ICMA Statement on Executive Orders Regarding Monuments and Federal Architecture
July 31, 2020
The Trump Administration has authored a suite of executive orders concerning architecture and monuments: the proposed order "Make Federal Buildings Beautiful Again" announced February 5, 2020, intended to confirm Greek and Roman classicism as the default model for federal building commissions; and the signed orders "Protecting American Monuments, Memorials and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence" of June 26, 2020, intended to criminalize the removal of public monuments, primarily those that glorify the Confederacy; and "Executive Order on Building and Rebuilding Monuments to American Heroes," of July 3, 2020, intended, in part, to establish a statuary park titled the "National Garden of American Heroes." Each of these orders raises grave concerns regarding the administration's conception of public space and the character of art and architecture. With this statement, we wish to promote critical understanding of both modern and historical works. As historians, we aim to emphasize the specific contexts that shape the construction, installation, use, and removal of monuments and buildings. We likewise advocate a plural and equitable perspective on public art and architecture.
The proposed order concerning architecture would mandate that the "Classical" building style associated with Greek and Roman temples should be preferred for federal commissions, along with "Gothic, Romanesque, and Spanish Colonial," which are deemed equally "traditional" and "beautiful" models. We wish to respond first on the basis of method. The stated stylistic preference is justified in part by data from a nationwide survey conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of AIA in 2007, soliciting the participating public's favorite examples from among 248 pre-selected buildings. We caution that to found contemporary national policy on the interpretation of a survey that queried 1,800 people (of unspecified demographics) more than a decade ago relies on a fundamentally misleading representation of data, which we strongly disavow on scholarly and scientific grounds.
Regarding the order's language and positions: the assumptions expressed in the draft order on the experience and meaning of architectural style are antithetical to what we know about the diverse communities of the past and present alike. The perspectives defined as "traditional" belong solely to European and colonial practices and therefore run counter to our understanding of the varied traditions that nourish modern pluralistic nations. The administration's limited characterization of the "traditional" is also false to our knowledge of the complex historic societies that developed the building conventions known as Classical, Gothic, and Romanesque in the first place. Moreover, the draft order defines Gothic, Romanesque, and Spanish Colonial as the "historic humanistic" styles. We fiercely object to this willfully narrow and Eurocentric definition. Historic humanism (as the term is commonly employed) encompassed myriad traditions that are neither European nor colonial.
The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) responded to the executive order in a nimble defense of architectural pluralism; we affirm their convictions and add a historians' caution to interrogate the many contingencies carried into the present by any historic building style.
Alongside its definition and privileging of the "traditional," the order's blanket ascription of "beauty" and value to certain building styles is deeply troubling. This language assumes and imposes a single perspective on the experience of public space, which we as historians know cannot ever be claimed in universal terms. Specifically, to many people, the "traditional" architecture defined in the order cannot be identified with the ideals of a modern democratic nation in any incontrovertible way. This caveat includes people in contemporary society, in the early years of settler society in the lands that became the United States, and in the antique and medieval pasts referenced by the styles in question, no less. For many people, past and present, the historic orders connote oppression and denied rights, not the highest aspirations of equality and freedom codified in the US Constitution. Slave labor built the halls of Washington, DC on the ancestral land of the Anacostan (Nacotchtank) people; slavery and other forms of disenfranchisement defined the deep past as well. As such, the "tradition" embodied by the predominant use of Classical, historic European, or Colonial style includes denying most of the population the right to vote. In this and other respects, it is important to remember that the historic styles can represent an exclusive conception of citizenship and a violent denial of personhood.
We cannot countenance the perpetuation of colonialism and the blatant privilege of harmfully limited perspectives on history as the "visual embodiment of America's ideals" (to quote the order).
A related point about plural perspective pertains to historical monuments. Regarding the current challenges specifically to monuments to the Confederacy in the United States, the ICMA Advocacy Committee endorses the thoughtful, clear call for their removal from public space issued by the Heritage Conservation Committee of the SAH. We draw attention also to the fact that discussion of the place of monuments in public life is urgent and pertinent in various contexts (see, for example, the consideration of Museums and Archives by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada). In weighing the function and character of public monuments in broad perspective, we advocate heightened attention to several matters that we bring to bear in research on the past.
1. The subjects of monuments and their locations are not the only factors in what statues or installations represent and how they make the past a part of contemporary public space. Practices of patronage (who commissioned, designed, and paid for them) are pertinent as well, as are the circumstances of monuments' commission, construction, and modification. Also critical is the way monuments are contextualized and how dynamic the contextualization itself might be. An example whose development clearly illustrates each of these factors appears in the Dammtor war memorial in Hamburg, Germany (photos here). Here, debate resulted in the absorption of a First World War memorial, originally constructed in 1936, into a 1985–86 "counter-memorial" on the same ground. Information at the site clarifies the Nazi commission of the original, which restricted participation in the design contest by citizenship and racial categories. The site has been a focal point in modern anti-war demonstrations—a reminder that ephemeral events factor in the history and meaning of the monument alongside its origins and form.
2. The physical and visual form of monuments can and should be treated as a question separate from the identities or themes of their subjects. Materials, genre, composition, and style have strong significance. In other words, whether someone or something should be permanently commemorated in public space is a matter distinct from how that commemoration is handled and what form it takes. The July 3 order specifies that "When a statue or work of art commissioned pursuant to this section is meant to depict a historically significant American, the statue or work of art shall be a lifelike or realistic representation of that person, not an abstract or modernist representation." Caveats equivalent to the SAH objections to the overly determinate order on architecture apply here. One might look to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice founded by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, AL to find a contemporary monument whose design embodies the power of both figural and more abstract forms to involve a visitor in a complex experience of commemoration. It is essential also to note that "realistic" style is not to be confused with documentation. Finally, we would reiterate the need to understand that forms and styles themselves have histories, and that these are part of the creation of any new work.
3. We recognize the current moment of interrogating, challenging, defending, and even breaking images as something vitally important in and of itself. The power of images in public space should never be underestimated. Throughout our histories, episodes of both iconoclasm and iconophilia (actions attacking or asserting support for images, respectively) have laid bare issues essential to the definition of particular communities and even to the definition of whole societies. Images, their forms, their presence, and their absence all broker convictions, ideas, and power. We must all attend to the urgency with which people now call—in various places and from diverse positions—for us to take the nature and work of images in public space profoundly seriously. Moreover, we must remember that monuments, as images and as products of visual cultures, have histories of their own. That history is to be distinguished from the subject a monument represents. To contest a monument is not necessarily to erase its historical subject, but to engage directly with fashioning the object's own history. In other words, moments of destruction are as much a part of monuments' histories as are their original conceptions, constructions, and commemorative agendas.
— ICMA Advocacy Committee, Board of Directors, and Executive Committee, with thanks to all colleagues who contributed to authoring and revising the statement