Exposed concrete: the American architectural style's defining material, from Frank Lloyd Wright through Brutalism and beyond

I had no idea how backwards the history of architecture & design from the 20th C. and after has been, until I began researching American ethnogenesis and its cultural reflections. This has led me to an Americanist defense of Brutalism, which will be an ongoing series.

The standard cluelessness from back-East academics (and their media-ite confreres), who are trapped in the least American region of the country, is that there is no such thing as a distinctive American culture, and that we inherited or imported everything from the Old World, primarily the Early Modern empires of Western Europe -- including in their degenerate collapsing stages, such as Cubist paintings and Bauhaus architecture and design.

The reality is that American pioneers beat the stultified Europeans to the punch, usually by several decades, and that Americans developed the superior standard of that form, whereas the Europeans could only manage an inferior copy of it, or didn't adopt it at all.

That's not a knock against European culture -- they just had their ethnogenetic heyday centuries before we did, so they already developed their own impressive standard forms. And as we see now, as the American Empire enters its degenerate collapsing stage of life, we too will become stultified non-creators having to either preserve / revive our previous foundational styles, or try to imitate others around the world if they are dynamic.

However, there are no other ascendant empires in the near future, undergoing an intense ethnogenesis, so there is in fact no one else for us to copy, as the Europeans finally managed to do with Midcentury Modern design (imported from America during the Pax Americana). So that leaves Americans with the task of preserving, reviving, canonizing, and celebrating what we have already made, and to limit any degenerate and warped extensions of it during our collapsing-empire stage of life.

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One major example of the backwards thinking about 20th-C. architecture & design is the nature of Brutalism, which the received cluelessness of back-East cerebrals holds to be European. They may bicker over whether its parent is Swiss (Corbusier) or British (the Smithsons), but it's definitely -- and distinctly -- European, in their view. And they place the birth in the post-WWII 1950s time period.

They never overtly argue against an American origin, and not for cynical reasons -- like, they would have to give up their silly initial views -- but because "American culture" is simply a non-force in their model of historical dynamics. Because America has no culture of its own, it could not have influenced anyone else, let alone the Europeans, whose combined forces exceed everything else out there. So why even bother exploring that hypothesis?

As far as the time period of its birth, they might allow an earlier "influential" stage -- as long as it were European, e.g. Bauhaus practitioner Mies van der Rohe in the late 1920s (Barcelona Pavilion). They would never entertain the possibility of an American influence in that decade, let alone earlier -- earlier, in fact, than any other European contemporary in a Modern style.

But just cuz back-East ignoramuses wear these ideological blinders, doesn't mean we have to. We owe no allegiance to a sector of society whose raison d'etre is supposedly "figuring things out," yet who not only come up with the wrong answer, but sanctify it into unarguable dogma. Nor do we owe cultural deference to anyone from back East, the black hole of culture in America. They simply do not get American culture, and perhaps have never been exposed to it in their lives, outside of movie portrayals -- or a visit to Disney World, but that's the topic of another post on primitive futurism in American design, and Brutalism specifically.

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While the exact criteria for Brutalism may vary somewhat, most people from any background agree on the central role played by the materials used -- and in particular, concrete, especially if it is exposed, i.e. not clad behind marble, ceramic tiles, brickwork, stucco, heavy coats of paint, or other materials that would disguise what the building is mainly made out of. It also cannot be assembled in such a way as to suggest it's not concrete -- e.g., if concrete is poured into individual blocks the size of traditional stone blocks, and those blocks are laid as in traditional masonry. That would be concrete imitating or disguising itself as masonry.

That is what this post will focus on, not other aspects of the style -- but those are distinctly American in origin as well, which contrast with European traditions, and which were pioneered in America long before they caught on among the avant-garde in Europe who were trying to rebel against their own centuries-old traditions (which we were not encumbered by in America, being a young nation undergoing ethnogenesis). For example, the blocky assemblage of masses, the rectilinear nature of lines, the relative sparseness of superficial ornamentation, the rough-hewn nature of shaping mass rather than delicate finesse -- these all go back to Chicago in the 1890s, not Berlin in the 1920s.

And so it is with the use of exposed concrete as not simply a utilitarian building material, which could be hidden by other ornamental materials, but as a surface-level one contributing to the aesthetic value on its own.

We'll start our exploration by exploding two related myths from the clueless back-Easterners -- from both the fanboys and the haters of the style. One, that Brutalism was an elitist style that only college graduates appreciated, or that was confined to their everyday territory. And two, more importantly, that it was pioneered by Europeans in the 1950s.

If you went to any park anywhere in America over Memorial Day weekend, you likely saw one of these, a drinking fountain made of concrete with its aggregate exposed, and whose metal parts are given a gleaming chrome finish, making it a textbook example of primitive futurism, something that looks like it's partly from the Stone Age and partly from the Industrial or Space Age:

It does not resemble European drinking fountains at all. They use metal (stone if fancy), and work it into fine-level shapes. The American style requires a more blocky, pure simple geometric volume, and the avoidance of European materials -- because we are not European, and had to create a new material for our new culture in our new empire.

Technically, the Romans created concrete 2000 years before we did -- and they did leave it exposed as an architectural / aesthetic element, and they even used it in a lattice of repeated simple geometric shapes (the coffered ceiling in the dome of the Pantheon, which the vaults of the Brutalist DC Metro stations perfectly resemble). But they did not expose the aggregate -- theirs looks like fairly smooth concrete, while ours has all those small pebbles adorning its surface.

Concrete is somewhat like masonry, where a large number of solid stones are held together by a connective network of binding material (cement for concrete, mortar for masonry). The main differences are the scale of the stones -- pebbles you can pinch between your fingertips, vs. stones hefty enough that you can only hold one in your hand.

And the assembly is totally different -- masonry lays down the stones (with or without mortar) in a planned, calculated, deliberate fashion. They don't have to be of uniform size and laid in a simple pattern (like rows of uniform height), but their placement is deliberate as each stone is set into the whole assembly. Whether you're looking at a brickwork facade of a house, or the impenetrable walls of Macchu Pichu, you can tell that the arrangement of individual stones into the whole was decided by human actors the whole way through.

The placement of individual stones within concrete is the opposite -- not even a single one was deliberately placed where it is, after deliberating about the others around it in the existing whole and where future ones would be placed after it. Rather, the stones are mixed up like balls in a hopper during the mixing process, and as the whole composite mass is poured (or sprayed or whatever else), the arrangement of stones does its own thing before settling into its hardened final state. Workers are not intervening to move this stone here, that stone over there, before the whole thing hardens. They wind up wherever they wind up.

And so, although the whole thing was made from human civilized technology, it has the look and feel and impression of a natural rock like sedimentary conglomerate. It doesn't look artificial because it is not artificial -- we introduced natural randomness during the mixing process, and did not intervene during the pouring and hardening process. It's somehow natural and the output of human technology at the same time -- maybe geological husbandry, like animal husbandry, not designing animals in a laboratory or factory.

At any rate, when the aggregate (the small gravel stones) in concrete is exposed, it looks like a Stone Age material, not an Industrial Age material -- not even a Metal Age material. It looks just as prehistoric in age, natural in formation, and organic in shape and texture, as traditional rocky materials like marble, granite, etc. But it's actually new, created by America -- not even the Romans exposed the aggregate like we do. We needed an ancient material to establish our primeval connection to this land, so we invented one that did just the job!

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These days, you can't go to any public space in America without seeing at least one example of exposed aggregate concrete -- drinking fountain, trash can, cigarette ash receptacle, wall / column support, bench, sidewalk / pavers, curb, etc.

And you *won't* find those things in Europe or anywhere else in Ye Olde Worlde. Theirs are made out of metal or stone.

This material is not only distinctly American, it is ubiquitous in America. We take it for granted that any random strip center in any ol' American suburb will have a trash can made from this material, and that the drinking fountains in the same suburb will be made from it as well. No material is more all-American than exposed aggregate concrete.

This also shows how populist and popular the material is -- it is not restricted to elite university environments, appreciated only by eggheads, or expensive to use. It's very affordable, suitable for mass use.

In fact, as I mentioned earlier, the desecration of the American architectural traditions and standards, especially the anti-Brutalist iconoclasm, has been a crusade led by the professional class for the professional class, in blue states and blue cities, by government bureaucrats and academics and pharma research labs, and by women rather than men. It's every conceivable demographic that lives in order to carry out the will of the neoliberal Democrat party.

The only wrinkle is the meta-ethnic frontier one -- West Coast Democrats are far more conservationist of American culture than East Coast Democrats (Boston / Massachusetts being ground zero for Brutalist demolition). They're closer to the historical, defining frontier against the Indians, while the back-Easterners were never shaped into Americans by that frontier, so why would they want to preserve its cultural output? They're pseudo-European, and they want their culture to be that way, and stay that way.

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However, we can't say that these ubiquitous concrete drinking fountains owe their existence to Brutalism -- that was just one stage within American architectural ethnogenesis. It goes farther back -- back to Frank Lloyd Wright himself! It's amazing, I don't plan to discover his foundational influence in everything I look into (like the swivel chair and cantilever chairs generally), but he really was America's first-mover genius. American architecture & design is just footnotes to Frank Lloyd Wright -- and that includes all areas absorbed into our empire over the 20th C., like Europe and Japan.

The work in question is the Horse Show Fountain from -- where else? -- Chicago, dating back to -- when else? -- 1909. Not Berlin, not London -- and not New York, for that matter. Not 1919 or 1929 or 1939 or 1949. Both the original and the current replica (made in 1969) are made from reinforced concrete, which is not clad behind any other material. It's a drinking fountain, for people and originally horses too.

Although the Wiki article claims that only the current replica has the grainy exposed aggregate surface (ubiquitous by the '60s), a gallery of images of the original, both photographic and illustrated, make it look about as aggregate-y as the later replica. Maybe in some areas more than others, like around the edge of the basin, where there are square indentations, but still, it doesn't look radically different and perfectly smooth.

And in fact, Wright used the exposed aggregate finish in the same year of 1909 in the same city of Chicago, for the Unity Temple. So, hardly a stretch of the imagination to believe the original fountain had some exposed aggregate as well.

Before getting to the Unity Temple, though, we have to consider earlier structures built elsewhere in America and Europe that claim to be the "first concrete / reinforced concrete buildings".

In 1853 in Denis, France, Francois Coignet built a reinforced concrete house -- but it was not exposed as an architectural element. Looks like it was covered by plaster (now peeling off in sheets), which was then painted. Because it did not take the material in a bold new direction, it spawned no imitators or movement within France. If you wanted painted plaster on the facade, you didn't have to use concrete underneath it -- any material from the French tradition would do.

Then in 1873, using a process designed by Coignet, the Coignet Stone Company Building in Brooklyn, New York used concrete blocks without any cladding. However, by casting them into blocks meant to resemble the cut stones of traditional masonry, and then either laid into place in arrangements also from traditional masonry -- or poured into molds meant to mimic that arrangement -- the concrete doesn't really show itself. If you didn't know beforehand, the viewer would probably think it was any ol' stone building. This is apart from the overall style being a Euro-LARP-ing style rather than a new American style. The raw material itself, and its assembly into the whole -- whatever style it is -- does not look new or different from European stonework.

The William E. Ward House of the same time period and metro area, has the same problems with it being the "first" in an ethnogenetic sense. It is made of reinforced concrete, which is not clad behind another material, but the material has either been cut and laid into place, or poured into a mold meant to resemble, the processes of traditional masonry. On the lower two stories, the corners where walls meet have simulated quoins, the most glaring example of trying to disguise its concrete nature as traditional masonry. Again, this is apart from the matter of the overall style being a Euro LARP.

The Highland Cottage from the same time and place has the same problems, and then some. Aside from simulating traditional masonry, the concrete is faced in stucco. Unlike the Ward House, this one is not reinforced concrete. The Coignet Stone Company Building has a reinforced basement, but not above that level. Wright's fountain and Unity Temple are reinforced. However, I don't think reinforcement is central to the development of a new American style and material vocabulary. It's not visible, and is only relevant on the utilitarian level -- allowing greater-scale structures to be built.

Aside from being in the wrong place for American ethnogenesis (back East), these three New York buildings are also from the wrong time -- still mired in the integrative civil war phase of imperial growth, which included the Reconstruction era. It wasn't until the 1890s that the winner of the civil war -- the industrial Midwest -- could hit the ground running with its creation and dissemination of a new national culture, after internal divisions had been sewn up. This would spread westward along with the meta-ethnic frontier, although places back East ended up adopting it to some extent as well. But it wouldn't last as long back East since they have always been reluctant participants in American culture.

In the right place at the right time -- Chicago in the first decade of the 1900s -- Wright built the Unity Temple. It was not only a new overall architectural style -- American Block Symphony, not Gothic, Baroque, etc. -- it used a new material, concrete with the aggregate exposed. The volumes do not resemble traditional blocks from masonry, are not laid into place in masonic ways, and do not simulate or mimic them via the molds into which the concrete is poured. Just monolithic slabs of concrete, of varying size, with more or less ornamentation built into the mold's shape. Not hidden behind anything else.

In addition to not hiding the concrete, and not mimicking masonry, the exposure of the aggregate within the concrete is a milestone in the history of American architecture. Now the material looked more like granite or marble or some other Stone Age material with patterns and textures within it -- not requiring their addition through mosaic techniques. It no longer looked so smooth and uniform and monolithic.

The techniques used to expose the aggregate are not relevant to its final state, but in this case the workers used wire brushes to gently grind away the outermost layers of the cement binder, like using a fork to flake away the outermost layer of a fruitcake to expose the individual globs of fruit suspended in the flour-y binder.

Like the Horse Show Fountain, the original Unity Temple showed signs of wear by circa 1970, and it was restored (not replicated) with an exposed aggregate finish (and then another major restoration in the 2010s, still using the exposed aggregate finish). But the original back in the 1900s had an exposed aggregate finish as well, as shown by contemporaneous pictures and Wright's own words (likening the appearance to granite). This makes me believe the original Horse Show Fountain also had a similar degree of exposed aggregate finish as its later replica.

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By the time of a 1986 article from Concrete Construction Magazine, "Unity Temple: the Cube That Made Concrete History," the neoliberal backlash against the Progressive and New Deal eras had begun, as well as its cultural expression in the perversion, slandering, or outright demolition of America's distinctive culture. The central target for neoliberals was Brutalism -- too American instead of whatever Olde Worlde LARP / pastiche they preferred, too populist instead of elitist (affordable concrete vs. expensive masonry), too ubiquitous instead of confined to the bi-coastal top zip codes.

In that context, the authors cannot use the term Brutalism or refer directly to the 1960s and '70s as the extension of the history begun by the Unity Temple. The reader is left to fill in the blanks, but that's what they're getting at -- American Block Symphony styles, using exposed aggregate concrete, trace back to Frank Lloyd Wright, in Chicago, at the turn of the century.

They also do not overtly state what this means for other boneheaded theories -- like the myth that Brutalism as a camp, or the use of unhidden concrete, or blocky assemblages of volumes, grew out of Europe somewhere between the '20s and the '50s. Nope -- it's as American as apple pie, from the Midwest (and later, further out West), from the turn of the 20th century, from the American architectural Plato himself, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Europeans were simply a non-entity in endogenous cultural creation after their 18th and 19th-century plateau. They descended into chaos in the early 20th C, along with their empires collapsing in WWI, limping through the interwar period before the remaining fragments were then scooped up by the American Empire -- both politically and culturally. If they wanted to join the American camp, they were more than welcome, and by the Midcentury Modern moment, they were all aboard Team America.

Blaming Bauhaus for anything outside of Europe in the interwar period is just a cope -- and if you're American, a cope to hide your thinly veiled anti-American attitude toward our culture. "Wah, I identify as an 18th-C. Euro aristocrat / ancient Roman villa-owner" -- too bad you're just some American suburban-raised schlub from the 20th and 21st centuries. You're no more of a Baroque aristocrat than a man is a woman. Remember, if you're outside of Europe:

>ywn be European

And here in America, we have nothing to apologize for or feel embarrassed about. I do feel sorry for some parts of Europe, in Britain and Germany mainly, where "Brutalism" was de facto Bauhaus eking out another few decades of comatose existence, while wearing a concrete disguise in order to blend in with the new American style that was anything but Bauhaus-y.

But charmingly Stone Age meets futuristic chrome drinking fountains adorning and providing a public good at parks all over America? Sublimely primitivist yet futuristic buildings that connect us with the primeval grounded past, while somehow simultaneously enticing us through a portal to the optimistic utopian future? No, that is to our *credit* as Americans, with our own cool badass culture. There is no "blame" to go around in the first place.

If you hate on Brutalism, you hate on the entire American tradition, from Frank Lloyd Wright to public parks to our ultimate architectural activity-place -- the malls. Oh yeah, I'm just getting started on this crusade to vindicate Brutalism. All you faggy mall-haters better pack up and leave now. But just as a preview: both malls and Brutalism proper were derided and demolished during the same time period, by the same camp of people, with the same complaints, whereas the appreciation / celebration / nostalgia came from a similar group of people (opposed to the first camp).

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To conclude this exploration into the origins of exposed concrete as America's defining building material, let's take a whirlwind tour through some major milestones along the way, between the Unity Temple and Brutalism in the '60s and '70s. To not stray too far from the main topic, and because he really was the one who organized everything into its major channels, we'll stick with good ol' Frank Lloyd Wright.

In the 1920s, he put in a stint in Los Angeles, where he built several houses using concrete blocks that were cast on site, but not in a recognizable Euro / Roman / Olde Worlde form. Rather, their rectilinear geometric impressions were inspired by Mayan temples and other New World civilizations.

The blocks were then arranged into place like usual masonry, in horizontal courses or stacked into columns, all contributing to the synthesis of Mayan step-pyramids and his own American Block Symphony styles. But they were clearly made from concrete, not stone that had been cut and carved, and not bricks. The designs are intricate and are used in a large number of blocks -- clearly telling us that they were all cast from a single, intricately shaped mold, not intricately carved each time. The latter would've taken so much labor, it could only be built by a legion of slaves for a monument for an imperial ruler -- not a house for a typical affluent American household.

You can watch a documentary on this episode of his career for free on YouTube. These buildings are the Storer House, the Millard House, the Samuel Freeman House, and most famously the Ennis House.

These blocks were later reincarnated, still in California but spreading elsewhere, in the decorative breeze blocks of Midcentury architecture. See here for an overview of the breeze block phenomenon -- one of the most identifiably American decorative elements, something unseen in Europe, but are everywhere out West (and somewhat back East), down to the most lowly apartment buildings, not restricted to elite circles. As you can see from the close-ups here, already in the '20s Wright used versions of his blocks that were perforated to allow light and wind to pass through, in addition to the totally solid versions.

In the 1930s, his Fallingwater house used massive horizontal cantilevered slabs of concrete, which although it has a slight sandy pigment to it, is still recognizable as concrete -- not clad in stucco, not employing or mimicking masonry, etc. The entire building is not made from concrete, but these slabs are its defining features.

Finally, and most important to establish the link to Brutalism, is the Guggenheim Museum, which was planned & revised during the late '40s and early '50s, and was built between '56 and '59. It is made from concrete that was poured -- or rather, sprayed from a gun -- in place, not cast into individual blocks used for masonry. It is not clad in any other material, nor was it hidden under heavy paint (although it did receive a light beige coat at first, which was later changed to white).

In fact, the paint is thin enough that you can still see with the naked eye the woodgrain impressions left by the boards that acted as the boundary or container ("formwork"), onto which the concrete was sprayed from the inside. See this post for the details. At first Wright wanted a smoother surface, but the head of construction argued that it was not only impossible, but that the impressions showed off the material better -- it's not stone, it's not going to look like stone.

Leaving the impressions of the formwork became a staple of Brutalism, and as far as I can tell, it all started (as always) with Frank Lloyd Wright, well into his senior career. Indeed, when first built the Unity Temple showed a kind of horizontal banding left by the various stages ("lifts") in which the concrete was poured from lower to upper heights (for the photo, see p.3 of the Concrete Construction Magazine article linked earlier).

Small-scale impressions of woodgrain, up to seams between successive lifts in the pouring process, are just like the natural imperfections in animal skins or quarried stone, and courses of masonry that are not perfectly level all the way across. It gives the concrete a primitive Stone Age feel, not a lab-perfected ultra-modern material with no variation of any kind or any seams.

So, Brutalism's "openness" about its construction process traces back to Wright, in the first decade of the 1900s -- not to Mies van der Rohe, who used no concrete at all in the Barcelona Pavilion several decades later, nor to any other Bauhaus-adjacent boogeyman / hero (depending on whether the clueless academic is a hater or lover of Bauhaus).

And not only did Wright pioneer the openness of the concrete construction process in the Guggenheim Museum, he also made the building a large-scale sculpture out of a few pure geometric volumes, and they're arranged into an asymmetric grouping to make for some movement of attention and off-kilter dynamism -- without warping the fabric of space, using distorted points-of-view, or fragmentation of the components, as would happen during the neoliberal era, most notably by Frank Gehry in another Guggenheim Museum (the one in Bilbao).

These defining traits of Brutalism were all there in the late '50s in America, but not in the '50s apartment blocks by Corbusier or the Smithsons, which are utilitarian Bauhaus boxes that use concrete instead of some other material. BFD -- it's still Bauhaus, not the style pioneered in America and later called Brutalism.

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To reflect on where we started with exposed aggregate concrete, that not only became a staple in those ubiquitous drinking fountains, trash cans, benches, columns for shopping center covered walkways, etc. Exposed aggregate running in vertical corduroy bands was a staple in Paul Rudolph's buildings, e.g. the Yale Art & Architecture Building from the early '60s and the Boston Government Service Center from the early '70s. Much of the facade of the Xerox Tower (by Brutalist superstar Welton Becket from the late '60s) is exposed aggregate.

There is no such thing as the "good Brutalism" that was for a popular audience, and had the charming familiar exposed aggregate, vs. the "bad Brutalism" that was for elites and had clinically smooth texture and perfectionistically uniform color. The latter-day American Stone Age material, with aggregate exposed, adorns so many of the structures that the clueless haters never bother to look at, and just assume that because it's concrete, it looks like dried cement.

Nope, it has lots of texture, pattern, and color from all the various stones revealing their faces. They may not come in neon or jewel tones, but there's plenty of earthy yellows, reds, oranges, browns, blacks / grays, sometimes shading into blue tones. And that's the type of "color" that the haters have in mind anyway -- a brick facade, marble, etc. If it counts as colorful for standard red brick and marble, it counts for exposed aggregate concrete.

Why don't they know what these buildings look like? Because they've never experienced them. If they've been up close to one IRL, their senses are too weak to perceive what is right in front of their faces. But mainly they are into hating on Brutalism as one part of their Olde Worlde LARP, and because Brutalism is distinctly American, that's a ripe target. It doesn't matter if its facades are as colorful as brick and marble facades -- just tell a lie that it's uniform gray, and don't bother to look closely at pictures to tell for yourself, and trust that everyone else in the LARP will do likewise.

The "why no color?" complaint is really rich, given that another complaint from the clueless haters is that Brutalism ignored the desires and wills of those who actually utilized the buildings, and only pleased the distant cultural elite who viewed them through photographs in slick magazines.

Actually, it's the haters who only look at these buildings in far-away-shot photos over the internet! Any close-up photo would show the texture, color, variety of stones, etc. But they image searched the building, got a zillion copies of the same shitty stock photo shot from a million miles away, and that's all they need -- close-up shots might contradict their preconceived hate, so please, anything but close-ups! And definitely no IRL visits to see it unmediated -- it would contradict your beliefs, and put you so physically close to a contaminating heretical substance -- Americanism! Why, all that American stuff might just melt away years of effort to cultivate your Olde Worlde LARP -- can't risk the exposure!

But as I said before, most Americans don't hate Brutalism, concrete, or its exposed aggregate form. We take it for granted, as the physical stuff itself as well as its creation of a primitive-futurist environment that we as Americans find irresistible. That mood makes us comfy and familiar, because it's so deeply ingrained into our culture by this point.

It's only managerial-professional-class Euro LARP-ers who get incensed over these defining traits of our culture, for obvious reasons of status insecurity when they belong to a non-European culture. Sadly for our heritage, though, they do wield disproportionate decision-making influence, so they can and already have begun a campaign of anti-American desecration and demolition, particularly on the East Coast.

That is as good as any predictor for the boundaries of the future states of the post-collapse American Empire. Where they're demolishing the distinctive architecture of our nation / empire, they're clearly seceding. Where they're neither fighting to demolish it, nor pro-actively guarding it, is a border region. Where they're conserving it long in advance, will be part of the core of the new American state, post-empire.

Concretely, as it were, that means the whole back East region will secede, with central-southern Florida being a wild card that could become a somewhat reduced nation of Florida unto itself, or a non-contiguous piece of America, while the north of Florida joins the secession. The Midwest will mostly stay, although Ohio could be a wild card that would join the secession. Not surprisingly, Florida and Ohio are both the two constant swing states in presidential elections.

Obviously California will stay and become the new political core (it's already been the main cultural core for most of our ethnogenetic growth period, after Reconstruction). But other parts of the Southwest will stay, too, for the same reasons -- Vegas (AKA Nevada), Arizona, all of Mormonland, Texas, all of it.

In fact, Mormonland provides the most intense counter-signal to the back-East demolishers of American Block Symphony buildings. Mormons have standardized Block Symphony as the style for their temples, the most important building type for them (not the weekly meeting houses, but the ones where weddings, initiations, and so on, take place).

Mormon elites did eliminate the Midcentury / Space Age (not Brutalist) design of the Ogden and Provo temples (in 2014 and early 2020s), but they replaced them with Block Symphony designs from the American Modern period and geographic origin. Not glass-and-steel fishbowl flexspace abominations like the East Coasters have done post-demolition, nor an Olde Worlde LARP that the trad haters of Brutalism would want (but would never actually get, and would settle for getting cucked by a glass-and-steel Silicon Valley kindergarten instead, because they hate the New Deal politics and culture even more).

The last group in the world to make the contradictory concept of "Greco-Roman" architecture their standard would be the Mormons, whereas it would be the go-to for many East Coasters. That tells you all you need to know about who is gonna make it into the post-imperial-collapse nation of America, and who will be inhabiting small breakaway states riven by mutual mistrust, bitterness, and sinking deeper into the cultural black hole that they've always been.