Two weeks ago at the Republican National Convention, Donald Trump’s daughter introduced him as a man who has overseen the construction of skyscrapers, thereby qualifying him to somehow take stead of the vastly more complex civic architecture of the United States. Never mind that Donald Trump doesn’t necessarily pay the architects he hires, making him less of an overseer and more of a cheap tyrant (with a terrible, reductive aesthetic sense, to boot). This tendency to inaccurately appropriate architecture is a theme within the Trump family—Melania made up an entire degree—but what Duo Dickinson notes over at CommonEdge is that Trump’s blowhardism is counter to what architecture is: notably, an exchange of ideas, and a conversation about how best to implement those ideas. As Duo writes:
Agreement with the Donald is being right, anything else puts you in the other side of him—wrong and disqualified; not a great place for an architect if he’s your client and radically divisive even in a time of extreme political discord in America.
For more on the intersection of politics and architecture:
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