A draft order by Donald Trump to make all new federal buildings classical is the latest example of how traditional architecture is used to disguise racist agendas, says Phineas Harper.

Who could have predicted that a president famed for his eponymous sub-Miesian skyscrapers would come out as a classicist" Yet this week, news broke of a White House executive order to dictate a style for all US federal architecture ? and that style is classicism.
Entitled Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again, the draft order demands that "the classical architectural style shall be the preferred and default style" for all new government buildings. Dead good lobbying by Robert Stern" A dead-cat policy to distract from the surging Bernie Sanders" Or something more deadly" The American Institute of Architects said it "strongly opposes uniform style mandates", but Trump's edict should be seen as part of a far more worrying agenda than a mere taste tussle. The order is not just about the look of buildings ? it is part of a jingoistic culture war waged against black and ethnic minority Americans. Trump's order venerating classical aesthetics is intended to wrap the buildings of American authority not just in stone cladding but in the architectural shorthand of his core political project: white supremacy.
It is not hard to see how Trump's executive order fits into an established pattern of mixing xenophobia with anti-modernist rhetoric
Of course, classical...