Meet the mastermind behind Trump’s war on modern architecture

The executive order President Trump recently issued that calls for classical and traditional architecture to be the preferred styles 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.”