Tear your eyes away from the ballroom. This courthouse is the real face of Trump-era architecture

By Oscar Holland, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump’s extravagant $400-million White House ballroom and proposed triumphal arch were always going to attract the most attention. That is somewhat the point. But this week in Tennessee, more than 500 miles away from Washington, DC, officials quietly unveiled a far more revealing illustration of the US president’s future architectural legacy.

Set to open in 2030, Chattanooga’s new courthouse will be a muscular Art Deco Greek temple. More than an imposing expression of judicial power, this state building also symbolizes something of national significance: It’s the first major new design announced by America’s federal building agency since Trump’s executive order, “Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again.” Its beauty is therefore now a matter of both architectural and political debate.

Almost a year has passed since the president formalized his disdain for modernism, postmodernism and brutalism by mandating that major federal buildings be designed in “classical and traditional” styles. Yet, big federal projects are slow and infrequent, meaning that Chattanooga presents the first concrete (or stone, rather) evidence of how architects will respond. The otherwise contemporary firm HOK’s interpretation features a row of square columns bookended by two bulky, mausoleum-like volumes — a kind of architectural equivalent to armored power shoulders.

Dubbing the style “Greco-Deco,” the National Civic Art Society (NCAS) lauded Chattanooga’s new courthouse as a “showpiece” of Trump’s executive order (a directive that the organization, incidentally, helped draft). NCAS president Justin Shubow, a vociferous advocate of classical architecture, said the project demonstrates that “classicism is still alive, can be done well and can be both traditional and original.”

“Many judges, regardless of whether they were appointed by a Democrat or a Republican president, want a courthouse that looks like a courthouse,” he said in a video call.

The design is hardly a major departure from other judicial buildings — not least the 1930s one it’s replacing. Its blocky, rectangular form borrows heavily from Chattanooga’s existing Joel W. Solomon Federal Building and US Courthouse. To some critics, however, there is something altogether more sinister at play.

According to Kevin D. Murphy, a professor and chair of history of art at Tennessee’s Vanderbilt University, the new design evokes a version of 1930s classicism “associated with fascist states.” Murphy also disputed the architects’ claim that the building symbolizes a value that, he believes, should be central to all contemporary courthouses: transparency. Quite the opposite, in fact.

“To me it isn’t at all transparent. It is very formidable and very solid, in a very conventional way,” he said over the phone, adding: “Is that the message you want to send about the judiciary? That it’s intimidating?”

Christopher Hawthorne, a former Los Angeles Times architecture critic who now publishes the weekly Punch List newsletter, was slightly more sympathetic. He considers Chattanooga’s new courthouse to be a “handsome design” that has “the potential to be perfectly competent.” That is not the point, however.

“Architecture has a responsibility to say something, or reflect something, fundamental about contemporary society,” he said. “I don’t think that this courthouse design has anything to say, except reflecting the current occupant of the White House.”

HOK did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

Eye of the beholder

Trump’s executive order perturbed many in the architecture profession when it was issued last year. Op-eds have painted the president’s reverence for traditional design as mere nostalgia that will lead, inevitably, to pastiche and derivative mimicry while stifling innovation. The American public, however, may hold somewhat different views on the merits of classicism.

A Harris Poll of 2,000 people, conducted on behalf of NCAS in 2020, found that more than 70% of Americans, regardless of political affiliation, prefer traditional over modern designs for courthouses and federal office buildings. Indeed, the FBI’s recent announcement that it will vacate the J. Edgar Hoover Building, or reports that the angular Dallas City Hall may be threatened with demolition, have hardly elicited widespread public outcry.

“I haven’t heard any Democrat politicians saying they like brutalism… or that we should have more avant-garde designs,” said Shubow, who believes that the Chattanooga Courthouse will become a “beloved civic landmark for generations to come.” “You might hear that from the architecture establishment, but that’s because they’re extremely out of touch with the preferences of the general public.”

Whether it is an architect’s responsibility to appease public opinion is another matter altogether. However, opposition to Trump was never strictly about the merits or shortcomings of traditional design per se, but rather, in Hawthrone’s words, “whether the federal government should be in the business of dictating specific architectural style” at all.

The American Institute of Architects — despite counting many classically-minded members among its ranks — slammed the directive, not because it looked to the past but for limiting their “freedom to create buildings that truly serve modern communities.”

For Trump, this freedom has always been the problem. Since the 1960s, the General Services Administration (GSA), which is responsible for all federal buildings, prohibited the idea of an official government style. Quality was always the priority, not mandating specific aesthetics. While this did, on occasion, lead to experimental designs unsuited to their civic functions, Trump appears to pin all the supposed crimes of modernism on the GSA. “Many of these new federal buildings are not even visibly identifiable as civic buildings,” the executive order complained.

Legislating for style may prove harder than Trump thinks. Ideas like “beauty” and “dignity” are easy to write in an executive order, but harder to formalize as working guidelines. How much concrete makes a building brutalist? When is a column’s capital Doric, Ionic or Corinthian enough to be considered classical? These are, perhaps, facetious questions, but they speak to a broader issue the GSA now faces as it overhauls its policies to ensure its buildings are “Beautiful Again.”

In a statement to CNN, a GSA spokesperson said the agency evaluates projects “on a case-by-case basis to guarantee full compliance” with the executive order. It is up to applicants, though, to “determine how best to respond” to the requirements “based on their expertise.” The result of this will, surely, be creative self-censorship and a reluctance among the country’s best architects to bid for public work. Hawthorne said he has heard anecdotal evidence of the latter. “I think architecture firms should be very wary of having their work enlisted in this sort of culture war,” he added.

Murphy, the Vanderbilt University professor, said the president’s orders are, in any case, “too vague” to serve as meaningful guidelines. He also argued that Trump’s ornate State Ballroom itself undermines ideas of classical restraint. “It’s kind of paradoxical, because what Trump himself is doing contradicts them.”

Ripple effect

Even supporters of the president’s architectural ethos have been irked by his demolition of White House’s East Wing to make room for the party space. Both sides of the political spectrum can agree on the dangers of bulldozing history — and the modest 1940s structure was arguably the very kind of stately neoclassicism that Trump’s executive order seeks to promote.

The ballroom is, however, a law unto itself. Its design was chosen without a competitive, public selection process (to the dismay of many in Congress), and construction will be privately funded. Beyond that, and for all the uproar, the executive order itself may only impact a handful of buildings.

The mandate applies specifically to federal courthouses, agency headquarters or federal public buildings that are either in DC or cost more than $50 million. Only so many of these can be built in a four-year presidential term. At present, just one call for proposals in the US government’s tendering portal — for a courthouse in Hartford, Connecticut whose design is set to be unveiled in April 2027 — explicitly cites “Making Federal Architecture Great Again.” The GSA told CNN that a total of six current projects are subject to the executive order.

Yet, the directive’s influence will likely stretch far beyond the purview of the GSA. Hawthorne believes that any project that could benefit from federal support might be moved “in the direction of design that might curry favor with the administration.” And look no further than the Beaux-Arts skyscraper rising on New York City’s Fifth Avenue, or the Washington Commanders’ proposed neoclassical-inspired NFL stadium, for evidence that privately hired architects are also turning to the past for inspiration.

Whether this is a welcome development — and whether Chattanooga’s sturdy new courthouse is a dangerous precedent or a sensible safeguard of civic tradition — may depend as much on your politics as your taste.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2026 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.