Most people heard a headline about a "beautiful buildings" order and moved on. But Executive Order 14344 is worth actually reading, because it is a short course in where American civic architecture comes from and why the people who founded the country cared about it. This page is that course. We will walk through what the order does, explain the classical orders and neoclassicism in plain terms, and give a short primer on every architect and figure the order names, so the next time you stand in front of a courthouse you can read it.
Executive Order 14344, titled "Making Federal Architecture Beautiful Again," was signed on August 28, 2025 and published in the Federal Register on September 3, 2025. It makes traditional and classical architecture the preferred style for federal courthouses, agency headquarters, and large federal buildings, and makes classical architecture the default in Washington, D.C., absent exceptional circumstances. It applies to federal courthouses and agency headquarters anywhere, to all federal public buildings in the National Capital Region, and to other federal buildings costing more than $50 million in 2025 dollars.
It revives the spirit of a 2020 order that had been revoked in 2021, though the new order does not cite the old one by name. Its argument is historical. Here is the heart of it, in the order's own words:
"President George Washington and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson consciously modeled the most important buildings in Washington, D.C., on the classical architecture of ancient Athens and Rome. They sought to use classical architecture to visually connect our contemporary Republic with the antecedents of democracy in classical antiquity."
Executive Order 14344, Section 1.
It is worth being precise about this passage: there is no separate order "declaring that American democracy descends from Athens." That language lives right here, inside the architecture order, as the reason for the policy. The Founders chose the look of the Greek and Roman republics on purpose, to remind citizens of both their rights and their responsibilities. The order argues the country drifted away from that in the 1960s toward modernist and brutalist buildings the public never warmed to, and sets out to correct course. (The deeper inheritance behind that idea, and America's renewed ties with modern Greece, are the subject of Athens to America.)
The order also defines its terms, which is the most useful part for a citizen. It says "classical architecture" includes Neoclassical, Georgian, Federal, Greek Revival, Beaux-Arts, and Art Deco. "Traditional architecture" adds Gothic, Romanesque, Second Empire, Pueblo Revival, Spanish Colonial, and other Mediterranean styles. And it names the styles it is steering away from: Brutalist and Deconstructivist. The only two specific buildings the order names as touchstones are the Capitol and the White House.
When the order says "classical," it ultimately means a visual language that is almost three thousand years old, built around the column. In classical architecture a column is not just a post. It belongs to an "order," a complete system of proportions running from the base of the column through its top, or capital, up into the beam it carries. There are five orders, and the fastest way to tell them apart is to look at the capital.
| Order | Look at the capital | Origin | Famous example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Doric (Greek) | Plainest of all: a simple cushion under a square slab. No base, sits right on the floor. | Earliest Greek order, ~7th-6th c. BC | The Parthenon, Athens |
| Doric (Roman) | Same plain cushion, but given a base and often a smooth shaft, more slender. | Roman refinement of the Greek | Theater of Marcellus, Rome |
| Ionic | A pair of scrolls (volutes), like a rolled-up scroll or ram's horns. | Eastern Greek world, ~6th c. BC | The Erechtheion, Athens |
| Corinthian | The fanciest: a tall bell of carved acanthus leaves. | Greek invention, Roman favorite | Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens |
| Tuscan | Even plainer than Doric: smooth shaft, plain everything. The most austere. | Roman, with Etruscan roots | St. Peter's Square colonnade, Rome |
| Composite | Leaves and scrolls together: Corinthian acanthus plus Ionic volutes. | Roman, 1st century AD | The Arch of Titus, Rome |
The one-glance rule. Plain cushion = Doric. Two scrolls = Ionic. Leaves = Corinthian. Smooth and plainest = Tuscan. Leaves and scrolls together = Composite.
From simplest to fanciest: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, Composite.
We know these as a set of five because of a long chain of writers. The only major architectural treatise to survive from the ancient world is Vitruvius, a Roman architect-engineer whose "Ten Books on Architecture" (around 30 to 15 BC) described Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Tuscan. He did not include the Composite, which had not yet evolved. The full canon of five was codified in the Renaissance from measurements of Roman ruins, in three landmark Italian treatises: Sebastiano Serlio (from 1537), Giacomo da Vignola's "Canon of the Five Orders" (1562), and Andrea Palladio's "Four Books of Architecture" (1570). Those books are how the classical language traveled out of Italy and eventually to Virginia.
Neoclassical architecture is the deliberate revival of those Greek and Roman forms, beginning in the mid-1700s. It was an Enlightenment movement, sharpened by the excavation of Pompeii and Herculaneum, that wanted to return to the clarity and proportion of antiquity after the elaborate Baroque era. The lineage runs in a clean line: Greece invents the orders, Rome expands them and writes Vitruvius, the Renaissance recovers and codifies them through Palladio, and the eighteenth century revives them in a more archaeologically faithful way.
The American Founders picked up that thread on purpose. Thomas Jefferson is the pivotal figure. He modeled the Virginia State Capitol directly on a Roman temple in France, designed Monticello, and based the Rotunda of the University of Virginia on the Pantheon. For the new federal city, the Capitol and the White House anchored a classical capital laid out on a grand plan. The point was political as much as aesthetic: a young republic dressing itself in the architecture of the ancient republics it admired. That is the tradition Executive Order 14344 is reaching back to.
The most striking thing about the order is that it does not speak in generalities. It names names, a specific lineage of architects across five centuries. Here is who they are and what they built. (Note: these short biographies are general history. Inside the order, the only buildings actually named are the Capitol and the White House, and the only places are Washington, D.C., ancient Athens, and ancient Rome.)
This is the air cover for everything Burnham Civic argues at home. The federal government has now, in writing, made classical and traditional architecture the standard for its own buildings and tied that choice to the founding purpose of the country. Federal procurement is the single largest driver of the American building trades, so when it commits to classical stone, brick, and bronze, it pulls quarries, kilns, and foundries back into production at a scale a single city could never justify on its own. Seattle does not have to invent this from scratch. It has to plug into a national tide already running, and write its own version into a local standard. What that standard should look like is the subject of Century Gate.
Athens to America - the deeper inheritance behind the order: democracy from Athens, and America's renewed ties with modern Greece.
Century Gate Design Standard - what Seattle's own public buildings should look like, the local version of this national turn.
The Standard Seattle Forgot - the materials and the rule behind a Seattle standard.
Building the Supply - how to manufacture the lime, pozzolan, and terra cotta a revival needs.
Architect, historian, builder, or citizen who wants beautiful public buildings again? Tell us who you are and how you want to help.