Prelude to an Americanist defense of Brutalist architecture

In the comments section to another post (beginning here and lasting several comments), I detailed how pointless and ridiculous the Trump executive order on federal architecture was.

Democrat partisans I'm sure took issue with it, but not from a nationalist or Americanist stance. They wouldn't even be able to point out the incoherence of the term "Greco-Roman" for architecture, since they deny the relation between the political and the cultural -- namely, that cohesive nations and outright empires produce the great, lasting, high culture around the world, from the beginning of civilization.

Rather, they see artists as existing in their own domain of society, perhaps having to humbly beg for funding from politically connected agents, but otherwise doing their own thing. The only time they allow art to express politics is when whining about Euro empires depicting The Other, defining themselves in relation to an Other, etc. -- and only then when the Other is not also a European! They don't care about the British and French defining themselves against each other, launching centuries of warfare against each other, colonizing and then getting decolonized from the Other's lands, and so on and so forth.

But Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire were not the same polity, did not share a language, did not worship the same gods -- crucially, the Greeks of several centuries earlier did not worship the head of the Roman government. More to the point, they were not defined by the same meta-ethnic nemesis -- Ancient Greece never did get to that stage, although the Achaemenid Empire pressing against them from the east came close. And even so, Rome was not forced into cohesive status to withstand the Persians -- but the Gauls from the northwest, as well as Carthagenians from the southwest.

Once Roman ethnogenesis hit its stride -- in the wake of its integrative civil war of the 1st century BC -- its architecture no longer resembled Ancient Greek at all. The Greeks did not use arches, vaults, or domes -- precisely the defining elements of the Roman style. Greek columns climbed strictly vertically toward the flat base of the roof of a temple, which may have been pitched toward the center, but had no curvilinear elements (other than the cross-section of the columns).

This process of radically distinguishing themselves from their earlier cultural (if not political) overlords from the East went so far as devising an entirely new building material, for their entirely new style, for their status as an entirely new ethnos. This new stuff -- concrete -- supported the Roman Architectural Revolution, including all those monumental civic projects like aqueducts, as well as religious + civic structures like the Pantheon, which still boasts the largest unreinforced concrete dome on Earth, 2000 years later.

A striking pair of images on the Wiki entry for coffer shows the dome of the Pantheon, along with the ceiling of the underground DC Metro stations. Both are exposed concrete -- not clad in some other material -- and both are not even trying to imitate some other material while actually using concrete -- it's clearly concrete poured into a mold, not bricks, not stone that's been quarried and cut and laid into rows, etc. And both make use of a repeated simple geometric motif -- square-like cells expanded into a rectangular matrix (albeit bent into an arch or dome).

No one (at least today) derides the dome of the Pantheon as a drab, soulless, alienating insect hive -- but they very well could have, if they were Greco LARP-ers from ancient Italy, especially from the part that never wanted to be Roman, in the south, proud of their Greek cultural influence. But those possible complaints would have fallen on deaf ears.

Some day -- perhaps already -- people will come to the same conclusion about the Brutalist ceiling of the DC Metro. Lord knows I occasionally found it insectoid when I lived in the area, and the opposite of a breath of fresh air after heading home from work. But the other times, I found it futurist, space-age, and just plain old cool.

And by now, I can appreciate its uniquely American status -- more so than the New York Subway, which relies mostly on European-style tilework, along with the ugly side of the industrial aesthetic -- those metal I-beams-as-columns along the platform. If they were gleaming chrome, that'd be beautiful industrial, but they're just I-beams with a coat of paint. Plus, the Subway doesn't have the dark intimate mood lighting as the Metro, let alone the row of lights along the platform edge that start blinking when the train is approaching. It's from the future! (No, it's just from America.)

The Metro used to be completely a product of the warm '70s color palette of its birth -- cream, orange, brown, with some chrome trim. But now both are headed toward neoliberal hell with only the futuristic side, not the primitive side, and with cold rather than warm colors, and harsh bright lighting instead of warm lighting. The reason you actually went to a Metro station -- riding a train -- was a pretty warm and cozy aesthetic experience, whether or not you liked the stations themselves.

And at any rate, the stations' floors are paved with red-brown ceramic tiles, in a hexagonal honeycomb arrangement -- without looking like an insect hive. That provides some warmth to the color palette as well as variety in the materials present.

But now I'm getting a bit too carried away -- a future post will document the warm, cozy interiors of Brutalist spaces. Next in the pipeline, though, is a review of the American style's use of exposed concrete, from our founding father Frank Lloyd Wright and afterward.

The point for now is that Brutalism has the most undeserved bum rap of all architectural styles. The cultural conservatives who wrote that Trump executive order were not only late in putting it out during the transition to the Biden admin, rather than at the outset of Trump's term, but 40 years after the style had already been not only abandoned but derided as something to contradict going forward.

So we see yet another example of the Trump admin being disjunctive -- trying to redefine its party's overarching program, but falling back into its old habits that got it where it is today, at the end of the road. Brutalism was a New Deal-era style, and once the neoliberal revolution took off during the Reagan realignment of the '80s, it was dead as a doornail.

For awhile it was merely derided, ignored, left unkempt, and contradicted when new buildings were erected. But it was not until the neoliberal apex of the woketard 2010s that American elites began actively and systematically demolishing examples of the style.

This anti-Brutalist iconoclasm has run most rampant among blue institutions like government bureaucracies, universities, and pharma research institutes, in blue cities like Boston, in blue states like Massachusetts. It seems to be worst on the East Coast, and less intense as you move west, since the back-East region is the least American region, having little role in being defined by our empire's meta-ethnic nemeses (mainly the Indians on the frontier, along with the Mexicans later on).

The total demolition and erection of new buildings was financed by another blue patron -- the finance sector, who divvied out to their political allies the output of the Central Bank's multi-trillion-dollar money-printing bonanza ("quantitative easing"). This is taking place under blue presidents, Obama and Biden, as well as under Trump (though not W. Bush -- too early for woketard iconoclasm).

So, Trump and his cultural conservative supporters who hate on Brutalism are birds of a feather with Obama-era woketards from the government and corporate bureaucracies. They may have contrasting rationalizations for why Brutalist buildings must be destroyed, catering to their different constituencies, but that's just branding and marketing. Functionally they are on the same team, a good cop and a bad cop (Our cop and Their cop).

And yet the outcomes have primarily favored the blue team's preferences -- not a RETVRN to Roman, Gothic, etc., but fishbowls of glass and steel on the outside, and Silicon Valley daycare center on the inside. It's Bauhaus for babies. And therefore, anti-American, as Bauhaus had minimal influence in America and its broader sphere of influence, and was a competing dead-end movement from moribund rival empires (German in that case, though many Austrian Empire refugees were there too).

Then again, maybe the cultural conservatives who lobbied for that executive order also prefer the fishbowl flexspace aesthetic that's beloved by their fellow urbanite over-produced elites from knowledge sectors of society. In fact, I'll bet they live and work in the Swamp itself, or its suburbs. Nobody who hates that heavily on Brutalism can deny that they're just whining about their personal experience of having to take the DC Metro to and from work every day. Tourists may find it futuristic and cool -- but that wears off after months and years of commuting that way.

They're not living in rural areas of red states working in agriculture, energy, the military, or manufacturing. That is the core of the GOP coalition. And they may never see an example of Brutalism in their entire lives, other than having to trek into town to fill out some paperwork at their municipal building that was built in the '60s. They're certainly not surrounded by it, and they are not the ones seething about it, let alone demolishing it.

But at least on the surface of their claims, the right-wingers want a more trad-looking building to replace the demolished Brutalist one, and on that level, they have been completely exploited and defeated by their no-honor-among-theives allies from the blue camp of neoliberalism. That extends to the iconoclasm against historical statues -- they could be Confederate or Yankee, it doesn't matter. The point is, woketards removed or demolished trad-coded statues, while their fellow Brutalist-haters from the right wing stood by and cried but did nothing.

Applying what we've seen from both sides over the past 10 years, we can see that efforts to conserve our distinctly American culture will -- for the short term, anyway -- not be helped by cultural conservatives from the GOP. They're too neoliberal, and bound to hate on at least half of what defines American culture -- that of the New Deal (they might not mind that of the Progressive Era, though). More than that, they lack any power, and just stand by while shit hits the fan.

Sadly, that means conservation efforts will come from a civil war within the Democrat coalition, between the woketards who only want to keep destroying the past and replacing it with new crap, and the vintage / thrift store / antiques crowd who want to preserve, enjoy, and celebrate all the totally awesome stuff we've created.

Isn't that a trad crowd? Not really -- trad means never change, only accept the past. The vintage / thrift store / antiques crowd doesn't really care about the culture of this land before the late 1800s, because it wasn't very American back then, and was based on European imperial models. But we're not Europe, and can't compete with them on their own cultural turf. Still, who made better movies, with better cinematography, built better buildings, furnished them with cooler designed objects, and developed a new aesthetic of primitive futurism?

So the attitude is more of curating, cataloging, and canonizing what came before, aware that our heyday is long over and nothing new can ever top what was created at our peak. Forming a consensus on the standards of American culture, and then spreading awareness about them, celebrating them, enjoying them, viewing them, and so on.

We can't conserve & preserve cultures that we did not create, and that we have no geographic or temporal link to. It's up to the Italians to preserve Roman culture -- or Spaniards to preserve what the Romans brought to their land. But Romans never landed in North America, so there is nothing of theirs for us to preserve. Certain aspects that can be copied and mediated, like their language and literature, we can preserve. We could even preserve images of their visual art and architecture. But most of that stuff is in Italy, not America, so we can't help them as much as they could help themselves.

We could help directly by occupying them, as we have since WWII, to protect buildings and otherwise ensure the stability of their Roman heritage. However, our occupation has served mainly to absorb them into our cultural orbit -- and if that conflicts with centuries of preserving Roman heritage, what America says, goes. That was the whole point of the post-war Vatican II Council -- submitting the Roman Church to the American Empire. Cuius regio, eius religio. So don't count on foreigners to preserve your own heritage.

To the extent that we managed to preserve some of what was created in other empires, that owed to our status as a new ascending empire in our own right. The Abbasid Caliphate during its heyday could preserve parts of Ancient Greek or Roman culture, but after their empire collapsed, they were in no position to be the repository of global knowledge, and so today's House of Wisdom is no longer in Baghdad. That will be no less true for America's status as global knowledge repository, as our empire collapses.

This is another reason why the kind of cultural conservatives who lobbied for that Trump executive order, or gave it a virtual high-five through a Silicon Valley platform, will generally not be helpful. Their idea of conservation is defending something like "Western Civ" -- most of which unfolded on another continent, hundreds or thousands of years ago. We can play no big role in defending Christianity, although we could in defending Mormonism or Pentecostalism. We can't protect castles or cathedrals, perspective paintings, flamenco or fugues.

We can only defend Block Symphony buildings, primitive futurist objects, rock and jazz music, movies, cars, etc. -- but that leaves plenty of work to keep canonizers and conservationists busy forever. Just don't count on much help from performative haters of Brutalism, who were late to that iconoclastic crusade anyway.