Date of Award

Spring 2026

Thesis Type

Open Access

Degree Name

Master of Liberal Studies

Advisor(s)

Dr. Robert Vander Poppen

Second Advisor

Dr. Steven W. Schoen

Abstract

The dominant visual language of American federal buildings has been classical, surviving repeated ideological challenges, professional revolts, and political controversy. While this persistence has been widely observed, the mechanism behind it has not been clearly identified. This thesis isolates that mechanism. Drawing on architectural history, federal procurement policy, and primary sources from Jefferson's correspondence through the executive orders of 2020 and 2025, it argues that classicism endures not because its meaning has remained stable, but because federal architecture is governed by a persistent functional constraint: government buildings must be immediately legible to an ordinary citizen, without signage or prior knowledge, as instruments of republican self-governance. The thesis names this standard civic legibility, and the formal system that meets it civic grammar. Competing movements, including the Gothic and Romanesque Revivals, Modernism, and postmodern historicism, each advanced coherent professional arguments, and each failed at the federal level in proportion to its inability to meet that constraint. The current dispute over General Services Administration design policy is best understood not as a clash of ideologies but as an unresolved institutional design problem: the profession's retreat from civic legibility after the 1962 Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture has produced buildings that struggle to communicate public authority, and no successor architectural language has yet demonstrated the capacity to do so at scale.

Rights Holder

Jesse S Walker

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