Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is John Herschauer, Associate Editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is Justin Shubo. Justin is the president of the National

Civic Arts Society, a non-profit organization that promotes the classical and humanistic tradition

in public art and architecture. He was previously the chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine

Arts, an independent federal agency that he was

appointed to lead during the first Trump administration. Today, he joins us to discuss the future of

public architecture in a second Trump term. Justin, thank you for joining the 10 Block's podcast.

Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. So both the New York Times and NPR have called you,

quote, one of modern architecture's biggest critics.

So I'll start with the obvious question. Why are you critical of modern architecture?

Well, first, just to step back, architecture is extremely important.

It builds the world in which we live. It is unavoidable in a way, say, a painting on a

museum wall is not or a novel. You have to live in and surrounded by architecture. And so therefore,

it has a moral or political component. Architecture can uplift us. It can beautify the environment. It can make

us feel that this is a world that was designed for beings made like us. At the same time,

architecture, if done badly, can demoralize us. It can make the world an ugly place, make the world

feel meaningless. So architecture

plays an incredible role in the culture. And in my view, starting very much after World War II

in America, architecture took a turn for the worse when modernism became hegemonic. In his first term, kind of responding to that

hegemonic takeover, Donald Trump published an executive order promoting beautiful federal

civic architecture, which required, with some exceptions, that federal buildings be built in one

of several classical styles. It prompted a massive pushback from the architectural establishment,

...