When that thing formerly known as the sun reappeared on Sunday morning in my garden, it threw beautiful columns of foggy silver across trees and meadow.

Fairy slides we used to call them when the kids were little. Alas, current associations go to magical thinking of a different kind: the installment of a king, if not emperor, wishing for a return to neoclassical building styles emulating the architecture of Greece and Rome millennia ago with columns as tokens of power and order, linking the current regime to nasty ones before them.

It was, after all, Hitler and Mussolini, who appropriated the tradition and grandeur of neoclassicism to serve the Nazi image and reminded a fascistic Italy of the power of the Roman Empire. No surprise, then, that our dear leader is going for Dictator Chic.

But who will be his Albert Speer, the equivalent to Hitler’s main architect?

Speer was as nasty as they come, but able to escape a death sentence at the Nuremberg trials because it was not yet known when he was tried how deeply he had been involved in the Holocaust. After his prison sentence he was released in 1966 and lived a life writing successful books until the died in 1981. Here is historians Ulf Schmidt assessment.

“Speer was personally involved in the Holocaust, that his ministry provided the building materials for an extension of Auschwitz, that he made a substantial fortune with Aryanized property, denounced uncooperative competitors, initiated the construction of concentration camps, and supported the draconian measures used against forced and slave labourers in some of Germany’s most horrific underground production facilities. If only a part of this had been known during the International Military Tribunal in 1945, which preceded the trial against Karl Brandt and others, Speer would probably have been sentenced to death. The fact that most of it was unknown at the time gave Speer the possibility of creating his own carefully constructed, but also greatly biased, post-war narrative of himself and the regime, a convenient and plausible story, which scholars and journalists either took for granted or were unable to refute.”

And here is an incisive essay by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, on reading Speer’s Inside the Third Reich as a child in Africa, then re-reading it as an adult at Yale. “His rueful acknowledgment of his dedication to Hitler, and his philosophical puzzlement at his own complicity, seeks to cast a glaze of innocence over him.” Perhaps the kind of book a certain attorney general might write in the distant future?

Back to the white columns: it is not architecture per se that should be seen as the problem. As I learned here there were lots of good guys (relatively speaking) who used neoclassical styles in their capitals (Paris’ Pantheon, London’s National Gallery,) and lots of bad guys, who have used the most progressive architects and architecture to set monuments to themselves. These include monumental buildings in totalitarian states such as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan, designed by progressives like Norman Foster and Zaha Hadid. Jair Bolsonaro from Brazil is apparently hiring the Danish star architect Bjarke Ingels.

The problem is the political process that seeks to reverse the Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture (with us for 60 years now,) which insisted that architects suggested the designs to the government, not vice versa.

Entitled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again,” the draft of the executive order argues that the founding fathers embraced the classical models of “democratic Athens” and “republican Rome” for the capital’s early buildings because the style symbolized the new nation’s “self-governing ideals.”

Here are the details and also the reactions of various parties involved, including the resignation of the General Service Administration’s Chief Architect and Director of the Design Excellence Program, David Insinga, and the response of the American Institute of Architects.

“The AIA strongly opposes uniform style mandates for federal architecture. Architecture should be designed for the specific communities that it serves, reflecting our rich nation’s diverse places, thought, culture and climates. Architects are committed to honoring our past as well as reflecting our future progress, protecting the freedom of thought and expression that are essential to democracy.”

I believe proscribing certain styles of architecture is a statement of power, and an imposition of values associated with the style. It is not just a brand, it signals an ideology. If it is historically associated with authoritarian regimes by someone with authoritarian tendencies, we should be alarmed. Restricting creative freedom is just one more step in line of the developments we have seen over the last few years. We should march in protest columns, not have neoclassical ones stare in our faces.

Bruckner’s 4th symphony (a beautiful piece) starts with a sunrise, but since he was appropriated by the Nazis we’ll skip him. Let’s listen to this instead: Carl Nielsen’s Helios overture. Fittingly composed during a journey to Greece…