Is it Trump's personal taste, an homage to the fascist architecture of the 1930s, or just a good old-fashioned monument building? One of Trump’s first actions when returning to office was to sign an Executive Order requiring that all new and refurbished U.S. federal buildings follow a classical architectural style. Personally, I love classical architecture, as well as referencing its core principles in contemporary design. It looks great when done right. But Trump’s previous projects rarely, if at all, reflected good classical composition, or detailing. At best, you can find an occasional pastiche reference but almost always, a good amount of gold leaf... This appears to rule out personal preference as the driving force here, which raises the question: Why the sudden change in taste, and why enforce it? Surely enforcing design style with an Executive Order, is at least on some level,,, undemocratic? It turns architecture from being by the people, for the people, to being dictated, in the truest sense of the word, by the state (or, in this case, an individual). It is this top-down control of design, and not the classical architecture itself, that carries uncomfortable echoes of some darker chapters in history, in particular the work of Albert Speer. What do you think? Is this reading too much into this? Should an individual be able to dictate the architecture of a nation?