WHAT KIND OF CLASSIC?
Well, it’s the law, at least for now. The executive order concerning the use of classical and traditional styles in federal buildings was signed on August 28, 2025. The intent is unequivocal, for example: “In the District of Columbia, classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for federal public buildings absent exceptional factors necessitating another kind of architecture.” But what kind of classical? That remains to be seen. It could be the somewhat archaeological classical of Charles McKim, who is mentioned in the order, or the stripped classical of Paul Cret, who is not. (Cret’s 1933 Ft. Worth courthouse is pictured above.) Or the inventive classical of Bertram Goodhue, who described his design of the American Academy of Sciences Building as “God knows what kind of Classic.” Or perhaps a reinvented classical; is there an Inigo Jones, an Edwin Lutyens, or a Jože Plečnik waiting to be discovered? That might be asking too much. Still, as Adam Gopnik observes is an otherwise sternly censorious article in a recent New Yorker, “If, indeed, all federal buildings were to be done in the manner of nineteenth-century courthouses—well, worse things are happening.”
WHAT NOT TO DO
Recent architecture from KieranTimberlake at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s hard to imagine a more awkward addition to a nice old building (Cope & Stewardson, 1892). The height, roof form, curtain wall, brick color—all clash, and not in a good way. And the obligatory green roof doesn’t make up for it. What were they thinking?
THE FED BUILDS
Although the media frequently describes the building project that the Federal Reserve is undertaking at its Washington, DC headquarters, the Marriner S. Eccles Building, as a “renovation,” it is much more than that. When Paul Cret designed the building in the mid-1930s, he used an H-shaped plan to ensure daylight in all the offices. The current project fills in those two spaces with glass-roofed atria. The external view (above) shows the clumsy mating of Cret’s marble facades with a steel-and-glass curtain wall. Quel dommage!
A WARNING
As Stephen Kotkin has observed, “There are two ways to destroy a city, bombing (Coventry 1940, above) and rent control.” A warning to New York voters.
LÉON KRIER, ARCHITECT AND TOWN PLANNER (1946-2025)
Léon Krier was a character. He dressed like an impresario, wrote like a pamphleteer, and drew like an angel. He happily stoked public controversy. His most famous bon mot was “I’m an architect, because I don’t build.” But he did build. The three buildings that I’ve seen of his—his own house, a town hall, and a university audiitorium—have a quality that seems to have eluded most of his traditional-minded contemporaries: originality. He was a classicist, but not a revivalist. He was original, too, in his thinking about town planning, to use an old-fashioned term he would have liked. To Krier, the principles of sound urban design were all known long ago—and didn’t need to be reinvented—the great challenge was how to accommodate the automobile. His solution was not to banish cars to the periphery, or to separate them from pedestrians, but to pragmatically insinuate them into the plan—under buildings, in buildings, beside buildings, on the street, and in ad-hoc car parks that were really squares. In a Krier plan such as Poundbury, the street plan appears at first picturesque and chaotic, but this is done with a singular purpose. The person on foot is king, the person behind the wheel is the interloper.
A COUNTRY PLACE AND ITS MAKERS
This month sees the publication by Monacelli of Planting Fields: A Place on Long Island. Gilded Age country estates on Long Island’s Gold Coast are not unusual—there were originally 500 of them—but this one is, not least because the house and its 400 landscaped acres have survived, more or less intact, now a public arboretum and state park. I contributed a chapter. I chose to tell the story of Planting Fields more like a novel than a design history. The characters matter: the enterprising Helen Byrnes who starts it all, the talented Grosvenor Atterbury and James Greenleaf who in several important ways set the architectural tone for the house and garden, the able Leon Gillette of Walker & Gillette, the persevering and adaptable Fred Dawson of Olmsted Brothers, the tragic Mai Coe, and of course William Coe, the tough, self-made businessman who develops a green thumb. And as in the plot of any good novel, nothing is inevitable and unexpected events overtake the best-laid plans.
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