FBI Headquarters Building in Washington, D.C.
The New York Times gave NCAS president Justin Shubow some good quotes in a February 22, 2025 article on the politics of Brutalism under Trump:
The [Brutalist] buildings’ very association with government is sinister to people in Mr. Trump’s orbit, like Justin Shubow, who served on the Commission of Fine Arts during Mr. Trump’s first term. “Brutalism represents faceless bureaucracy,” he said. “It represents a kind of federal power in the worst possible way.”
Mr. Shubow, who helped draft the 2020 executive order targeting Brutalism, told The New York Times that classical architecture “is the architecture of American democracy. It’s what the founders consciously chose for the core buildings of government in the new nation.”
The F.B.I. building — which Mr. Shubow calls “the ministry of fear” — “needs to be torn down and replaced,” he said. “I think there is an incredible opportunity to build a new classical F.B.I. building at that site.” . . .
Mr. Shubow cast [the otherness of Brutalism] in a negative light, saying that the buildings “look extremely foreign” and “like something from the Soviet Union.” . . .
Brutalism’s detractors have presented the style’s unattractiveness as a fact. In 2018, Mr. Trump reportedly said of the F.B.I. building: “It’s one of the Brutalist-type buildings, you know, Brutalist architecture. Honestly, I think it’s one of the ugliest buildings in the city.” Mr. Shubow called Brutalism “aesthetic pollution,” a style celebrated by “architectural elites” but abhorred by “ordinary people.”