Lecture Response: The Active Lives of Classicism (and Architecture Critics)

Response to David Sadighian: “Crisis Classicism”

David Sadighian presented the final lecture of 2025 to a full house. The fact that the first three rows of the hall were filled with Yale’s faculty is a testament to Sadighian’s popularity as both a teacher and a scholar. He presented material plucked freshly from recent trips to Yale’s Beaux-Arts archive and the bathroom tweets of President Trump.

After a semester of lectures devoted to appreciating great buildings and building theory, the lecture—cryptically titled “Crisis Classicism,” with no description of its contents on the YSoA website—turned to a subject all architects were aware of, but few had engaged with seriously: a certain orange-faced man’s renovations of the White House. Over the hour, Sadighian deftly wove together disparate strands of the roles classicism has played in political imagery, contrasting Yale’s engagement with the Beaux-Arts revival to its present mutation in the hands of the White House.

Entertaining and prescient, his lecture made me reflect on our own responsibility as critics: Why is it that Trump’s architectural tastes have not been a bigger topic of conversation in architecture schools? Why haven’t Yale studio talks treated it as a serious historical moment? Was it too tasteless for us to even acknowledge? Too easy to explain away? Too far outside the scope of legitimate architectural discourse?

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 set in motion.

Note: This review was written a month ago. As of now, others, like Kate Wagner at NYRA*, have discussed the ideological underpinnings of Trump’s Ballroom demolition.