Justin Shubow will be our guest for a Casual Conversation on Monday, August 3 at 5 pm. Mr. Shubow is an architecture critic who has had a significant impact on public architecture in Washington, D.C. and is making his case for a humanistic architecture to a national audience of government officials and urban planners. And to you!
I contacted Mr. Shubow by email after I read an essay of his in the magazine First Things. He grew up in Baltimore, and I remembered him from that time. His wife is a practicing psychiatrist in Baltimore, and Mr. Shubow went to Yale Law School (YLS) 36 years after I did. In the most recent Yale Law Report (Summer 2026) at 107, Mr. Shubow stated in his 2008 class notes: “The U.S. Secretary of Transportation appointed me chairman of the new, first-of-its-kind Beautifying Transportation Infrastructure Council, which aims to improve the aesthetics of our bridges, roads, train stations, and airports. Also, in January I delivered a lecture at YLS, sponsored by the Federalist Society chapter, on the return of classical architecture in the design of federal courthouses, something I’ve been extensively working on.
Penn Station.
For anyone who has used Penn Station in New York, protection against dehumanizing architecture is badly needed. It is not only ugly outside, it is a warren of dirty, tight, and low spaces that treat people like rats in a maze, and I have been one of those rats many times. Mr. Shubow is on it:
As part of my activities at the National Civic Art Society, I have overseen Rebuild Penn Station, a project to construct a new classical Penn Station in New York City inspired by the original designed by McKim, Mead & White. The project has received coverage in the Wall Street Journal, Architectural Digest, and The Weekly Standard, among elsewhere.
About - Justin Shubow ; see also Rebuild Penn Station .
Preserving the Mall and finding a proper site for two new national museums:
Among his other projects, he has proposed that the planned (but stalled) American Women’s History Museum and the National Museum of the American Latino be re-sited, and that they belong not on the Mall but on the land now occupied by the James V. Forrestal Building, as Mr. Shubow wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Post in June of this year, Justin Shubow - :
Directly across Independence Avenue from the Smithsonian Castle is the soon-to-be-vacated James V. Forrestal Building, which served as the Energy Department headquarters. The gigantic hulk severs the Mall from the city’s southwest quadrant and includes a rebarbative bridge blocking views of the castle. Forrestal is a stained Brutalist superblock, a product of 1960s urban renewal that demolished a historic African American neighborhood. Even fervent preservationists of Brutalism acknowledge the monotonous building’s flaws.
There’s also a practical case for replacing the building. A February 2025 report from the Urban Land Institute completed on behalf of the National Capital Planning Commission found that adaptive reuse of Forrestal was not viable. The analysis recommended that the building be “totally razed.” Relocating the Energy Department, the report said, would save more than $2 billion in deferred maintenance plus $41 million in annual operating costs.
Further, the use of the site for the two museums would not only preserve the Mall from further encroachment, but also allow some repair to the city’s fabric caused by 1960s urban renewal under a proposal outlined by Mr. Shubow in the op-ed for development in conjunction with the proposed re-siting of the two museums, to wit, by
using the Forrestal site as a catalyst for overhauling the surrounding district. A plan developed in 2023, in a National Civic Art Society collaboration with Catholic University’s architecture school, would accomplish that by extending the Mall southward from the Smithsonian Castle to the waterfront, replacing the Brutalist Southwest Federal Center with 15 acres of green space. The plan connects the Mall to the Wharf through museums, plazas and promenades.
The Eisenhower Memorial:
I’m the author of The Gehry Towers over Eisenhower: The National Civic Art Society Report on the Eisenhower Memorial, a 150-page examination of the memorial’s competition, design, and agency approval. The report was credited with galvanizing the opposition to the memorial. Architect magazine reported, “NCAS voices legitimate concerns—about the scale, materials, and durability of Gehry’s design, for instance, as well as about the selection process.” Reviews said the report was “fiery” and contains “devastating pieces of information.” MIT professor Paul D. Spreiregen, the professional advisor for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial competition, said the report is “quite fascinating” for presenting “at least four articles in one—Gehry, the design, the process, and classicism.”
RealClearPolitics wrote, “Shubow and his group have become go-to sources for criticisms about the memorial in papers like The Washington Post, New York Times, and The Daily Beast.” Philanthropy magazine reported, “In taking on Gehry, [the National Civic Art Society has] punched well above its weight class.”
Brutalism:
Mr. Shubow may be the leading public critic of brutalism, a style that is prominent [sic] among D.C. government buildings built in the 1960s and thereafter. From The Spruce:
Brutalism is a style of architecture that was prominent from the 1950s to the 1980s. Characterized by simplistic, hulking concrete structures, Brutalist architecture originated in England and spread to the rest of the world shortly thereafter.
A polarizing style that appears aesthetically crude and is what you'd expect from a government building, university library, parking garage, or high-rise housing, Brutalist buildings are rough, minimalist structures. They lack flourishes or classic beauty and are popular locations in films and television series about urban dystopias.
And from Mr. Shubow, https://firstthings.com/monument-to-failure/ :
Brutalist structures are massive, with expansive rough-concrete walls and deeply recessed windows. Brutalism was a dramatic departure from the International Style in its rejection of sleekness and flatness. Its spirit was not that of transnational corporations but of utopian totalitarianism.
Brutalism is brutal: to the eyes and to those who would use the building. Baltimore had its ugly poured-concrete brutalist construction, The Morris Mechanic Theater. It was as cold as any I have ever been in and diminished the pleasure of every performance I attended there. It was eventually torn down, and nothing has yet replaced it.
The Sydney Opera House is another brutalist structure, and not even the soaring lines of the building redeem its stripped-down construction aesthetic looked at from the inside.
Theaters (from me):
About 20 years ago, theater venues approached new construction with a minimalist aesthetic, and one medium-size LORT theater looked just like another. The LORT theater in Little Rock, Arkansas is almost identical to Wooly Mammoth in D.C., and each is as inspiring as hunk of lead. I have some family history relevant to the issue: my grandfather built six movie palaces in the late 1920s in New England, and two have been restored: The Garde Arts Center in New London CT and the College Street Music Hall in New Haven. The restoration in New London is to the original too-much-is-just-right approach that movie palaces used at the time of their construction: Moroccan deserts, camels, and finely crafted wooden screens all over. Going to a movie, concert, or other performance is an occasion: it lifts the heart and enriches the soul. And is tremendous fun.
The New Republic:
The final word comes from Una Hajdari in The New Republic (July 2, 2026), as excerpted by Mr. Shubow on his website:
Shubow’s argument [that “since the mid-20th century, Modernist mandarins controlling government architecture have been forcing ugly designs upon us.”] has genuine populist purchase because it is half true. Federal Washington is overwhelmingly neoclassical, and the midcentury turn to modernism was a real break from it. Americans associate government buildings with columns and domes because that is what they mainly were and are today. (And to be fair, Shubow’s view of Washington’s brutalist buildings is widely held among locals.)
The Founders saw their fragile new republic as the heir to Athens and republican Rome, and they wanted the buildings to say so. Thomas Jefferson modeled Virginia’s Capitol building on a Roman temple precisely to claim that lineage in stone. The U.S. Capitol, the White House, the Supreme Court, and the earlier memorials along the Mall used classicism as an argument that the United States belonged among the self-governing republics of antiquity.
Sign UP! We all have opinions about what makes for good architecture. Some of you may even be pining for a Safdie cube to live in at Habitat 67. Bring your questions and ideas to this Casual Conversation. Usual rules apply. Let me know by Saturday, August 1, if you plan to join us by emailing me at arthur.fergenson@ansalaw.com .
Arthur Fergenson
P.S. There is even a Broadway musical about historic preservation: Skyscraper. It starred Julie Harris who sang as well as you might imagine, and Peter Marshall (yes, who hosted The Hollywood Squares), with Charles Nelson Reilly. Sample lyric: “Save that building, don’t tear it down. Save that building, it has renown. . . . In the basement, Herman Melville once harpooned a mouse. Ho, ho, ho!” I saw it, and I am still bemoaning the loss of those 2-1/2 hours of my life.