MAGA War on Architectural Diversity Weaponizes Greek Columns

I was passing by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington the other afternoon when the raking winter sun made the patterned, bronzed-aluminum facade glow. The building seemed to warm its patch of a frozen National Mall, alongside the chilly phalanx of gray stone behemoths, nearly all classically designed.

Style-wise, I don’t know what to call the museum’s architecture. David Adjaye, the Ghanaian-British architect, led the design team. The building is classicizing, with its base and capital, at the same time that those patterns on the facade borrow from ironwork by Southern slaves, and the facade’s canted, three-tiered structure derives from West African sculptural traditions.

The design is a kind of meditation on the symbolic meanings of American classicism and how style functions as a symbol of pride, or a tool of oppression and colonialism, from which modernism, with its transparent glass and technical innovation, promised escape and liberation. Architecturally speaking, the museum is many things, in other words, not to mention it is mobbed all the time — hands down the most popular and successful new public building in Washington this century.