How Brown University Can Draw Lessons From President Trump’s Architectural Ambitions

Parsa Zaheri

Brown’s current mission as an academic institution has been obscured by the lack of a unifying thread in its architecture.

On January 20, 2025, the Trump administration issued a presidential memorandum directing the General Services Administration, the administration responsible for federal, civic architecture, to construct architectural works that are “visually identifiable as civic buildings” by adhering to traditions of a “classical architectural heritage.” While Trump’s memorandum has been criticized by some for being unduly restrictive in granting architects the necessary degree of artistic license, a deeper understanding of the foundations of American architecture helps illuminate an underlying truth in the memorandum.

Prior to the American founding, the colonists of New England struggled to define a uniquely American artistic style and to realize the creative potential of American artists, painters, sculptors, and architects alike. As one of the most prominent American colonial portraitists John Singleton Copley explains, “Artists were treated like shoemakers,” which is to say that artists were treated as ordinary craftsmen and artisans. However, after the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the severance of political allegiances to Great Britain, Americans came to realize the fundamental need to develop an identity that was distinct from the English, and architecture was one of the crucibles in which a distinct American identity was born. By the 1780s, the Federal-style of architecture was developed in America, which sought to emulate the works of Ancient Greece and Rome in a Neoclassical style.

Among the early Americans, there was an understanding that the United States inherited the traditions of Greek democracy, Roman law, Renaissance humanism, and Enlightenment thought and brought these values to their apotheosis. To that end, American architects looked to European Neoclassical luminaries, such as Andrea Palladio, to find a proper architectural vocabulary fitting for the new American nation. The Federal-style of architecture lasted until about the 1830s and is most visible in the homes of the Founding Fathers, namely George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

The Federal-style, alongside the values and aspirations it carried about our American identity, was embedded into the architecture of government buildings and can be seen in works like the United States Capitol Building, White House, and the Supreme Court of the United States. Art is at its best when its style or form corresponds to its function or vocation. For instance, the paintings of Mark Rothko represent rudimentary and sparse geometric shapes, namely quadrilaterals, to evoke a sense of harmony and symmetry and create a sense of peace and contentment within the viewer. Likewise, Federal-style architecture is often used for government buildings to evoke the function of the building, such as upholding justice, maintaining discipline through laws, and executing those laws in our society. What inspirational and aspirational values are communicated through the architecture of Brutalism, Postmodernism, or Deconstructivism? These styles simply do not convey the American values we have established through Federal-style architecture. In this sense, Donald Trump’s memorandum to represent buildings in a manner that aligns with “classical architectural heritage” is essentially asking that civic buildings represent the key values of our American identity.

Given we’ve established that architecture serves as a method of representing our common identity, it’s worth considering the question of how the architecture on Brown’s campus reflects its values as an academic institution. Brown’s architecture is difficult to define because it is rather eclectic in style, ranging from the concrete Brutalism of the John D. Rockefeller Jr. Library to the rounded arches of the Romanesque Revival style of Sayles Hall. Brown’s architectural style mainly revolves around colonial architecture and the Romanesque and Gothic Revival, but it also incorporates more modern styles that are worlds apart in appearance and function.

While this eclectic architecture represents the diversity of intellectual thought on campus, the amorphous amalgamation of styles also obscures the core, common values shared by Brown as a university. Brown’s architecture seems to obscure the Universities’ values more than reveal them because there is no single “style” that defines Brown’s campus, meaning there is a lack of a single, common takeaway from the architecture of Brown.

We can compare Brown’s architecture to that of Georgetown’s which is uniformly designed in the Romanesque Revival style, save for the exceptions of the contemporary-styled housing units in Village A and the Georgetown Intercultural Center. Georgetown’s architecture reflects its particular visual identity as an academic institution centered on Jesuit values, and the Romanesque style recalls medieval universities like the School of Chartres, where students learned about the seven liberal arts — grammar, rhetoric, logic, geometry, arithmetic, music, and astronomy.

In a similar vein as Georgetown’s Jesuit academic tradition, Brown University was originally founded as Rhode Island College by a group of Baptist clergymen with a faith-based groundwork. Its first president was James Manning, a Baptist Reverend, and the next nine presidents of Brown after James Manning were also Baptist clergymen. The influence of Baptist values on Brown’s campus can still be seen in Manning Hall, which mirrors the Doric façade of the lower half of the First Baptist Church in America with its sparse cream-colored pediment, triglyphs and metopes, and four Doric columns holding up the entablature. Despite its Baptist roots, James Manning felt it critical that “sectarian differences of opinions, shall not make any part of the public and classical instruction.” As Brown grew and expanded, both architecturally and metaphorically, it adopted new aspirations, such as the Open Curriculum in 1969, but Brown’s core values as an academic institution remain the same. The fact of the matter is that Brown’s current mission as an academic institution has been obscured by the lack of a unifying thread in its architecture.

Like President Trump’s desire that civic architecture reflect an identifiable American identity that expresses the values of the Founding Fathers, a university’s architecture should reflect its institutional values. Ultimately, Brown’s inability to tie together the different threads of its architectural styles into a common, unified tapestry has left us with an unfinished work of art; one that is vulnerable to completely unraveling unless it is stitched back together in time to come.

Cover image courtesy of gregobagel via Getty Images