AIA releases statement on 2016 U.S. Election results — Will Trump’s relations with architects change?

Photo via AIA.

The unthinkable has happened and Donald Trump is now the president-elect of the United States. Considering Trump’s rocky relations with architects (and critics) and his comments on America’s “inner cities” during the debates, now that he has won the White House, what does a Trump presidency mean for the architecture industry in the coming years?

In what sounds like every public-figure response to the election results, the AIA released their own statement today saying that they “are committed to working with President-elect Trump to address the issues our country faces”. That includes core architecture issues like housing, infrastructure, and energy/the environment. If you need a refresher on Trump’s stances on these issues, Archinect recently summed them up here.

Here is the entire AIA statement from Chief Executive Officer Robert Ivy:

“The AIA and its 89,000 members are committed to working with President-elect Trump to address the issues our country faces, particularly strengthening the nation’s aging infrastructure. During the campaign, President-elect Trump called for committing at least $500 billion to infrastructure spending over five years. We stand ready to work with him and with the incoming 115th Congress to ensure that investments in schools, hospitals and other public infrastructure continue to be a major priority.”

“We also congratulate members of the new 115th Congress on their election. We urge both the incoming Trump Administration and the new Congress to work toward enhancing the design and construction sector’s role as a major catalyst for job creation throughout the American economy.”

“This has been a hard-fought, contentious election process. It is now time for all of us to work together to advance policies that help our country move forward.”

The AIA is gearing up to cooperate with Trump to tackle these pressing urban issues, but will he return the favor? You be the judge.

Donald Trump is architecture’s nightmare client

Trump undertakes the design shouting phase. Image: wonkette

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: