Lecture Response: The Active Lives of Classicism

Response to David Sadighian: “Crisis Classicism”

David Sadighian presented the final lecture of the year to an assembly room barely able to contain the students who showed up. The first three rows of the hall were filled with Yale’s faculty, a testament to Sadighian’s popularity as both teacher and scholar. He presented material plucked freshly from recent trips to Yale’s Beaux-Arts archive and the bathroom tweets of President Trump.

The lecture addressed a subject all architects were aware of, but few had engaged with seriously: Trump’s renovations of the White House. Why is it that this issue has not been the topic of conversation more? Was it because Trump’s decisions were too easy to dismiss as tasteless? Was it too far outside the scope of legitimate architectural discourse?

Through the lecture, Sadighian pulled together strands of the roles classicism has played in political imagery, concentrating on Yale’s engagement with the Beaux-Arts revival to its present mutation at the hands of the White House, asking us to grapple with classicism’s many meanings: a return to the triumph of a mythic past, a symbol of racial purity, a fantasy of a unified public.

Like Learning from Las Vegas, Sadighian chose to look where architects are not trained to look. His lecture insisted that even the unseemliest architectures deserve rigorous attention, if only so that we can understand the power and cultural machinery that they activated.