Neoclassical architecture as government architecture

I haven't written about this go around with the Trump Administration's promotion of neoclassical architecture for government buildings ("MAKING FEDERAL ARCHITECTURE BEAUTIFUL AGAIN," White House, "The White House issues executive order mandating classical and traditional architectural design for federal buildings," Architect's Newspaper).  From the article:

The EO specifically applies to “all federal courthouses and agency headquarters,” “all federal public buildings in the National Capital Region,” and “all other federal public buildings that cost or are expected to cost more than $50 million in 2025 dollars to design.”

Deconstructivist and Brutalist styles are no good, this EO declares. Instead, other styles—and their practitioners—should be emulated. Architects to aspire to, the EO states, are Alberti, Brunelleschi, Michelangelo, and Palladio; Enlightenment masters Robert Adam, John Soane, and Christopher Wren; and 19th-century architects Benjamin Henry Latrobe, Robert Mills, and Thomas U. Walter.

Department of Labor headquarters.

Then again, you can always gussy up a newer building with a banner promoting Trump.

He promulgated a similar order towards the end of his first term, too late to make an impact.  

I wonder about the impact anyway since the Administration is focused on the sell off of federal properties, is discarding leases of property, etc. ("The Trump administration took down a list of 400-plus federal buildings it might sell. Here’s what was on it," Boston Globe).

Although some of this is legitimate, as properties age the cost of rehabilitation may exceed the cost of building new ("The federal government could soon sell these three big downtown Boston buildings," Boston Globe).

Although there are good examples of the new, I actually favor the concept because so much of the modern architecture for government buildings feels cold to me.  And there is the monumentality of classical architecture that projects government, and to me civic identity.  That's what I believe the City Beautiful Movement was about, according to Kathleen Lamp:

According to historian Jon Peterson, City Beautiful was a progressive-era urban planning and beautification movement that brought together municipal art (sometimes called “decoration”), outdoor art (landscape architecture), comprehensive city planning, and city services (city water, sewer, trash and snow removal).

Those are the elements of urban design and placemaking that I've advocated for since the start of the blog.

Generally, architecture and planning communities don't favor the proposal, wanting there to be the possibility of innovation and new forms of monumentality incorporated in new buildings, to be constructed of their time, rather than the period of 1895-1930 or so.

Old Courthouse in St. Louis, with the Gateway Arch in the background.  

New York Times photo.

Kriston Capps wrote about it for Bloomberg some time ago, "Trump's Politics of Urban Disgust," where he discusses Trump's campaign for remaking the capital.  We've heard of plans for a new ballroom for the White House, eradication of the Rose Garden at the White House, the design related executive order, and other interventions.  

President Donald Trump addresses a dinner for donors who have contributed to build the new ballroom at the White House, Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/John McDonnell)

Today we learn that Trump wants to build another crazy scheme, an Arc de Triomphe by the Lincoln Memorial ("Trump plans to leave his mark on Washington by building a Paris-like arch near the Lincoln Memorial," AP).

This idea of the neoclassical is a revival of the City Beautiful movement, with monumental white marble neoclassical buildings, often in the form of a campus. 

Given that Union Station in DC is an example, I've favored the concept.  The station is vibrant inside and out, even if to some the building may appear to be a mausoleum from the outside.  (The old Main Post Office building to the left of the Station is also neo-classical in design.  New stations of the time were often built with post office buildings next door to facilitate transfer of mail to the railroad postal cars.)

OTOH, there is the Cleveland City Beautiful campus with an auditorium and other buildings, and at least when I experienced it, it felt cold and empty even if the buildings are attractive.  This was the root of the criticism of the movement by Jane Jacobs, big buildings, large spaces not amenable to use and people.

Cleveland Mall, Cleveland, Oh - Photos by Janelle D'Avignon, 2023

But strictly design-wise, rather than from the placemaking standpoint, it's pretty cool.

I hate to admit I wasn't familiar with scholarship on the movement looking at the South's implementation of City Beautiful which was used to cement the Lost Cause ideology through statuary and urban renewal of black areas, such as in Charlottesville, Virginia.(Also see "Tools of Displacement," Slate.)

Note that for a long time, I did recognize DC's Union Station was an early form of urban renewal as it wiped out a poor community--Italian and Irish, not black, called Swampoodle, through the construction of the large railyard behind the station. 

Railyard, 1977.

These days, the parking lots to the right are all redeveloped as part of the NoMA district ("Union Station in Washington Has a Grand Development Plan," New York Times, "NoMa: The Neighborhood That Transit Built," Urban Land).

Photo: Drew Angerer, New York Times.

Same with the federal government's campaign to replace or eliminate alley dwellings on the interior of blocks, which were often domiciles for low income blacks, and of course the Southwest Urban Renewal program.

Trump's association with neoclassical likely dooms support from progressives, especially because after the City Beautiful period the adherents were dictators ("The good, the bad and the ugly – neoclassical architecture in modern times," Apollo Magazine).

It turns out that Diane Keaton was a historic preservationist

While it's hard to top the movie "Annie Hall"--I think I first saw it on a double bill with Harold and Maude at the Royal Oak Music Theater for like $3 in 1978 or 1979--it turns out Diane Keaton was a committed historic preservationist ("Opinion: The Ambassador Hotel lesson," Los Angeles Times, "Diane Keaton’s quiet activism helped preserve these Los Angeles landmarks," Fortune).

She bought, rehabilitated and sold historic residences ("Actress Keaton lists Tucson house for $1.1 million more than she paid in 2018," Arizona Daily Star, "Diane Keaton indulges her ‘impractical’ side by buying older Spanish-style homes to redo," Los Angeles Times), including a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Los Angeles.

Backyard with pool.  FLW house once owned by Diane Keaton.

She was a board member of the Los Angeles Conservancy for two decades ("How Diane Keaton Tirelessly Campaigned to Preserve Los Angeles’ Architectural History," Variety) and for a time served as a trustee for the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

Is historic preservation becoming a conservative movement?

 Bloomberg CityLab reports that the concepts of the value of historically designed and architectually attractive buildings are being criticized because hard right leaders like Donald Trump ("Trump Architecture Memo Promises to Change How the US Government Builds") and Viktor Orban of Hungary ("A Rogue Leader’s Plan for the Heart of Budapest") are mandating this type of design for new government buildings.

Interestingly, wrt Orban, there are 100s of high quality projects across Europe that rebuild lost buildings the way there were built in the past.  These are featured on the Reddit thread ArchitecturalRevivals.  To be fair, this argument is well articulated in today's Bloomberg article, "Budapest's Most Historic Site Gets a Controversial Rebuild."

This is one of those issues where like a broken clock being right twice a day, amongst the voluminous decrees by Trump, there can be a couple that make sense.

I don't see historic architectural design as being appropriated by the right.  The right, despite Trump's Executive Orders, primarily focused on property rights with zero regulation ("Why Historic Preservation Districts Should Be a Thing of the Past," Bloomberg) still disfavors preservation.

CityLab also has another article seemingly on the same topic, "An Underrated Upside to YIMBY Ideas? Better-Looking Buildings." 

But in my experience YIMBYs don't care about quality design whatsoever.  They are in favor of what I call 21st Century Urban Renewal, tearing down attractive albeit small scale buildings often historically designated, in favor of new denser construction ("The Escalating Argument Over Historic Preservation," Governing Magazine). 

Although repudiation of historic preservation policies can be seen as a progressive one by people who see the movement today as one of anti-change, even racist ("Unfinished New York," Places Journal).

Second + Second, designed by Snow Kreilich Architects for Minneapolis, elevates the style of the typically mundane 5-over-1 apartment building format. Peter VonDeLinde

Note that it is possible for newly constructed buildings to be attractive, using historical precedents, but it is so rare.  

This is illustrated by the article itself, which claims the new unattractive building on the left is superior to the design of the building on the right.

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Also see, "A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing: GGW criticism of consulting team retained to write the next iteration of the city's preservation plan (helped me to articulate the 21st century narrative in favor of historic preservation)," [2025].

Articles critical of current preservation practice:

-- "What We Build Is More Important Than What We Save," American Conservative
-- "What Historic Preservation Is Doing to American Cities" Atlantic

Would more traditionally designed "rowhouses" be more successful in Detroit's condo market?

Most developers argue that their market research says that today's consumer segments want "modern-looking" residential buildings.  OTOH, traditional rowhouses in center cities do better than the modern.  And in NYC, "pre-war" facsimile apartment buildings are more successful than newer buildings.

Condos in the Woodbridge neighborhood of Detroit.

Crain's Detroit Business reports, "Detroit condo market stuck in neutral with too much supply and sluggish sales, report shows," that the city's condo market is slow.  It doesn't help that Detroit has high property taxes.

In North Atlantic Cities, Charles Duff discusses why the rowhouse building type was common during a few century period on both sides of the Atlantic, especially in the Netherlands, Great Britain, and east coast cities in the US. 

Rowhouses on 10th Street NW in DC.  Flickr photo by Mr. T in DC.

With exceptions like San Francisco, the rowhouse building type didn't move west.  Arguably, there are some of the type in Chicago. 

I've thought for a long time that if Detroit did some repatterning of neighborhoods by using the rowhouse building type, it'd be more economically competitive with the suburbs.

Note that the UK still builds high quality attractive rowhouses with either brick or stone facades ("Moat Lane Regeneration").

While DC does have ersatz rowhouses and popups that detract from the more traditional rowhouse built in two basic styles from 1800-1930, there are some newer buildings that respect the city's historic housing tradition.

Change takes a long time: Parks edition

Today we had a ribbon cutting for the new Fabian Lakeside Pavilion at Sugar House Park in Salt Lake, where I am on the board.  One of seven pavilions, they are about 60 years old.  The Park is about 70 years old, a regional park, and unusually, owned by the City and County jointly but overseen by an independent board.

The pavilion project is interesting for a bunch of reasons:

• the original pavilion study dates to 2016.  So it took 8 years to construct the first new pavilion.
• the park, being jointly owned by the city and county, has interesting problems with capital funding, as the agreement calls for joint and equal funding, leading to lots of paper and accounting issues.
• But the two different governments work on different Capital Improvement Planning (CIP) schedules and only last year did I figure out how to make the two separate processes congruent--for our purposes, the equivalent of one process
• the city started putting money aside for this pavilion 4-5 years ago.  The county a bit more recently.  
• the original design for the pavilion was very modern and execrable (a lot of architecture firms aren't interesting in referencing architectural history).

The latter made me blow up the meeting and we had a special session later where we worked out a style that was a bit more balanced, with some cues to historic park architecture.

After the board meeting, I happened to go to a conference with a session on historic park architecture, featuring buildings and structures of the US Forest Service, and I ended up writing a long paper about park architectural history.

And I realized for the first time that most park system master plans fail to discuss park architecture generally, let alone park architectural history ("I discovered a massive omission in local parks master planning: it fails to discuss architecture and design in an overt way," 2023).  Which dates to the late 1800s with railroads creating lodges to serve the large western national parks.  This approach to design was continued by the National Park Service when it was created in 1916 ("parkitecture"), and was updated in the 1950s for modernism.

For various reasons, state and local park systems tended to adopt this approach, abetted by the New Deal, when many state and local parks were built by various federal government works programs, using design guidelines developed by the National Park Service as the lead, but also the US Forest Service.  (Other federal agencies like BLM use the same guidelines.)

This issue was one that inspired my series of articles on gaps in park master planning:

-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part One | Levels of Service"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Two | Utilizing Academic Research as Guidance"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Three | Planning for Climate Change/Environment"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Four | Planning for Seasonality and Activation"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Five | Planning for Public Art as an element of park facilities"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning, Part Six | Art(s) in the Park(s) as a comprehensive program "
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Seven | Park Architectural (and Landscape Design) History" 
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Eight | Civic Engagement"

-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Nine | Second stage planning for parks using the cultural landscape framework" 

and specifically with architecture and the cultural landscape (""Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Seven | Park Architectural (and Landscape Design) History").

I suppose there are a couple more I should write, on transportation access ("Revisiting: Access to Theodore Roosevelt Island, a national park in Washington, DC," 2022), on planning for multiple agencies owning parks in particular jurisdictions ("Federal shutdown as another example of why local jurisdictions should have more robust contingency and master planning processes," 2013), and including for profit actors in the sector as part of master planning ("Why community recreation plans should include for profit actors: What do you do when important assets face dissolution?," 2021) which I've written about for even longer.

Still, 8 years.  One of the other board members really helped push this along in the past 18 months, so it does show the value of having independent boards.  Again, it puts in perspective how long change takes.  That's the equivalent of two political terms.  I always laugh when after 6 months or so people are complaining about the failure of newly elected public officials to do anything.

.... But you've got to invest in those boards.  The city and county have failed to do that.  Luckily, we have a couple of more engaged board members, and the board is becoming more active and less passive.

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I fought to keep grills as part of the program.  Our park manager (the County) has been removing grills.  But because we are independent, they had to do what we wanted. I argued grills are part of equity. Similarly, we've developed some nice signage for the pavilion, although it's not quite installed.

Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Nine | Second stage planning for parks using the cultural landscape framework

 Gaps in park master planning frameworks

-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part One | Levels of Service"

-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Two | Utilizing Academic Research as Guidance"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Three | Planning for Climate Change/Environment"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Four | Planning for Seasonality and Activation"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Five | Planning for Public Art as an element of park facilities"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning, Part Six | Art(s) in the Park(s) as a comprehensive program"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Seven | Park Architectural (and Landscape Design) History" 
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Eight | Civic Engagement"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Nine | Second stage planning for parks using the cultural landscape framework" 

But while I have written a bunch about parks and transportational access, I didn't think to include that as another topic in the series.  The challenge is to ensure that as many parks as possible are accessible by transit.  This, and other forms of accessibility, should be covered in a parks master plan.

-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Ten | Park transportational access" (2025)

Planning a park at the outset is about creating the landscape design and program.  Planning parks at the outset is "simple" in that land features are identified and either preserved or enhanced, and a program--who the park will serve and how it will be done through the provision of a set of facilities including landscape elements--will be created.

Plans cover land and water features, facilities, intended uses, and programming.  At the end of the process one of the ways the plan for the park gets expressed is through a map schematic.  While detailed, they are examples of more simplified planning documents.

Burgess Park, Southwark, London.  Note the level of detail specified on the schematic.

Updating the park master plan.  The planning issue comes up when you update a plan for a park.  How large is the park, what features does it have, is it cultural and historically significant or are there elements that deserve more detailed analysis, etc.  

Sugar House Park is almost 70 years old, and has different planning needs compared to when the park was created.  Items like vegetation and Parley's Creek were not covered thoroughly in the most recent (2008) master plan update process.  And there are more issues today like climate change and its effect on the park and patrons, and how to respond.   

Many of the "natural features" in Sugar House Park are specified in the post on climate change, "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Three | Planning for Climate Change." including Parley's Creek, its watershed, and flood control, water conservation, turf and plants, trees/arboretum, and fauna.  Topography and viewsheds are key elements also.

When the park experienced flooding via Parley's Creek in 2023.

Mobility, heat effects  and mitigation measures, park and park architectural history, buildings and structures and other facilities, programming, strategy and management of the park are the other necessary elements to have a plan that is truly comprehensive.

So a park or park system plan, to be comprehensive should be a combination of a cultural landscape plan, a regular park design and program plan, a capital improvements plan, an organization and management plan, a branding and marketing plan if the park is signature, a programming plan, and a fundraising plan.  

Or would you call those "natural elements" environmental, and call that section of a plan an environmental master plan?  Environmental plans have five elements: land, air, water, waste, and energy, some of which you would address only parenthetically in a park plan.

Definitely complicated depending on the nature of the particular park or park system being studied.  Because there are so many items, you can call it a cultural landscape plan because that approach is so macro focused and comprehensive.  

But maybe the issue is to just make the comprehensive park or park system plan more comprehensive, by including as many of these other items as possible for study, but not calling it a cultural landscape plan per se.

Cultural landscape planning approach.  A way to tie together the various planning threads for a park and/or a park system is to use the cultural landscape planning approach, which looks at sites more comprehensively than a typical parks plan.

I think that it is in next stage planning where the cultural landscape approach becomes more relevant to parks planning.  For Sugar House Park, the elements to address in more depth would be related to the land, water, vegetation, buildings and history.  

Cultural Landscapes

A cultural landscape is a place with many layers of history that evolves through design and use over time. A cultural landscape embodies the associations and uses that evoke a sense of history for a specific place. 

Physical features of cultural landscapes can include trees, buildings, pathways, site furnishings, water bodies – basically any element that expresses cultural values and the history of a site. 

Cultural landscapes also include intangible elements such as land uses and associations of people that influenced the development of a landscape. Cultural landscapes include neighborhoods, parks and open spaces, farms and ranches, sacred places, etc.

However, the cultural landscape approach is usually applied at a large scale.  In the US, it's used most often for creating management plans for National and State Heritage Areas, which can cover hundreds of square miles and hundreds of separately owned cultural resources.  

ATHA visitor center in Hyattsville, Maryland.

Maryland has a National Heritage Area in Baltimore and a program that designates state heritage areas.  

Planning occurs at two scales, for the heritage area as a whole (ATHA management plan), focused on the big picture and identifying historic themes, and plans for individual sites like house museums, parks, etc.  

The plans for individual units range from park or museum master plans, to house museum plans (building preservation, marketing, etc.). 

-- Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes, The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties
-- Protecting Cultural Landscapes: Planning, Treatment and Management of Historic Landscapes: Planning, Treatment and Management of Historic Landscapes, Preservation Brief 36
-- How to Evaluate and Nominate Designed Historic Landscapes, National Register Bulletin 18
-- Guide to Cultural Landscape Reports: Contents, Process and Techniques

-- The Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation
-- The Cultural Landscape Foundation

The most distinctive element about large scale cultural landscape planning is that interpretation is organized around the major historic themes of the area (comparable to identifying the period of cultural significance for a historic district, "What is the Period of Significance and what does it mean for Cleveland Park?," Cleveland Park Historical Society).  So the Rivers of Steel Heritage Area in Pittsburgh didn't include one particular mining area as a resource, because it was associated with the steel industry of Cleveland.

One Maryland State Heritage area is the Anacostia Trails Heritage Area in Prince George's County, abutting DC.  The state areas focus on highlighting local historic assets and marketing them as a tourism product.  

The marketing program may include visitor centers, the organization of cultural resources into "trails," events, wayfinding and interpretive signage, brochures and other elements. 

Parks and park systems are simpler units than heritage areas and a modified approach to planning at the scale of the cultural landscape makes more sense. Obviously not all parks and local parks system are the same.  And only some parks probably rise to the level of high historic/cultural significance.

The challenge is to do more comprehensive planning for the parks that should be planned at that level of detail. I argue a more simplified approach to cultural landscape planning can be adopted for master planning for local parks systems and individual parks.  Using the principles, not the level of detail.  

Broad Branch Park in New Jersey is a rare example of a local park with a cultural landscape plan, which took several years to create.  The report has six volumes and totals over 1,000 pages.

• Existing conditions
• History of the park and critical periods of development
• Hydrology, infrastructure, and historic fabric
• Structures in the park
• Vegetation in the park
• Treatment and management

Such detailed planning for an individual park is beyond the capacity of most parks systems.  Note that many parks conduct Cultural Landscape studies using the methods of the National Register of Historic Places.  

For example, the Cultural Landscape report (vol. 1, vol. 2) for the Eleanor Roosevelt Historic Site in Hyde Park, New York makes a number of treatment recommendations:

• Improve Landscape Condition
• Protect and Enhance Historic Setting
• Reestablish Historic Field and Forest Patterns
• Perpetuate Historic Managed Vegetation
• Enhance Historic Character of Roads and Walks
• Provide Effective Deer Control
• Maintain Compatible Park Furnishings
• Expand Landscape Interpretation

The 1983 Plan to restore and revive Central Park in Manhattan is a great example of this kind of plan for a more local, but significantly historic resource. 40 years later the book still reads so well, and offers a lot of guidance for contemporary parks planning.

-- Rebuilding Central Park: A Management and Restoration Plan

Again, such reports are focused on identification and maintenance of historic resources, while for a contemporary park or park system, only some elements may be historic, but application of the analytical  framework of cultural landscape planning is relevant.  

The challenge is identifying certain resources as historic and recognizing this and treating them appropriately, while mixing in other planning approaches to other elements of park resources.

A good way to contrast first stage versus second stage parks planning would be the Rebuilding Central Park plan of 1983, to revive a park constructed starting in the 1850s, or the Bryant Park program, versus the creation of the High Line in Manhattan, Brooklyn Bridge Park in Brooklyn. or Millennium Park (2009 Rudy BRuner Award: Silver Medal winner) in Chicago.

This came up with Sugar House Park and planning for replacement pavilions.  I argued the approach was a-historic and failed to acknowledge the relevance of the architectural history of park buildings and structures to the decision making process ("Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Seven | Park Architectural History and Design").

For Sugar House Park, the elements relevant to a cultural landscape second stage planning approach would be: 

• site history (former prison)
• architectural history of the park (some materials from the prison are used in some structures that exist today) and area
• as well as park architectural history more generally (parkitecture style)
• viewsheds towards the Wasatch Front Mountains
• Parley's Creek (natural) and the pond (man-made)
• topography, in particular the hills (my line is that hills are a competitive advantage for the park compared to other parks in Salt Lake City, which are mostly flat--two areas are especially popular for sledding) 
• tree cover and management (treating the trees collectively as an arboretum--we are in the process of getting Level One accreditation from ArbNet, and will continue to develop this concept over the years) 

Adding the cultural landscape lens to parks planning.  In parks master planning updates, agencies should endeavor to identify important historic and cultural elements for each park, although just thinking about Salt Lake County and Salt Lake City parks, most parks do not rise to this level.  

For signature parks, it shouldn't be hard to identify the elements that for future planning purposes, qualify as significant and relevant to cultural landscape approaches to planning.  

Does that mean a cultural landscape study should be conducted for each park that qualifies?  That's hard to say.  Many parks departments don't have that kind of infrastructure and funding, although they could work with local historic preservation offices to secure some. 

Maybe doing the equivalent of a "windshield survey"--a term from historic preservation where you do a quick visual assessment of a property to determine if it is a significant or contributing resource to a potential historic district--is enough (Bulletin 24: Guidelines for Local Surveys, NRHP), provided that the identified elements get the additional attention deserved within the planning process.

Salt Lake City.  To its credit, the Salt Lake City Public Lands Department (broader than "just" parks) has done an assessment of parks in terms of their cultural and historic resources (memo).  Five parks were designated as particularly significant and a cultural landscape study has been completed for Liberty Park (created 1881), while studies are underway for Pioneer Park (dating to 1847 as a public facility)--the signature Downtown park, and Allen Park (which for quirky reasons is culturally significant, dating to the 1940s).  The intent is to produce such studies for 11 parks in total.  But funding hasn't been secured.

I can't claim to have read hundreds of parks master plans, but this kind of identification of particular parks with significant historic and cultural resources is unusual.  

On the other hand, the language of the memo as submitted to the city's Historic Landmarks Commission hasn't made it into the city's most recently updated parks plan, ReImagine Nature, although this plan is more of a vision framework than a master plan.

Salt Lake County.  I am not so familiar with the Salt Lake County system, but most of the parks were created after 1960, and most don't have historic elements.  

Although, some parks in some communities across the county may date to the 1800s (that's when the area was settled by Caucasians) and early 1900s, and often have elements relevant to historic and cultural preservation.

The best way to ensure that cultural and historic resources are considered within parks master planning is to take the Salt Lake City approach and do a broad survey of park resources, and determine which parks require differentiated treatment when it comes to further planning and updated plans for specific parks. 

Gaps in Parks Master Planning, Part Seven | Park Architectural (and Landscape Design) History

 Gaps in park master planning frameworks

-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part One | Levels of Service"

-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Two | Utilizing Academic Research as Guidance"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Three | Planning for Climate Change/Environment"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Four | Planning for Seasonality and Activation"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Five | Planning for Public Art as an element of park facilities"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning, Part Six | Art(s) in the Park(s) as a comprehensive program"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Seven | Park Architectural (and Landscape Design) History" 
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Eight | Civic Engagement"
-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Nine | Second stage planning for parks using the cultural landscape framework" 

But while I have written a bunch about parks and transportational access, I didn't think to include that as another topic in the series.  The challenge is to ensure that as many parks as possible are accessible by transit.  This, and other forms of accessibility, should be covered in a parks master plan.

-- "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Ten | Park transportational access" (2025)

This topic was one of the first that struck me as a significant gap in parks planning. 

While park master plans tend to not reference built environment and landscape architectural history, the reality is that architectural historians do this kind of evaluation all the time, publish books and reports, etc. about parks and designers like Olmsted.

For example, the Library of American Landscape History  specializies in this field.  One of their most recent books is Boston's Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City.  According to the publisher:

This book is the first full historical treatment of Franklin Park, providing the analysis that confirms its place as one of the great works of nineteenth-century American art. Illuminating the history of the park and its popularity in the early twentieth century, Ethan Carr also describes its decline and the new plans for its renewal, as the City of Boston, working with the surrounding neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain, commits funding and expertise to assure that Franklin Park continues to improve the lives of the people it was created for.

But within the parks profession, the idea of applying the architectural history lens to master planning hasn't been taken up.

Park architecture and design. At Sugar House Park, we are replacing pavilions as part of addressing $20+ million in unfunded state of good repair projects, plus trying to incorporate some new ideas into rebuilding old facilities.  

The originally proposed new structure is stark, severe and decidedly modern.  It doesn't fit the park's architectural history or landscape.  But I needed a narrative to explain why and to be able to convince a majority of board members to move in a different direction.

What it made me realize is that at the local and state level, there isn't a good understanding, codification, and application of park architectural planning history to current parks master planning ("I discovered a massive omission in local parks master planning: it fails to discuss architecture and design in an overt way"). 

It never occurred to me before, when reading park master plans, that architecture is never mentioned as an element, although of course it makes up the bulk of discussion in specific plans for buildings. 

Railroad park tourism as an architectural movement.  The approach to park architecture in the US was shaped by how passenger railroads promoted tourism to Western national parks.  

These parks were created before the formal creation of the National Park Service.  (Note that the railroads were a driving force in the creation of the National Park Service, because of how important parks-related tourism was to their business.)

To promote tourism-based ridership, railroads focused  attention on developing national parks as destinations by  constructing lodges and other buildings using a rustic style of wood and stone, using building materials from the regions of particular parks, and then using those facilities to drive visitation.

As visitorship increased, the park rustic architectural style influenced people's perceptions of how a park's facilities were supposed to look.  

It is likely that park officials and stakeholders from around the country visited these national parks, experienced the structures and the way they were integrated into the landscape, took these lessons and ideas back home, and aimed to implement a form of park rustic style appropriate in their local situation and context.

NPS architectural style: rustic style/parkitecture. 

When the National Park Service was created in 1916, it kept the same approach to park building architecture that had been developed by the railroads.

The style, called NPS rustic and/or parkitecture, features natural materials primarily stone and wood, with a focus on the use of regionally significant materials like flagstone or river rocks, cedar wood, red rock, etc.  

The same approach to architectural style of buildings and structures was adopted by other federal land agencies like the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management.

Park rustic style pavilion at Jordan Park, Salt Lake.  Note the fireplace made of stone.  Because of vandalism and other issues, parks these days tend to not build fireplaces.

The basic thrust is to snugly fit buildings into nature and the landscape, rather than for the buildings to stick out.  

-- Park and Recreation Structures, NPS

-- Shelters and Recreation Facilities, NPS

-- Camp Stoves and Fireplaces, US Forest Service

Adoption of park rustic throughout the country. Park rustic ended up being "imported" to other communities, because after visiting parks out west, professionals and other visitors took their cues on park design from those parks.

State and local park adoption of the park rustic style spurred by the New Deal.  This was accelerated by the New Deal.  State and local parks construction projects used the same design manuals ("The Best Kind of Building" The New Deal Landscape of the Northern Plains, 1993-42 Northern Plains, 1993-42 ," Great Plains Quarterly, "Indiana's First State Park: A New Deal Delight," Living New Deal).

Chapter 5: Resorting to the Woods: State Parks and Recreation Demonstration Areas

EVEN MORE THAN PARKWAYS, playgrounds, and metropolitan parks, state parks were a product of the Depression. During the New Deal these recreation landscapes developed to a level of crude finish and beauty unequaled before or since. The Recreation Demonstration Areas, which were a kind of training ground for the state park, began, flourished, and died with the New Deal. 

-- Public Landscape of the New Deal

Parkitecture prioritizes “architecture that is of and respectful of the natural landscape.” The first statement of policy for NPS called for “harmonizing improvements such as roads, trails, and buildings with nature" ("Parkitecture: past and present," Whole Trees).

Craig Thomas Discovery and Vistor Center, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.

Postwar park building architecture has been updated, called Park Modernism, still using natural and regionally relevant building materials/

Complemented by glass, concrete, steel and other modern materials, with modern design touches.  

It references, complements, and updates the Park Rustic style.

While rare, some parks in the 1960s and since have adopted a truly modernist architectural approach that isn't based on wood, stone, and regionally relevant materials based on the park rustic/park modernism approach.

Value engineering and modular construction.  To save money, today many park structures are purchased from vendors using stock designs.  The designs include rustic, modern, and "not very good."

In local park systems, many buildings are now constructed from cheap materials like concrete block, but augmented with techniques like coloring the block and variegating the shape of the block, to acknowledge the characteristics of the types of original, natural, regionally sourced buildings materials used historically, without the cost of using original, high quality materials.  

The angles of the roof of this pavilion, as well as the design of the pavilion are out of sorts compared to park rustic structures constructed in the 1920s and 1930s.

Not having an understanding of park architectural history, decisions on new facilities may end up diminishing the value of historic park architecture, because it isn't considered a basic element of parks master planning and architectural styles and materials aren't considered as part of the decision making process.

The wall to the left of the Administration Building is shown as constructed of red stone, the Administration Building is red brick.  In the foreground is Parley's Creek.

Sugar House Park architectural history.

In the residential neighborhood, brick is the dominant material for housing and a lot of the historic building stock in the neighborhood and throughout Salt Lake.  Rather than red, typical of the east, a wide variety of brick colors were used.

In the neighborhood and the city, some new commercial and institutional buildings respect the heritage of brick as a building material including incorporation of design patterns, although the color of brick used tends to not reference the styles used during the historic period.

Sugar House Park had been a prison, and the walls were constructed out of the red rock common to Utah.  A bit of the rock remains on site, used in other structures.  

If we can trust the illustration and "fading" of one of the rare color images of the Prison, based on the architectural history of the site we should have settled on red rock, red brick, and wood as the dominant materials.  

This Utah freeway abutment uses red rock as a material for the abutment

and red colored concrete for the beam

Some red rock from the prison has been incorporated into structures in the park, like this memorial, bridges over the creek, and in terraces.

But people didn't understand the argument that red rock should be considered a distinctive and highly relevant building material for the park's structures.  

Sadly, a more recently constructed monument in the park uses white rock.  We should have specified red rock.  But at the time I wasn't clued into the issue.

A perfect example is the choice of exterior building materials for the restrooms at Sugar House Park.  

The brick type and masonry style has zero relevance to either the Park--where buildings were constructed of traditional red brick--or the neighborhood, where buildings are constructed with a wide variety of colorful brick but none like the bricks used in the restroom.  (I will create a brick chart for the Sugar House neighborhood at some point.)

The result is the presentation of a pastiche of architectural styles and materials that is no longer coherent within the continuum of US park architectural history the built environment in parks.

Sugar House neighborhood residential architectural style is Prairie-Craftsman, constructed in a wide variety of different colored brick.  Unlike its use in the Prison Administration Building, standard red brick is quite rare for the neighborhood and for historic buildings in Salt Lake more generally.

It is used today in some new construction, although its use is limited by cost. 

Use of types of bricks common throughout the neighborhood would be inappropriate for the park site because it was represented by the traditional red brick style, which is actually uncommon within the City of Salt Lake today.

Pattern books are models for how to illustrate the palette of appropriate building materials in the local parks master plan.

Image from ""The Art of Pattern is the Legacy of our Grandparents": Koen Mulder on the Brick Bond as a Composition Tool," ArchDaily

Based on a review of historic images, it's likely that adobe and/or stucco (parging) were common materials used on the prison buildings.

How to better define park architecture for  local parks master planning

First is to identify the predominate architectural style of the built environment, recognizing that at the scale of the system there can be differences within districts.  

It's most likely to be park rustic, but could be park modernism, depending on the time period in which the community was built, especially in postwar suburban settings.

The second is to specify in the plan the types of materials that are locally appropriate to the  architectural style and history of the park system and where necessary, individual parks. For example, Salt Lake County parks has farms, more traditional parks, historic buildings, and the type of appropriate building material will vary.

Another color postcard of the prison, showing the Administration building in red brick, but not the walls.

It is on this point where I wasn't as successful as I'd like to have been in convincing board members on adopting architectural design elements and building materials specific to Sugar House Park.  

But at the time my dealing with this was ad hoc and I hadn't thought through or analyzed the history of the built environment of the park site and the neighborhood.  

The Garden Center fireplace uses the "Forest Service style" (Camp Stoves and Fireplaces).

In the initial discussions of the new pavilion and what would be an appropriate design, I did write a long memo about park architectural history more generally.

Now I would say, based on the architectural style of the original pavilions and the interior of the Garden Center which uses wood in the ceiling and has a marvelous stone fireplace (the Garden Center uses cheap concrete block for its exterior), that park rustic is the dominant architectural style for the park.

And that the historically appropriate materials are wood timbers, red brick, and red rock. 

This determination should be included in the discussion of the park's master plan, and extension, in park system master plans.

The third is to address parks and the park system master planning in terms of landscape design and the cultural landscape.  The cultural landscape approach is discussed in this entry, "Gaps in Parks Master Planning: Part Eight | Second stage planning for parks using the cultural landscape framework."

Cultural Landscapes

A cultural landscape is a place with many layers of history that evolves through design and use over time. A cultural landscape embodies the associations and uses that evoke a sense of history for a specific place. 

Physical features of cultural landscapes can include trees, buildings, pathways, site furnishings, water bodies – basically any element that expresses cultural values and the history of a site. 

Cultural landscapes also include intangible elements such as land uses and associations of people that influenced the development of a landscape. Cultural landscapes include neighborhoods, parks and open spaces, farms and ranches, sacred places, etc.

-- Guidelines for the Treatment of Cultural Landscapes, The Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties
-- Protecting Cultural Landscapes: Planning, Treatment and Management of Historic Landscapes: Planning, Treatment and Management of Historic Landscapes, Preservation Brief 36
-- How to Evaluate and Nominate Designed Historic Landscapes, National Register Bulletin 18
-- Guide to Cultural Landscape Reports: Contents, Process and Techniques

-- The Alliance for Historic Landscape Preservation
-- The Cultural Landscape Foundation