Justin Shubow joins host Rachel Lu to talk about the importance of beautiful government buildings and the possibility of a classical revival.

Brian Smith:

Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org and thank you for listening.

Rachel Lu:

Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Thanks for joining us today. I’m Rachel Lu, Associate Editor at Law & Liberty, and here with me today, I have Justin Shubow. He’s the President of the National Civic Art Society, a non-profit organization in Washington, DC that promotes the classical and humanistic tradition in public art and architecture. Welcome to the show, Justin.

Justin Shubow:

Thanks for having me.

Rachel Lu:

So we’re going to be talking today about the Beautifying Federal Civil Architecture Act, but before we get into the politics, I just thought I’d open with this question. I know you’ve dedicated tremendous energy to improving public buildings. If you were given the opportunity to wipe one public building or monument off the map and redesign it completely, what would you do with that opportunity?

Justin Shubow:

Well, I think one of the worst buildings that I would eliminate is the Department of Housing and Urban Development Headquarters in Washington, DC. It’s a massive, ugly, brutalist building designed by a famous architect, Marcel Breuer, and it’s just incredibly oppressive. Two different HUD Secretaries, one Democrat, one Republican, have said the building is like ten floors of basement. And a third HUD Secretary, also a Democrat, Julian Castro, seconded those Secretaries and also said that the building looked like something from the Soviet Union.

So here we have both Democrats and Republicans agreeing that this building is terrible, and it also does damage to an area of Washington, DC that’s very important. So, the building is located in the southwest quadrant near the National Mall. It could be a beautiful classical building that harmonizes with the best of our tradition in Washington, but it represents and embodies the federal government at its worst as a faceless bureaucracy.

Rachel Lu:

Yeah, and what would you do with that potential? What could be in that space?

Justin Shubow:

Well, I think an example of what a noble building could be is the buildings in the Federal Triangle, buildings like the FTC headquarters. These were classical buildings inspired by ancient Roman designs that were constructed in the 1920s and 30s. The Head of the Treasury Department specifically said that these buildings should be classical. The buildings helped to complete Washington, DC as a classical city as it was originally intended by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Rachel Lu:

Right. And that was the norm for a long time in Washington, DC, right? To build buildings in that style.

Justin Shubow:

Well, the founders consciously decided that the core buildings of government would be classical. They wished to harken back to Democratic Rome, Republican Rome, and Democratic Athens, and they saw the classical tradition as time-honored and timeless. They started a tradition that continued in America for about 150 years—and, in fact, in 1901, the federal government made Classicism official, talking about its greatness and how respected it is by people over the years.

Rachel Lu:

Right. So, I want us to talk more later about why this changed if we have a chance, but let’s get first to this issue of the Beautifying Federal Civil Architecture Act. Because this is a bill that’s presently in front of Congress or potentially being debated by Congress. Can you tell us about what that is, what the status of it is, and so forth?

Justin Shubow:

Sure. Just one correction. It’s the beautiful Civic Architecture Act, not Civil.

Rachel Lu:

Okay. Sorry.

Justin Shubow:

As a bit of background, the federal government, starting in the 1950s up until very recently, has been building almost entirely modernist federal buildings. And President Trump issued an executive order that revolutionized federal architecture by reorienting it from ugly modernism to beautiful, classical, and traditional design. The order said that, and it applied to federal buildings costing $50 million or more, it said that the building should uplift and beautify public spaces, inspire the human spirit in noble the United States, command respect from the general public, be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional architectural heritage. And it specifically said for Washington, DC that classicism should be the default style for federal public buildings.

The executive order didn’t ban modernism, but it did make it much more difficult to build brutalist and deconstructivist designs. Unfortunately, President Biden in his second month of office, rescinded the order without giving any explanation. But more recently, as you said, there now is legislation pending in Congress. In the Senate, the lead sponsor is Marco Rubio. In the House, the lead sponsor is Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, who’s a rising star and is almost definitely going to be a Senator from Indiana in two years.

This legislation would essentially codify that executive order with some changes, but one important thing that it would do is it would require that there be substantial public input when decisions are being made for designs for federal buildings and U.S. courthouses.

Rachel Lu:

Right. So, Biden canceled that without explaining what was going on with that really, and this is an attempt to revivify that effort.

Justin Shubow:

Correct. This legislation proves that this issue is now on the national radar. This is not just about President Trump. This has much broader support from well-respected Members of Congress. This is an issue that’s not going away.

Rachel Lu:

Right. So, as I understand it, one of the arguments in favor of this, there are many, but one is just that people in general prefer classical architecture. It’s more beautiful. They’d rather walk by it and look at it in their cities. And there’s, I think, a lot of survey evidence that this is the case, right? That people prefer this. So partly for that reason, you want to give the public more opportunities to have input into the buildings that are being built in the Capitol and elsewhere, the public buildings that they’re paying for and that they’re living with, and they’re looking at. How is that going to work? How would that look? What kind of optimal structure would you want there to be for the public to give input into public buildings?

Justin Shubow:

Well, first, I would say that my organization in 2020 did do a survey run by the Harris Poll, a highly respected, non-partisan polling company. We polled 2,000 Americans to see their preferences for the design of federal buildings and US courthouses. And what we did was pair images, very carefully selected to show actually existing federal buildings similar in shape, size, color, and so on, making sure the sky was the same. And we just simply ask the participants, “Which of these two buildings would you prefer for a federal building or a U.S. courthouse?”

The results of the survey were overwhelming. 72% of the people surveyed preferred the traditional design, and there were widespread majorities across all demographic groups: race, gender, socioeconomic, political party affiliation, you name it. Regarding political party affiliation, tradition was preferred by 70% of Democrats and 73% of Republicans. So this survey proved what everyone really knows, which is that ordinary people prefer classical and traditional design for these kinds of buildings.

And you ask, “How could we ensure that the public has a say?” Well, I could imagine that when a building is going to be built in a particular locale, like, say, there’s going to be a new federal courthouse in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which in fact is the case, there is going to be one, that you could pick lay people from that region and give them samples of the kinds of buildings that they might want.

So in other words, you might provide an example of a classical building, a brutalist building, a deconstructivist building or a Romanesque building and so on, and say, “Which of these styles would you prefer for the new courthouse?” These lay people could be surveyed, and those survey results would influence the design that the architects actually create.

Rachel Lu:

I see. Yeah. So explain this—why is it, do you think, that people prefer traditional styles?

Justin Shubow:

Well, I think one major reason is that they are inherently beautiful. There are certain buildings and kinds of buildings that are greatly admired by not just Americans but people around the world. I think when people look at the U.S. Capitol, they see an inspiring, iconic building representing American democracy. And by contrast, when people see a brutalist building, they tend to see it as oppressive, foreboding, and so on. There is widespread agreement across cultures about what makes for a beautiful building. Symmetry can matter—having a certain degree of ornament and complexity matters.

So yeah, those are some of the reasons why people might like it. At the same time, Americans do associate this design with our federal government. Classical architecture is widely seen as the embodiment of our democracy. So there’s this association in the minds of Americans about what makes for building that speaks to who we are and who we wish to be.

Rachel Lu:

Yes. That’s interesting. What do you think that connection is? What are the precursors to that architectural style, and why does it seem particularly fitting for us that our federal buildings would be in that style?

Justin Shubow:

As I said, the founders saw classical architecture as returning to the roots of democracy in Rome and Greece. So it made sense that they chose that architecture instead of, say, gothic or something else for the buildings of government. It’s interesting—in the 19th century, when the British Parliament was deciding what their new parliament building was going to look like, they had a competition, and the competition required that the building be either Gothic or what they called Elizabethan. There was opposition to having a classical parliament because people said that style was too Republican, meaning it was too anti-monarchical.

And so I think there is this long association in America tying classical architecture to democracy. And you look at certain structures like the U.S. Supreme Court, which is modeled on temple architecture with the steps leading up with the columns with the pediment. This is a classic American building type, the courthouse that everyone recognizes. It’s what you see on TV and in movies. And when people see that, I think they see a temple of justice. There’s something about the temple form that resonates.

Rachel Lu:

Yeah, and it’s interesting how architecture has a particular capacity to shape people’s sensibilities because we do walk by buildings every day, right? They’re part of our lives in a particular way. So, it does have that particular significance. Now, this might be a good moment to ask, why are people so opposed to this? I’m not really enough in this field to understand it. When you walk by these awful buildings that look like Borg cubes or these kinds of things, it’s just hard to understand. Why does someone choose to build a building like that?

Justin Shubow:

Well, the opposition to the executive order and the legislation really only comes from a small sliver of society. It’s from the architectural establishment, which is almost entirely modernist in orientation. And certain cultural elites, like, say, the New York Times editorial page. When Trump’s executive order was pending, the New York Times published an editorial titled “What’s So Great about Fake Roman Temples?” And it said, “Well, maybe the founders needed to create a new kind of architecture, but we no longer need to wear borrowed clothes.” The New York Times was calling for something that suits us today. The implication being that in some important ways, we are different from the people in the past, classical architecture doesn’t suit the spirit of the times. Underlying a lot of this modernist ideology is this idea that there’s progress in history and we can’t build in historic styles since there is this evolution.

I would say that the New York Times, by implication, was saying that the U.S. Supreme Court building and the Jefferson Memorial were also fake Roman temples when they were constructed because these are not 2,000-year-old buildings. But as I was saying, the architectural establishment represented by the American Institute of Architects, which is the main trade organization, they’re vehemently opposed to this policy because it’s a major threat to their hegemony. They have been the determiners of what our federal architecture should look like, and they do not want that power taken away from them. Most of them do not work in a classical, traditional style.

And there’s a lot of money at stake here also. It’s important to understand that the federal government is the largest patron of art and architecture in the country, and they want to continue building in various modernist styles.

Rachel Lu:

That is helpful. So when an architect is designing a building that someone who is really opposed to the kind of criteria that you would want them to use, is the thought something like, “I want to build something original. I just don’t want to just copy old styles that other people did. I want to come up with something that puts me and my cohort of architects on the map,” or something like that? Is that the driving motivation behind that?

Justin Shubow:

Yeah, there are certain modernist architects who think of themselves as creative geniuses with emphasis on innovation and “creativity.” They don’t believe that emulating traditional architecture is something that should be done. A lot of them think that they just know better than ordinary people. Even if their designs are not appreciated by the public, they think that they are achieving the highest goals of architecture. And maybe someday, the public will be educated and come around to liking their designs. But of course, say Brutalism has been around for 60 years now, and it’s still widely disliked, and I don’t think it ever will be liked.

There is something about architecture schools that brainwash or deform architects’ minds. There is a study that the longer architects have been in school, the more their preferences diverge from that of laypeople. There was a separate study that found that not only do architects evaluate buildings in a different way from the public, but they can’t even predict how lay people will respond to their buildings. That’s how differently they think from lay people.

And it’s important to understand that a building is not like a painting on a wall or a piece of music. You can’t avoid it. Architecture is forced upon us, and so therefore it’s the most political of the arts, small p political. And when you get to public buildings, it’s explicitly political since these buildings are speaking to who we are and who we wish to be.

Rachel Lu:

So, a lot about the politicization of architecture, right? Because you were once the Chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts. Is that correct? But were removed from that position by President Biden. Did I get that accurate?

Justin Shubow:

Yes. So, the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts is an independent federal agency established in 1910. It is the Aesthetic Review Board for Washington DC, reviewing the design of monuments, memorials, public buildings and so on. It has a great deal of influence on what Washington looks like. President Trump, and I should say in that Commission has been almost entirely modernist since, say, World War II. It has seven members. President Trump appointed me to that Commission. All Commissioners are appointed to four-year terms. In other words, it’s not meant to be a political appointment that changes with the administration.

Rachel Lu:

Right.

Justin Shubow:

He appointed me. And then, as other Commissioners’ terms ended, he appointed new experts on art and architecture. And ultimately, all seven Commissioners were supporters of classical and traditional design. So this represented a complete overhaul of the Commission. And I was elected Chairman of the Commissioners. Historically, Chairmen have served for long periods of time, 10 years on average. I was only the 11th Chairman of the Commission.

President Biden removed me and three other members of the Commission. Well, really, what the office, the White House did was send us an email in the morning saying that “you have to resign by the end of the day or you’ll be removed.”

Rachel Lu:

Wow.

Justin Shubow:

And the others and I refused to resign and therefore we were removed by President Biden. Unlike in the case of his rescinding of the executive order, the White House did provide an explanation for what happened here. They told the press that we were removed since our strong support for classical architecture did not comport with the President’s values.

Rachel Lu:

Wow.

Justin Shubow:

And to be clear, no Commissioner had ever been removed in the Commission’s 110-year history, let alone the Chairman. And I thought then, and I believe now that this set a terrible precedent that Commissioners are now being treated as political appointees to be removed by will. And I think President Biden, if you look inside his mind, has perfectly sound views on public art and architecture. But he was being heavily lobbied by the architectural establishment, again, who were threatened by the Commission since their hegemony was being taken away.

Rachel Lu:

Right. And as you say, there’s so much money in these projects that people have a pretty heavily vested interest in ensuring that the people making those decisions are sympathetic to their goals, but also to them personally, right? To whatever projects they particularly wish to advance. Yeah. Did anyone ever explain what the President’s values in public art and architecture are?

Justin Shubow:

No. They didn’t provide any more explanation than that. We were replaced by modernists. And in fact, later, even a fifth Commissioner, a classicist was removed from the Commission. So it was a shocking, sad story. It also raises questions, legal questions about whether the president even had the authority to do this, given that we were appointed to four-year terms. But again, this shows that the design of these buildings and statues and monuments and memorials is now on the radar screen. The White House did take strong action when the Commission by and large flew under the radar for many decades.

Rachel Lu:

That’s fascinating. So do you think with things like this new proposed legislation, there’s some real chance for a renaissance in architecture? Maybe I’m just throwing out an analogy because this is something that people in our orbit are familiar with in Law & Liberty’s orbit, maybe something like the Federalist Society for Law and Judges or something like that, where you get a combination of organization and the philosophical piece and also training people to do what you want them to do, right? Enough architects and people who are familiar with this design that they would be capable of designing beautiful buildings and monuments. Do you think there’s a chance of that happening? Is it happening now in architecture?

Justin Shubow:

Well, the fact that there’s legislation in Congress shows that there has been a sea change in how our leaders perceive architecture. So there is that top-down pressure that’s being placed on the field. At the same time, I hope that there will be bottom-up pressure, and more grassroots efforts by members of the public. There is inspiration from what’s going on in certain countries in Europe, especially in Scandinavia. There’s a movement called Architectural Uprising, it’s just started on social media, of ordinary people complaining about how ugly their new, modernist buildings have been and have been pressuring politicians to encourage the building of more traditional design. And they have achieved a great deal of success, and this has not been a partisan issue at all. Both the Left and the Right agree that our environment has become ugly, and then we need to reverse that. So if there can be an architectural uprising in Europe, I can imagine such a thing happening in the United States.

Rachel Lu:

Yeah. Isn’t King Charles a fan of traditional architecture or something like that? I think I’ve read that about him.

Justin Shubow:

Yes. When he was Prince, Charles was a vehement public opponent of modernist design. He gave this amazing speech at the Royal Institute for British Architects where he complained about how ugly buildings have become, and he specifically singled out a particular edition to the National Gallery saying it was like a carbuncle on the face of an old friend. So he had amazing rhetoric, and he also took positive action to put his beliefs into action. The heir to the throne, the Prince owns something called the Dutchy of Cornwall, which is 0.2% of the land in Britain. And on his land, he built an entirely new town called Poundbury, and he built it along traditional urbanist lines with traditional architecture.

And the town is beautiful. It’s a place people want to live and encourages community, and it’s been very successful. There have even been modernist architecture critics who really attacked it at first for being this unwanted throwback, but now many of them admit that it has been a success and the former Prince is responsible for that.

Rachel Lu:

Yeah. So what are the points that persuade people of this? You’ve already basically said that normal people don’t need to be persuaded. You can just show the pictures of buildings and they say, “Yeah, I want that one.” Right. But for people inside the field or who maybe have some interest in becoming architects or working in the field, what are the turning points that help them to appreciate? Yeah, we can use classical principles. That doesn’t mean that we’re just going to take an old building and copy it exactly, but we can use classical principles to build buildings that are still beautiful now and still express something that we today want to express, drawing on an older tradition. Have you seen examples of people being brought around to that point of view?

Justin Shubow:

Well, there are certain architecture schools, first and foremost, Notre Dame’s Architecture School, that do teach the classical tradition. They are not brainwashing architects who favor modernists and avant-garde designs. The education is based on the tradition, and it’s not diverting human nature in a poor direction. So, if architects go to the right schools and are educated in the right ways, I think they will agree with laypeople that there is a magnificent tradition that ought to be continued.

At the same time, there is more and more new empirical research showing the benefits of classical and traditional design for human beings, improving people’s welfare. There was a study of the design of hospitals finding that those hospitals that had views where the rooms had view of nature, had people recovering in a faster way, showing that nature is very important, biophilia. That is a phenomenon that needs to be taken into account. And a lot of classical buildings do have biophilic elements.

So for instance, think of a Corinthian capital with the leaves at the very top, A lot of detailing of classical design is based in nature, which is tapping into something about our human nature. They’ve also done eye tracking studies, looking at how people experience buildings. And the studies are finding that classical and traditional buildings grab people’s attention in a way that modernist buildings do not, that people have nothing to focus on in a modernist building, but they do zoom in on certain aspects of classical buildings.

Rachel Lu:

That’s really interesting, and I like it too because I am a graduate of the University of Notre Dame, so I was familiar with that architecture school just through friends and people who were in it. They spend a year studying in Rome. They go for a whole year to Rome to study classical architecture there, which is kind of cool.

So what do you see as the likely outlook for this Beautifying Federal Civil Architecture Act? Is it likely to go somewhere? What’s the present state of that legislation?

Justin Shubow:

Well, so far it’s been gaining more and more co-sponsors. Admittedly, all the co-sponsors so far are Republicans. I think some people are wary, some Democrats are wary of signing onto it since this was an issue that Trump touched and therefore polarized it in their minds. But I think when Members of Congress come to see photographs of what the government has been building… I mentioned the HUD building as being egregious, but that was built in the 1960s. More recently, there have been amazingly bad designs, one of them being the San Francisco Federal Building by an architect named Thom Mayne. The building looks like some kind of evil alien spacecraft that’s going to shoot laser beams at you. It’s a deconstructivist design, and the building is widely hated. And the architect himself has previously said that his buildings take an aggressive approach toward the public.

So this guy has a nihilistic take on architecture, and thus we’re getting buildings like that. Another bad example is the new Salt Lake City Federal Courthouse. It appeared on the cover of Salt Lake City Weekly with the headline “How the City ended up with a Borg Cube for a Federal Courthouse.” It looks like, again, literally like the alien spacecraft, and that’s one of the strongest arguments for Members of Congress. Simply look at what we have been building, most of it very bad, but there is a counter-example that we like to show people, and that is the new Tuscaloosa Federal Courthouse, which is a classical building. And the only reason the building exists is because a Senator from Alabama used his power to force the General Services Administration, the agency responsible for our federal buildings to give him a classical courthouse.

One thing I haven’t said in our conversation today is GSA has principles that it’s been following since the 1960s that explicitly say that architecture shall flow from the architectural profession to the government and not the other way around. In other words, the government has abdicated authority to the private sector. And that’s one reason that we’ve been getting so many modernist buildings. But again, my hope is that Members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat, will see what we’ve been building and also pay attention to public opinion like the survey that we did by the Harris Poll, which found that overwhelmingly, ordinary people want traditional and classical federal buildings and courthouses. And also that there needs to be a role for public input in design decisions because currently, there is no democracy in design. Ordinary people have no say in what is being built.

And in fact, just coincidentally to this legislation, the Government Accountability Office, which as you may know is a highly respected non-partisan independent agency, they did an investigation into how designs are chosen for federal buildings. And they found that there is no requirement that there be public input. And in fact, even if architects say they’re going to take into account what the public wants, that is very often not the case at all. And GAO recommended that the General Services Administration change its policies and procedures to require that there be public input in design, which is what we have long wanted. And GSA itself agreed to make changes in that regard. This I believe, represents a major victory for the proponents of Trump’s executive order. None of this would’ve happened, but for that order. That’s why the GAO report exists.

Rachel Lu:

This is so interesting because people like me and many people associated with Liberty Fund are fairly pro-limited-government. And in our time of increasing politicization and polarization of so many things, often I end up feeling like I would rather have fewer things be brought into the realm of the political, right? Everything doesn’t have to be political, but this is an interesting case because as you say, architecture is political, right? Enormous amounts of federal money are flowing into it, and it affects everyone in the public. So maybe this is actually a case in which making the thing more political or at least recognizing that that’s what’s going on there could be good because ideally, you could end up in a situation where both political parties want to show the public that they can build beautiful buildings, that they’re committed to having beautiful cities or something like that.

It might be that the negative trends that you want to oppose aren’t really popular among anybody. So it actually might be good if this is something that people cared about enough that it’s worth some politician’s while to invest energy in that. Does that seem to you like the direction that we’re moving now? It seems like this legislation is indicating that, and you gave an example of that as well.

Justin Shubow:

Yeah, I hope so. So long as politicians agree that we should be building beautiful buildings, things are going to turn out for the best. And you talk about classical liberalism, which I think is so much focused on the value of the individual. It’s interesting when you look at the birth of modernist architecture, you found these modernist architects being drawn to anti-individualist ideologies, whether it’s socialism on the left or fascism on the right. Modernism was born in Europe after World War I, where people thought that their civilizations had self-destructed, and they wanted to foment a revolution in the social order—and thus, they saw to completely reject the past and therefore reject traditional forms of architecture.

And the famous seminal modernist architect, Le Corbusier, said, “A house is the machine for living.” Architects like him had this view that human beings were cogs in a machine, and we ended up getting buildings that look like they’re mass-produced, that look like they’re made for the man-machine as opposed to the humanistic individual that say, classical liberals hold so dear.

Rachel Lu:

Yeah, that seems really critical, and it’s very interesting how buildings can express that. I lived in the former Soviet Union for a while, and I remember noticing this. When you walked into just normal residential zones in former Soviet cities, they would have these big forbidding apartment buildings, but they had all of these geometric designs all over them. I didn’t really didn’t know anything about architecture as such, but I noticed when you walked into those neighborhoods, you were surrounded by these large geometric designs. It must’ve taken a lot of effort to put them there, especially on ordinary residential buildings, but the size and scale of them aren’t human. And the doorways to these buildings are squirreled away somewhere on a side. They’re not made to be evident as though this is a place designed to walk into.

And it’s very strange. You think somebody wanted this neighborhood to feel not human. They wanted you to walk into it and feel like you were an alien moving into a space that was not designed for you. And why do people want that? What is the design movement that leads them into constructing those kinds of buildings? I don’t know. Have you visited the former Soviet Union? You’re probably familiar with these types of architecture.

Justin Shubow:

Well, yeah. I think when people think of Soviet architecture, they do think of modernist design, whether it’s these massive housing projects that are mass-produced and inhuman or brutalist buildings that really represent an oppressive government, overweening power, instilling fear in people. That’s what people think of when they think of that kind of architecture. And I would say that America’s lucky that that hasn’t been at the root of our design, and also that we should not be building buildings like that, that are inhumane and oppressive.

Rachel Lu:

Right. And I think the idea is partly to deter attachment to home and neighborhood and family. You want a neighborhood and a design that makes people feel like, “Yeah, I’m just a little cog floating along here. I don’t belong here. This isn’t somehow representative of me, or something that really matters.” And that helps to eliminate those intermediary layers between the state and individuals, which presumably is what many of those people wanted.

I want to ask, were there any projects when you were Chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts that you were either excited about or that you wanted to deter that may have been relevant to the decisions that were made there to make that change?

Justin Shubow:

Well, one thing that I am looking forward to in Washington, DC is a new national World War I memorial. It’s going to be built near the Treasury Department just in front of the Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. And although the plan of the memorial is modernist, the main artistic feature is going to be a magnificent classical sculpture, a bronze relief that’s I think 80 feet long by eight feet high. And it’s going to tell the story from left to right of American soldiers leaving the home front, going into the crucible of battle. You do see the tragedy and loss, but at the same time you see heroism, which is something that’s been lacking in our memorials, perhaps because the Vietnam Veterans Memorial set a trend where so many memorials are representative of people as being victims as opposed to evincing heroism.

And I think this memorial importantly, is also highly legible, meaning you don’t need a tour guide or an audio recording to understand what you’re looking at. And that’s one of the great strengths of the classical tradition is that it is easy to interpret. It’s not a question mark, it’s a statement.

Rachel Lu:

So that’s being constructed right now? That’s already in the works?

Justin Shubow:

Yes. It will take a couple of years to build the sculpture just because it’s so enormous. But yes, it is underway.

Rachel Lu:

That’s great. That sounds exciting. Are there any other trends you specifically want to mention that you hope will come along further in the architecture world in general?

Justin Shubow:

More and more architecture schools are teaching classical architecture. I mentioned Notre Dame, but now also Catholic University is another school, Catholic here in Washington, DC, that has been heading in that direction. And I think that’s a very positive development.

Rachel Lu:

So any young listeners out there who want to make a difference by going into architecture, there are opportunities now to do that.

Justin Shubow:

Oh, absolutely. And although modernism has been dominant in public architecture, there is still a great deal of classical and traditional design in residential architecture. When people hire an architect to build a house, they very often want a traditional-looking house, not some kind of glass and steel box. And so therefore, the graduates of schools like Notre Dame are immediately snapped up by architecture firms since there’s a large market for that kind of residential architecture.

Rachel Lu:

Yes, I have noticed that. It seems like a lot of these traditional styles are coming back in residential, and obviously there you have market driven incentives to build houses that people actually want. So that might end up being a leading edge for many of this. That’s really exciting. Thanks so much, Justin Shubow for coming on the show with us today. This has been a really interesting conversation.

Justin Shubow:

Yeah. Thanks again for having me. I’ve really had a good time speaking with you.

Rachel Lu:

Yeah. And thank you to our listeners for joining us today on Liberty Law Talk. This has been a conversation with Justin Shubow, the President of the National Civic Art Society, and everyone have a great day.

Brian Smith:

Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.