Once again, the news caught all of America by surprise, and especially its architects.
Among the latest decisions taken by Donald Trump, who is due to hand over to his successor Joe Biden in two weeks, the President of the United States slipped an executive order Monday ordering that in the future buildings constructed by federal administrations be " beautiful ”,“ classic ”and“ traditional ”.
So in the neo-Greco-Roman style so characteristic of the buildings of power of the United States in the 19th century, with their white stone colonnades and their ancient capitals, their triangular tympanums set with cornices, their flights of immaculate steps.
The Capitol in Washington or the Museum of Fine Arts in Philadelphia are the best known examples.
Read also: Trump orders federal buildings to be "beautiful";
the architects are dismayed
Donald Trump is not the first president to promote the neoclassical style.
Georges Washington and Thomas Jefferson had set the tone by entrusting a host of architects, often French, with the task of building the capital of a modern democracy which would draw its sources from the Athenian model and the Roman Republic.
However, the current president is even more in line with Andrew Jackson who made the Greek Renaissance style a model.
Based on the work of architect William Strickland, the genre will spread throughout America throughout the nineteenth century.
Despite the centuries, the two hosts of the White House have a lot in common.
Andrew Jackson, seventh President of the United States, shares with Donald Trump populist accents and a denunciation of the elites on which he has built his political career.
Unlike his predecessors, he is not known to have any particular curiosity for the arts or the cultural life of his country.
The Capitol and Supreme Court, built in the neoclassical style, in Washington.
Architect of the Capitol's Office
At the time of leaving the White House, Donald Trump surprises, however, by his choice to promote a return to the most formal American classicism.
Throughout his mandate, he did not mark the spirits by his architectural choices.
And previously, the real estate developer was above all illustrated by his taste for entertainment and luxury.
Never discreetly.
Gigantic skyscrapers, a flamboyant casino and some of the most expensive golf clubs in history are to his credit.
Trump style review.
Manhattan's Trump Tower
At the corner of 5th Avenue and 56th Street, the Trump Tower, inaugurated in 1983, is designed by the architect Der Scutt.
Wikicommons / Achim Hepp
Ideally located on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, between Central Park and Rockefeller Center, New York's Trump Tower is the real estate developer's first major achievement.
Inaugurated in 1983, built where his father for decades had wanted to leave his mark, the 58-story building was designed by architect Der Scutt, of whom it is one of the main achievements.
It combines a concrete structure and smoked glass in a style characteristic of the time;
the “box” aspect is however indented by a crenellated and nervous facade which evokes the large pixels of the beginnings of general public computing in the early 1980s.
The reception areas of the Trump Tower are clad in 240 tons of pink marble.
Wikicommons / Fletcher6
The very relative sobriety of the exterior contrasts with the opulence of the common areas inside: pink marble, tinted mirrors, gilded elevators and shiny bronze decorations.
“Everything in this building screams 'Look at me',”
writes a New York tourist guide who, however, recommends visiting this curiosity.
Also: Visit Donald Trump's Luxurious Penthouse in Manhattan
The three-story penthouse, which the former developer had installed in his tower, remained the main residence of the Trumps until his election as president and still today during their stays in New York.
The interior is decorated with a taste of the very assumed foil: eras, styles, materials mix happily as long as they are golden or very obviously expensive.
Grand Siècle painted coffered ceilings, Italian-inspired frescoes, marble columns with Corinthian capitals, interior fountain, crystal chandeliers and sconces and mirrors everywhere.
The Trump Taj Mahal Casino in Atlantic City
The Trump Taj Mahal (here in 2006) was built by the developer in the late 1980s. Wikicommon / TonyTheTiger
Built at the end of the 1980s in the gambling city of New Jersey and inaugurated by Donald Trump in 1990, this complex which includes a casino, restaurants, hotels, concert or strip venues and shops has cost nearly a billion of dollars.
Thought to be
“the most flamboyant casino on the east coast”
by its promoter, the complex is of a very classic, even industrial structure: large volumes of anonymous concrete and steel are dressed in Indian inspired decors.
This is the Taj Mahal at the beach in Benidorm.
Not to spoil anything, the establishment, frequented by the pundits of the Russian Mafia, was several times placed on the verge of bankruptcy before being bought in 2017 by the group Hard Rock Cafe.
Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas
In the middle of parking lots and vacant lots, the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas is recognizable among a thousand with its glass facade treated with gold.
Capture Googlemaps
Too much is never enough.
In 2008, Donald Trump inaugurated his latest project: a hotel with nearly 1,300 rooms in Las Vegas.
The promoter has not found land to his liking on the busy Strip, where all the major casinos in the "city of sin" line up.
So he sets his sights on a space, much further north, behind the Mirage or the Caesar Palace.
It is a vacant lot, large plots to be subdivided, where the city hopes to develop a whole new sector.
Trump wants to build
"the crown jewel of Las Vegas" there.
To ensure good visibility, the tower must be high (200 meters, the tallest apartment building in this city) and above all well visible.
For this, the glass has been treated with gold to be even more brilliant.
The facade is so reflective that the airport authorities (50 million passengers per year) threaten the architects with lawsuits, fearing that the pilots will be blinded.
"It's one of the most beautiful billboards of all time,"
Donald Trump would later say.
You drive down the Strip and there you see it. ”
But in 2008, when Trump inaugurated his "gold bar" (his ingot), the world fell into financial crisis.
The planned second tower is abandoned and the hotel stands magnificent between a vacant lot, an open-air car park and the service entrances of a shopping center.
Trump International Tower in Chicago
When imagining the plans, Donal Trump wanted his tower to be taller than the 527 meters of Chicago's Willis Tower.
Wikicommons / Diego Delso
In 2001, Donald Trump announced a major project for the city nicknamed "The Windy City".
He wants to return the city to the title of tallest tower in the world.
The plans are entrusted to the local agency Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, which was responsible for creating, in the early 1970s, the neighboring Sears Tower, a skyscraper that dominated the skies for 25 years with its 527 meters.
Not enough to scare Donald Trump who intends to hang a record on his record.
The trauma of September 11 will force the magnate to revise his plans downwards.
Opened in 2009, the Trump International Hotel and Tower spans 98 floors.
Where the Sears nested black cubes thirty-five years earlier, the Trump stacks four oblong-shaped levels.
Always glass and, above all, concrete in the country where steel is king.
Aluminum panels bring cooler reflections than those of its sisters in New York or Las Vegas, but a few bronze strokes remind us that we are among the Trumps.
Overlooking the river that flows into Lake Michigan, the skyscraper blends in perfectly with the Chicago skyline.
And this is all his problem: Trump wanted to distinguish himself by building the tallest tower;
it only has a stunted project left that bears little comparison with the Sears, the John Hancock Center or the very recent Wanda Vista Tower.
The Chicago skyline dominated by the Sears Tower.
Wikicommons / Daniel Schwen