What Donald Trump could learn from Jawaharlal Nehru about architecture

Days after his second presidential inauguration, Donald Trump issued a fatwa that mandated all new federal public buildings be built in the neoclassical style.

This meant that new government buildings, whatever their function or location, should have classical Greek and Roman styling, symmetry, proportion and architectural elements.

In a memorandum issued on January 20, 2025 titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture”, the POTUS specified “that Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government”.

This is not the first time Trump has expressed his disaffection with contemporary expressions of architecture. Late in his first term, he was even more trenchant.

In an “Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture” (issued on December 21, 2020), the US president specified that “classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for federal public buildings, absent exceptional factors necessitating another kind of architecture”.

The order even foregrounded brutalist or deconstructivist architecture as one that “subverts the traditional values of architecture”.

Within three months of being issued, it was revoked by incoming president Joe Biden.

This time, the new order is likely to be implemented, however, considering that Trump is...

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