture and a thoroughly 20th-century impulse toward central planning and state control. Modernism brought housing projects so bare and standardized that no worker wanted to live in them.


In City Journal, Catesby Leigh, past founding chair and fellow of the National Civic Art Society (which supports the executive order) writes:


One thing to be borne in mind at this politically charged juncture in our national life is that classicism is not an “ideology,” as some critics are charging. It is a formal language, with a vocabulary and syntax—originating with the classical column and its superstructure—geared to the idealization of structure in anthropomorphic terms. In other words, the classical language makes its appeal to us as embodied beings. It has shown itself supremely adaptable to changing social and technological conditions, and thoroughly receptive to regional inflections. Classicism is not, and never has been, a closed system. And it should come as no surprise that it has been used (and abused) by political regimes from one end of the ideological spectrum to the other.
     

‘Trump invokes a timeless Scriptural staple of initiations’

     

Alex Wong for Getty Images

No, that is not an Illuminati hand gesture.

After taking the oath of office to become the 45th president of the United States this afternoon, Donald Trump delivered his inaugural address, a speech of only 16 minutes that vowed a revival of self-governance and national self-determination, and also professed faith in God—while also invoking a verse of Scripture that should be familiar to the attentive ear of every Freemason.

Excerpted:

“At the bedrock of our politics will be a total allegiance to the United States of America and through our loyalty to our country, we will rediscover our loyalty to each other. When you open your heart to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice. The Bible tells us how good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity. We must speak our minds openly, debate our disagreements honestly but always pursue solidarity. When America is united, America is totally unstoppable.”

Of course the new American president cites the first verse of Psalm 133, which is offered (in longer form) in Freemasonry’s first ceremony of initiation: the Entered Apprentice Degree:

“Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!”

Psalm 133 has been a staple of initiation rites at least since St. Benedict authored his rule for monastic life 1500 years ago.

At the risk of stirring the troubled minds of all kinds of conspiracy “theorists,” I share this minor point here.
     

‘Trump will not be sworn on Washington Bible’

     

Magpie file photo

The George Washington Inaugural Bible, at Genesis 49-50, where the first American president placed his hand upon being sworn at Federal Hall in Manhattan on April 30, 1789.

I hadn’t been able to get an answer—which I took as a negative answer—from the Masons I know at St. John’s Lodge in New York City as to whether the 45th American president will take his oath of office Friday with his hand upon the George Washington Inaugural Bible, which the lodge owns, but The Hill reported within the hour that Donald J. Trump instead will have both his personal Bible and the Abraham Lincoln Bible for the swearing in at the U.S. Capitol.

The Washington Bible is on display, alongside handwritten pages of Washington’s first inaugural address, at the National Archives through next Wednesday. The Bible’s appearance there caused some wonder about the historic holy text possibly being used January 20. This Bible typically is displayed at Federal Hall in New York City, where Washington took his first presidential oath of office in 1789.

Click here to read The Hill story.

Click here to read a 2009 Magpie article on the historic Bible and the non-Constitutional addition of “So help me God” to the swearing ritual.