Federal Architecture and First Amendment Limits - Jessica Rizzo

One of the last laws Trump signed during his tenure as president was the Executive Order on Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture, enacted only in the last month before he left office. The crux of this order is a directive for the federal government to favor more ‘traditional’ and what Trump considers more ‘beautiful’ styles of architecture when building new government buildings. A lot of the language in the order is relatively vague, prescribing for example and I quote “Care must be taken, to ensure that all federal building designs command respect [sic] of the general public for their beauty and visual embodiment of America's ideals''. However, this edict does pronounce that certain styles should be prioritized, specifically “Gothic, Romanesque, Pueblo Revival, Spanish Colonial, and other Mediterranean styles of architecture” at the cost of potentially excluding more recent schools of design like brutalism and postmodernism. My guest today, Jessica Rizzo, a writer and scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Carey School of law, makes the case that efforts to exclude specific art styles (and by implication elimination from the urban landscape the philosophical beliefs that underpin these artistic movements) is tantamount to censorship regime, which risks infringing on the first right amendments of architects and artist who don’t confirm to the same aesthetic principles as the Trump administration. In this conversation with Rizzo we explore the First Amendment implications of Trump’s EO , the limits on the public’s ability to use the First Amendment to contest offensive government speech, and the ways in which existing law fails to reckon with the unique limitations and possibilities of architecture.